The Verso Book of Feminism: Revolutionary Words from Four Millennia of Rebellion

By Verso UK

Throughout written history and across the world, women have protested the restrictions of gender and the limitations placed on women's bodies and women's lives. People-of any and no gender-have protested and theorized, penned manifestos and written poetry and songs, testified and lobbied, gone on strike and fomented revolution, quietly demanded that there is an "I" and loudly proclaimed that there is a "we." The Book of Feminism chronicles this history of defiance and tracks it around the world as it develops into a multivocal and unabashed force.

Global in scope, The Book of Feminism shows the breadth of feminist protest and of feminist thinking, moving through the female poets of China's Tang Dynasty to accounts of indigenous women in the Caribbean resisting Columbus's expedition, British suffragists militating for the vote to the revolutionary petroleuses of the 1848 Paris Commune, the first century Trung sisters who fought for the independence of Nam Viet to women in 1980s Botswana fighting for equal protection under the law, from the erotica of the 6th century and the 19th century to radical queer politics in the 20th and 21st.

The Book of Feminism is a weapon, a force, a lyrical cry, and an ongoing threat to misogyny everywhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781788739276

Book preview

INTRODUCTION:

WE BEGIN WITH WHAT IS NOT YET COMPLETE

Feminism is unfinished business.

The reasons it is unfinished are legion: political, economic, social, experiential, having to do with violence and race and capital, families and states and empires, sexuality and reproduction and the actions of men. It is unfinished because gender is still a reason to be killed, harmed, denied, exploited. But there is one more reason: feminism is unfinished because it is the work of imagination.

Feminism is a politics of emancipation, and the first thing needed for such a politics is to see the need for one. For women to begin advocating for themselves meant an imagining of women together as a collective force. To call yourself a feminist is to insist on connecting your life to others, and that was and still is a political act.

For example: in 1892, African American scholar and educator Anna Julia Cooper wrote in A Voice from the South,

Only the BLACK WOMAN can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.

Cooper spoke in the first person I but also adamantly in the we of black womanhood, crediting the first edition’s authorship to A Black Woman of the South. Her charge—that liberation was truest when entered into with those who were most marginal—was also a challenge to her audience. She asked of us to follow her I in order to make a we.

Two decades later, in the first women’s literary journal in Japan, Seitō, Yosano Akiko argued that claiming the I was a revolutionary act in a society where women were seen as inferior. That is, claiming the I could tell about the conditions of the we:

I desire to write entirely in the first person.

I who am a woman.

I desire to write entirely in the first person.

I. I.

One century later, the Tamil and Dalit poet Sukirtharani spoke both for herself and all those living at the frayed edges of societies and towns. In her 2012 poem A faint smell of meat, the poet’s I blends into her we:

In their minds

I, who smell faintly of meat,

my house where bones hang

stripped entirely of flesh,

and my street

where young men wander without restraint

making loud music

from coconut shells strung with skin

are all at the furthest point of our town.

But I, I keep assuring them

we stand at the forefront.

The productive tension between the I and the we—between the personal and the political, between the social expectations given and the life one lives, between articulating experience and claiming political voice—is the driving struggle and foundational act of feminist practice.

As this book shows, this is a practice enacted again and again around the world, often in tandem with other movements of revolutionary change: during wars for empire and territory, Europe’s waves of revolution, the abolitionist struggle against slavery, the spread of capitalist modernity across the globe, workers’ battles for labor rights, the post-colonial independence movements in the Global South, the black freedom struggle in the United States, the rise of the digital age. Modern Western feminism is often historicized as a series of waves, from the first wave of women’s suffrage and abolition activism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the second wave of the 1960s to ’70s that took up harassment and rape, marriage and abortion, lesbianism and sexual double standards. The 1990s and 2000s brought the third wave, with its reclamation of sex and its insistence on diversity and individual empowerment, and now we are said to be in a fourth wave fueled by technology, the #MeToo movement, intersectionality, and trans politics. Historically speaking, these definitions are about as useful as they are incomplete, but the metaphor is instructive: waves keep breaking upon the shore.

