The New Woman
Changes in Lifestyle and
Imagination
Often, a culture’s ideals of women
only apply to women of the
dominant social group.
In a society where women’s
identity is sharply circumscribed,
non-citizen, slave, foreign or
“other” women may have very
different roles from citizen
women.
Roman women may be defined as
family oriented, chaste, maternal,
and generally responsible.
But slave women, performers, and
prostitutes may be described as
voracious or promiscuous, capable
of acting for themselves as well as
being sexually aggressive.
Roman women, despite being
defined as domestic (as opposed
to public) and excluded from
voting and many other aspects
of public life, still had rights in
the public arena.
Like Etruscan women, they dined
with their husbands; and
conversation, intelligent
exchange, and shared ideas were
expected between husband and
wife.
Man and woman with scroll and writing
tablet, Pompeii (ArtArch)
Women could own property and
often controlled their own
business activities and finances.
The “New Woman” went a
step further and claimed an
independence and sexual
freedom that opposed the
traditional chastity and home
values of the Roman matron.
Both literature (especially
love poetry) and political
rhetoric define a new female
behavior that was at once
exciting, frightening, and
challenging to the system.
Women’s roles became a hot
issue in this time of rapid
social change and political
upheaval.
Lifestyle Changes
According to “traditional” values, women were valued
for their chastity and family contributions most of all,
just as men were valued for their public and military
service.
But women were
accustomed to
working (if poor),
to education (if
middle class or
wealthy), and to
recreation.
This is a woman’s
changing room at a
public bathhouse.
Were these women wearing designer workout gear?
While some thinkers (like
Cato the Elder) believed that
women’s luxuries were
inherently degenerate, others
– maybe the majority –
believed that luxury and
display were appropriate for
high born women.
Romanticized images of girls
picking flowers or engaging in
little tasks (such as filling a
perfume vase) decorate the
mansions of the wealthy.
Where did luxury and freedom
end, and degeneracy begin?
“New Women” were controversial. Women who felt free to
spend, party, play politics, and have sex outside of the family
structure were clearly departing from traditional roles!
So were men who wanted to avoid marriage and family
responsibility and prolong their free, irresponsible years.
Poetry reflects this new social dynamic, and much rhetoric
condemns both the men and women who engage in it.
sleeping
Ariadne,
Roman
type;
VRoma
Let us live and let us love, my Lesbia,
and let us value at a single penny all
the jealous talk of senile old men!
When the sun sets, it can rise again,
but for us, when once our brief light
sets, we must sleep through one
eternal night. Give me a thousand
kisses, then a hundred . . .
Catullus
Catullus wrote in the late BCE
period, and died young, either 30
or 40.
He wrote poems to a woman he
called Lesbia, an allusion to the
erotic skills of the women of
Lesbos, and to Sappho, whose
writing inspired him.
Is this relationship real or
fictional? It may have
elements of both.
Lesbia may have been a real
woman known as. . .
Clodia
Clodia was from a powerful
aristocratic family and could
apparently do as she liked
without fear of anyone’s patria
potestas!
She was closely allied with her
brother Publius Clodius
Pulcher, who had a reputation
for excess himself.
She was married but had affairs
– probably with Catullus, and
also with Caelius Rufus.
explicit sexual scenes provide racy domestic
décor . . .
After their breakup, he was
prosecuted for political
violence.
Cicero, Clodius’ political
enemy, defended Caelius
by casting all the blame
for his bad behavior on
the corrupting influence
of Clodia!
His speech gives a clear
idea of what society
feared, delighted in, and
maybe expected of a
“bad woman.”
Cicero
•being the aggressor in
sexual relationships
•choosing younger,
impressionable men
•extravagant spending, gifts,
bribes
•one-night stands,
indiscriminate sex
Sempronia
Sallust, a historian approximately
contemporary with Catullus,
describes a conspiracy supported by
Sempronia, an aristocratic woman.
He paints a picture of a vibrant,
talented woman who’s rotten to the
core.
Sempronia had often committed many
crimes of masculine daring. In birth and in
beauty, in her husband and also her
children, she was abundantly favored by
fortune: well read . . . able to play the lyre
and dance more skillfully than an honest
woman should . . . But there was nothing
she held so cheap as modesty and chastity.
Propertius
Propertius writes to a fictional lover he
calls Cynthia (one of Venus’s epithets).
He portrays her in different situations:
escaping from her husband to see him,
her lover, or a prostitute/madam whose
customer he is.
He presents her free and open sexuality
as the inspiration for his poetry and his
romantic state of mind.
(Cynthia speaks): There I was dangling on a rope, lowering
myself hand over hand into your arms. We used to make love
then on street corners, twining our bodies together, while our
cloaks took the chill off the sidewalk.
Other poems show Cynthia as bitchy and critical.
Others still describe wild parties and a lifestyle totally at
odds with traditional Roman values.
Who was Propertius’ audience? What did they get out of
his poetry?
And did this
sort of poetry
really reflect
women’s lives?
If it was a fantasy –
was it men’s or
women’s?
Tibullus and Sulpicia
Like Propertius, Tibullus
wrote love poetry to a fickle
(and fictional) mistress.
But attached to his volume
of poetry are poems by
Sulpicia, a young, unmarried
Roman woman who also
wrote love elegies.
She addressees her lover as
Cerinthus (a fictional name)
but alludes to situations that
show both real limitations
on Roman girls, and erotic
desire.
Light of my life, let me not
be so burning a concern to
you as I seemed to have
been a few days ago, if in
my whole youth in my folly
I have ever done anything
which I admit to have been
more sorry for than last
night, when I left you alone,
wanting to hide my passion.
Finally a love has come which would cause me more shame were
rumor to conceal it than lay it bare for all. Won over by my Muses,
Venus brought me him, and placed him in my bosom . . . I delight in
my wayward ways and will not lie for fear of gossip. Let them talk: I
am a worthy woman who has been together with a worthy man.
Dominant Women
Omphale, the queen who forced the
hero Hercules to do women’s work, in
women’s clothes, while she went around
in his lion skin, is a popular image now.
The same political upheavals which had
forced women into strong roles, may
have forced aristocratic men into
seeking new world perspectives now that
their traditional sources of self-worth
were no longer sure.
Men could no longer count on stable family
income and status; politics was dangerous and
the world was in upheaval. Perhaps pleasure,
“free love” and aggressive women looked better
than a chaste wife and paternal responsibility.
Ovid
Ovid wrote a sexually
charged account of the
rape of the Sabine Women,
as well as Metamorphoses,
whose stories of
transformation often
hinged on eroticized divine
rapes.
He also wrote Ars Amatoria, The Art of Love, which purported
to be a pick-up manual for men who wanted to seduce women . .
. freeborn Roman women.
Ovid hung with an aristocratic crowd, including Julia, the
emperor’s daughter.
Julia
Julia, the daughter of Augustus, was
married first to her father’s best friend
(for whom she bore five children),
then to her father’s heir.
She had affairs and anecdotes
abounded: one commentator says she
only took lovers when she was
pregnant: “I never take on a passenger
unless the ship is full.”
Augustus tried not to notice, but
when he had to, he exiled her for life
to a barren island.
Julia, daughter of Augustus
Ovid suffered the same fate.
The New Woman
Was the New Woman fact or
fiction?
The poetic creations of Catullus,
Propertius and Ovid arose from
new social conditions.
Some aristocratic women were able
to live with freedoms, especially
economic and sexual freedoms,
they had never had before.
But we see the New Woman in
literature through a veil of either
romance or judgment.
How did real women try to
construct their lives, and what did
they seek for their own happiness?
finis