While Roman society was MUCH more sexist than anything we would regard as acceptable in modern society, women had many rights at the height of the Roman Empire that later European societies would not keep. The right of women to own property was so strict that gifts from a wife to a husband were not legally recognized - if they divorced, claims that any property of the wife was a gift to her husband would not be recognized, and would be returned to the newly-divorced wife. Women often held significant amounts of property and ran businesses in their own name, and there is ample evidence for women as independent workers in skilled and semiskilled professions.

There is considerable writing at the time discussing the role of women in society, and while the opinions of Roman men are very far from ‘enlightened’, they also quite clearly regard women as more than breeding stock. The Roman author Musonius Rufus even advocated for women to be trained in the arts of war, and posited than any job a man could do, a woman could do also.

Women could divorce their husbands without need for any deeper cause beyond “I don’t want to stay in this marriage anymore”, and domestic abuse within marriage was grounds for civil lawsuits. All rape of freeborn persons (within the context of Roman governance; foreigners being conquered were less lucky) was subject to the death penalty. Bloodline descent (‘breeding stock’) was considered much less important, as Romans placed a higher value on a cultural/loyalty familial system in which adoption was widely accepted and direct descent was less important (though not nil) to being recognized as part of the descendants of the family. The idea of ‘securing the throne’ was not really applicable until later in Roman society when the norms of the city of Rome began to be eroded in favor of a more ‘cosmopolitan’ and universal imperial culture.

/Romaboo moment over

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