Because feminist politics coalesces around bodies forced into a hierarchy of gender and sex, part of the work of feminism is also to imagine a future when the idea of woman as an oppressed group no longer needs to exist. That is, feminism sets out to destroy the conditions of its own emergence. As the Argentinian feminist movement Ni Una Menos put it, as their call for a women’s strike spread across Latin America and the world in 2017: We organize to change everything.

Feminism as a term didn’t come into common English usage until the 1910s, a particularly revolutionary worldview born out of the women’s movement of the nineteenth century and the battle for suffrage. The word was first included in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1933 and defined legally: the advocacy for women’s rights.

In making selections for this book, I’ve understood feminism to be the twinning of the self to the collective, from exploring what it is to inhabit a gendered body to breaking apart the idea of woman altogether. You’ll see myths of female power as well as calls for legal reforms, private musings alongside revolutionary theory. Since part of feminist practice as I understand it is to transform a world that wants to minimize you, you will also hear from women not talking about women and feminism at all but instead conducting scientific experiments, fighting racial violence, struggling for national independence or socialism or communism, fighting apartheid, discovering comets, forming workplace unions, making art. All of these practices are, to my mind, part of the feminist work of expanding the scope of the world.

You will not see women’s voices here who sought in some way to minimize the world, narrow it, keep it conservative. Versions of feminism have been used as a justification for imperial wars, as a form of white supremacy or a language borrowed by states to overwrite the voices of women seeking redress from state-sanctioned violence, as cover for denying the many differentiations of race, sexuality, class, bodies, citizenship status. Where we do hear from women who have at some point aligned themselves with exclusive projects, my co-editors and I have noted this for the reader and decided to include the piece because we believe it has had some long-lasting impact on expanding the political imagination of feminism: it has helped give us the tools to push against exclusion and make the world bigger.

In Old English, the word woman was a combination of the word for wife and the word for man. As man just meant person, woman was thus a wifely person. Very obviously, the word is flawed. Recognizing its limitations is also part of feminism’s work.

Consider the testimony of Thomas Hall, an English colonist in Virginia. Hall’s story emerges in the historical archive because in 1692, the male-presenting Hall’s identity and genitals came under scrutiny from colonial Virginia’s highest court for laying with a servant woman known as Great Besse. Hall, born as Thomasine, donned men’s clothing to fight in France and to emigrate to America. When the court demanded to know ether hee were man or a woeman, Hall replied that he was both.

This book enters feminism through Hall’s eyes, not the court’s. In the court’s zealous demand to pin down gender identity and regulate unruly bodies and desires, I find the structure of oppression I believe feminism fights against and imagines beyond. In the regulation and constraint of all of us made to be women or men, there is a shared, if ever-shifting, ground for political work.

The women in this book are visible in the historical record because they were able to use words to scratch their mark on the surface of the world. Each voice marks the many who were left out of the archive, who could not write or publish or act in public, whose words and actions have been lost. Their absent chorus stands behind the voices that appear here.

As you read, let the women’s words pull on you.

Words can be a claim—Greek lyric poet Sappho, 590 BCE:

although they are

only breath, words

which I command

are immortal.

Or a celebration—Buddhist nun Sumangalamata, collected in the Therigatha, the oldest collection of women’s literature in India, 500s BCE:

Free, I am free!

How Glad I am to be free

from my pestle.

My cooking pot seems

worthless to me.

And I can’t even bear

to look at his sun-umbrella—

my husband disgusts me!

Words can be a complaint—an anonymous poet in medieval Spain:

Why should I be with a husband bound

who merely orders me around?

Or a threat—Lucrezia Marinella, part of the Venetian intellectual class, 1601:

If women, as I hope, wake themselves from the lengthy slumber by which they are oppressed, then these ungrateful and overbearing men would learn humility.

Or a force—American renegade Mary MacLane, 1902:

If I could live, and if I could succeed in writing out my living, the world itself would feel the heavy intensity of it.

Words can mark the coming storm—Zeina binti Mwinyipembe Sekinyaga writing a letter to a Tanzanian regional newspaper in 1926:

Know ye that we women are bereaved without a death, are hungry in the midst of plenty, and are dead while still living.

Or promise lust and adventure—Hayashi Fumiko, in her autobiographical novel of a female drifter looking for meaning and whiskey, 1928:

Let’s get naked and while we’re at it work our damnedest.

Words can invoke those unable to speak—Chicana writer and activist Cherríe Moraga, 1979:

I am a white girl gone brown to the blood color of my mother speaking for her

And words can defy—Mauritanian poet Mubaraka bint Al-Barra, on writing in a country where words are the province of men, 1994:

I belong to a social category … where to be a woman poet means to question the very foundation of womanhood.

Words, it turns out, can help us live. As bint Al-Barra tells us, despite the burning of her books in the 1980s, I simply had to continue writing.

For those who have been collectively denied, words carve out space in which to exist. As American poet Emily Dickinson, master of the precise and cutting phrase, wrote, She dealt her pretty words like blades.

This is more than metaphor. Sometimes, when a woman’s words didn’t enter the historical record, her cutting actions did. For example, Michele de Cuneo, an Italian nobleman who sailed with Columbus, described trying to rape an indigenous woman in the Americas. He ended up cut:

While I was in the boat I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me, and with whom, having taken her into my cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such a manner that I wished I had never begun.

So let us end with a description from the year 1100, of the Japanese female samurai Tomoe Gozen:

Once her sword was drawn, even gods and devils feared to fight against her. Indeed, she was a match for a thousand.

Let each voice in this book be a match for a thousand. Let each voice cut.

Jessie Kindig

New York City, 2020

THE VERSO BOOK OF FEMINISM

date unknown

NORTHERN PAIUTE PEOPLE

How Her Teeth Were Pulled

In the old times women’s cunts had teeth in them.

It was hard to be a man then.

Watching your squaw squat down to dinner.

Hearing the little rabbit bones crackle.

Whenever fucking was invented it died with the inventor.

If your woman said she felt like biting you didn’t take it lightly.

Maybe you just ran away to fight Numuzoho the Cannibal.

Coyote was the one who fixed things.

He fixed those toothy women!

One night he took Numuzoho’s lava pestle

To bed with a mean woman

And hammer hammer crunch crunch ayi ayi

All night long.

Husband, I am glad, she said

And all the rest is history.

To honor him we wear our necklace of fangs.

Coyote, the legendary trickster who appears in numerous indigenous stories in the western part of North America, here confronts another mythic trope of women’s power: the sharp-toothed vagina.

date unknown

ZUNI PEOPLE

How Women Learned to Grind

Once, many generations ago, there lived a beautiful goddess of the ocean—the Woman of the White Shells, younger sister of the Moon. This goddess was the special patroness of beauty and grace and she imparted an attractiveness almost equaling her own to those into whose hearts she deigned to breathe. So that she would not be defiled, she lived in a cave.

One day when some maidens were passing near the mountain, suddenly the beautiful goddess appeared to them, sitting high up in the rocks, dressed in sparkling white cotton garments. She beckoned to the maidens to approach her, reassuring them with her friendly smile.

Sit ye down by my side, she said to them, and I will teach you the arts of women. Then with a sharp-edged fragment of jasper, she chipped out a mealing stone of lava. Next she fashioned another stone of finer rock, long enough to reach entirely across the mealing stone. Taking white shells and white kernels of corn, the goddess ground them together between the stones, demonstrating to her pupils a grace of movement before unknown to women. Now, leaning ever so lightly on her grinding stone and glancing slyly under her waving side-locks, she talked to the watching maidens, teaching them how to tease their lovers; then dashing the hair from her eyes, she turned back to the mealing trough and began to grind, singing meanwhile, in time with her labors, the songs that ever since young women have loved to sing, young men loved yet more to listen to.

For the Zuni people, corn meal was—as this story goes—literally life.

date unknown

CHEYENNE PEOPLE

Proverb

A nation is not conquered until

the hearts of its women

are on the ground.

Then it is done, no matter

how brave its warriors

nor how strong their weapons.

This much-quoted proverb is from the Cheyenne people of the Great Plains of North America.

date unknown

APACHE PEOPLE

How Changing Woman Stays Young

When Changing Woman gets to be a certain age, she goes walking toward the east. After a while she sees herself in the distance looking like a young girl walking toward her. They both walk until they come together and after that there is only one. She is like a young girl again.

Changing Woman, one of the mythic founders of Apache culture, gains her power through longevity—she never dies. During the four days of a young Apache woman’s ceremony upon first menstruation, she was thought to gain the power of Changing Woman.

2300 BCE

ENHEDUANNA

Invocation

The true woman who possesses exceeding wisdom,

She consults a tablet of lapis lazuli

She gives advice to all lands …

She measures off the heavens,

She places the measuring-cords on the earth.

Enheduanna was likely the daughter of a Sumerian king who unified peoples of the Mesopotamian region into the Akkadian Empire. She was appointed high priestess of the moon goddess in the city, a position of authority from which she helped create a network of astronomical observatories that charted some of the first celestial maps and led to the development of the Babylonian calendar.

1400s BCE

HATSHEPSUT

My Falcon Rises High

My command stands firm like the mountains and the sun’s disk shines and spreads rays over the names of my august person; and my falcon rises high above the kingly banner unto all eternity.

In her twenty-year reign during Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty, female pharaoh Hatshepsut oversaw the extensive construction and renovation of temples, monuments, and obelisks. These words were recorded at the opening of a temple for Hathor, the goddess of beauty, nourishment, and destruction.

500s BCE

HEBREW BIBLE

Song of Songs, 2:1

I am a rose of Sharon

A lily of the valleys.

In the Song of Songs from the Hebrew Bible, often read during the springtime holiday of Pesach (Passover), a young woman and man desire and pursue one another, declaring their love to be self-making and holy. Authorship has traditionally been ascribed to King Solomon during the tenth century BCE, but modern scholars have proposed it to be one of many similar love poems from Egypt and Babylonia in the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE.

500s BCE

SUMANGALAMATA

Therigatha

Free, I am free!

How Glad I am to be free

from my pestle.

My cooking pot seems

worthless to me.

And I can’t even bear

to look at his sun-umbrella—

my husband disgusts me!

So I destroy greed and hate

with a sizzle.

And I am the same woman

who goes to the foot of a tree

and says to herself,

Ah, happiness,

and meditates with happiness.

This poem is from the Therigatha Verses of the Elder Nuns, a collection of verse from Buddhist nuns that was finally committed to writing in 80 BCE. It is believed to be the earliest collection of women’s writing on the Indian subcontinent.

ca. 590 BCE

SAPPHO

Although They Are

Although they are

Only breath, words

which I command

are immortal

Greek poet Sappho, born on the island of Lesbos, is the first woman writer to appear in the written archive of Western letters. Known as one of the greatest lyric poets of her time, today only 650 lines of her verse survive—it is rumored that her work was later burned by the church for its homoerotic undercurrents.

428 BCE

EURIPIDES

Hippolytus

Wide o’er man my realm extends, and proud the name that I, the goddess Cypris, bear, both in heaven’s courts and ’mongst all those who dwell within the limits of the sea and the bounds of Atlas, beholding the sun-god’s light; those that respect my power I advance to honour, but bring to ruin all who vaunt themselves at me.

Euripides’ dramatic tale of the Greek myth of Hippolytus explores the conflicting impulses of desire and control, sex and chastity. Here, Greek goddess of love Aphrodite declares her dominion over men, in defiance of Hippolytus’ oath of chastity.

411 BCE

ARISTOPHANES

Lysistrata

LAMPITO

Hark, what caterwauling hubbub’s that?

LYSISTRATA

As I told you,

The women have appropriated the citadel.

So, Lampito, dash off to your own land

And raise the rebels there. These will serve as hostages,

While we ourselves take our places in the ranks

And drive the bolts right home.

CALONICE

But won’t the men

March straight against us?

LYSISTRATA

And what if they do?

No threat shall creak our hinges wide, no torch

Shall light a fear in us; we will come out

To Peace alone.

Aristophanes’ Greek comedy Lysistrata tells the story of the women of two warring Greek city-states during the Peloponnesian War who refused to have sex with their husbands and lovers until peace was negotiated. Though there is no record of the play being based on historical fact, women around the world have used the sex strike as a tactic: in 2009 in Kenya, for example, the Women’s Development Organization led a week-long sex strike to convince male politicians to address civil violence.

300s BCE

ESTHER

Book of Esther, Chapter 9

Then Queen Esther, daughter of Abihail, with Mordecai the Jew, wrote with full authority to confirm this second letter about Purim … The command of Esther established these customs for Purim, and it was written in the book.

Esther is one of many women leaders that appear in the Hebrew Bible, despite the obviously patriarchal culture of the ancient Near East in which they lived. Miriam, Deborah, Huldah, Ruth, and Tamar all emerge as women whose initiative and leadership, self-preservation and agency, visions and bodies are central to the fate of the Jewish people. Esther was forced, along with thousands of other virgins, into the harem of King Ahasuerus (likely Xerxes I), threatened with death if she disobeyed him, and disobeyed him nonetheless to save her people—and with this note, confirmed her own written authority over her story.

200s BCE

HIPPARCHIA

Epigram on Hipparchia

I, Hipparchia, have no use for the works of deep-robed women; I have chosen the Cynics’ virile life. I don’t need capes with brooches or deep-soled slippers; I don’t like glossy nets for my hair. My wallet is my staff’s companion, and the double cloak that goes with them, the cover for my bed on the ground. I’m much stronger than Atalanta from Maenalus, because my wisdom is better than racing over the mountain.

Athenian philosopher Hipparchia was the most famous Cynic philosopher of her day and remarkable for her insistence on living on equal terms with her philosopher husband, Crates, wearing men’s clothes, and subverting Greek sexual norms. Though some philosophy schools admitted women, Greek and Etruscan women were kept strictly separate from political and intellectual life, and it was unusual for any woman who was not one of the hetairai—intellectual and sexual companions working for male citizens—to gain access to male power and scholarship. This is an epigram from Hipparchia’s tomb—a defense of her life devoted to philosophical ideals.

70 BCE

CICERO

Second Oration against Gaius Verres

What has nature wanted to be more dear to us than our daughters?

Roman statesman, lawyer, and philosopher Cicero here gives voice to the high value elite Roman fathers placed on their daughters, one expression of a conflicting urge in Roman society to formally exclude women from public life but to value them as individuals and allow for select elite women to take part in politics. He put this question to the men assembled to hear his speeches on the corruption trial of the former governor of Sicily.

42 BCE

HORTENSIA

Hortensia’s Speech

As was appropriate for women like ourselves when addressing a petition to you, we rushed to your womenfolk. But we did not get the treatment we were entitled to from Fulvia, and have been driven by her into the Forum. You have already stolen from us our fathers and sons and husbands and brothers by your proscriptions, on the grounds that they had wronged you. But if you also steal from us our property, you will set us into a state unworthy of our family and manners and our female sex. If you claim that you have in any way been wronged by us, as you were by our husbands, proscribe us as you did them. But if we women have not voted any of you public enemies, if we did not demolish your houses or destroy your army or lead another army against you; if we have not kept you from public office or honour, why should we share the penalties if we have no part in the wrongdoing?

The daughter of a distinguished Roman orator, Hortensia cultivated her political voice through calling on his legacy—one of the most potent forms of power available to elite Roman women. This is an excerpt from Hortensia’s speech in the Roman Forum, protesting the Second Triumvirate’s decision to tax wealthy women to pay for a civil war against Julius Caesar’s assassins. Hortensia argued that women were being taxed but could not represent themselves in government; while the Triumvirate was apparently angered, it reduced the number of women taxed and included men in the levy. Though we have no account from Hortensia’s own hand, her speech was recorded by many historians. This version was written by Greek historian Appian during the second century CE.

40

TRUNG TRAC AND TRUNG NHI

Oath of the Trung Sisters

Foremost, I will avenge my country,

Second, I will restore the Hung lineage,

Third, I will avenge the death of my husband,

Lastly, I vow that these goals will be accomplished.

The Trung sisters were leaders of the first independence movement in what is now Vietnam, against their district’s annexation by China’s Han dynasty. Before leading their troops into battle, the sisters took this oath. They successfully drove out the Chinese governor, the first time in 1,000 years that Nam Viet was free of Chinese rule. Trung Trac was called Trung Vuong—She-king Trung. It is said that some of their troops went into battle pregnant and gave birth on the battlefield.

60

BOUDICA

Boudica’s Speech

Boudica, riding in a chariot with her daughters before her, as she approached each tribe, was saying that it was customary for the Britons to wage war under the leadership of women; but then, she said, she was not avenging her kingdom and her power as a woman born from noble ancestors, but rather her lost freedom, her body worn out by whips, and the defiled chastity of her daughters as one of the people. The rapaciousness of the Romans had advanced so far, she said, that they do not even leave bodies, old age, or maidenhood unsoiled. Nevertheless, the gods of just revenge are present … She said that the Romans would not even be able to endure the din and clamor of so many thousands, much less their fury and violence … That was the resolve of a woman: the men might live and be slaves.

Celtic ruler of the Iceni tribe in today’s North Sussex region of Britain, Boudica’s tribe was attacked by Roman soldiers who believed a woman had no place on the throne. Boudica was beaten and her daughters raped, and she spent the next years building an alliance of wronged Celtic tribes. For two years, Boudica led an army of over 200,000 against the Roman occupiers, successfully recapturing Londinium (now London) before defeat. There are no existing writings by Boudica herself, though we have many Roman historians’ accounts of her actions and words. This speech was reimagined and retold by the Roman historian Tacitus.

77

PLINY THE ELDER

Naturalis Historia, XXV, 10

There was nothing more highly admired than an intimate knowledge of plants, in ancient times. It is long since the means were discovered of calculating before-hand, not only the day or the night, but the very hour even at which an eclipse of the sun or moon is to take place; and yet the greater part of the lower classes still remain firmly persuaded that these phenomena are brought about by compulsion, through the agency of herbs and enchantments, and that the knowledge of this art is confined almost exclusively to females.

The skills of Greek women—like famed second-century BCE astronomer Aglaonike from Thessaly, who was known for her expertise in predicting lunar eclipses—were considered to be magic and witchcraft rather than true scientific knowledge. Due to the circumscribed positions of women in the male-dominated Greek city-states, talented women were often known as sorceresses and priestesses rather than scholars. Aglaonike was called the Witch of Thessaly for her supposed talent of making the moon disappear. Here, Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder alludes to this history in his multivolume work Naturalis Historia.

100

BAN ZHAO

Lessons for Women

I find that nowadays gentlemen-scholars only know that wives ought to be moderated by their husbands, and the authority and dignity of a husband ought to be properly established. For this reason, they instruct their sons and teach them canonical classics … Yet only to educate men and not to educate women—are they not being partial (bi ) in their treatment of the two sides? According to the Record of Rituals, at the age of eight, children should begin receiving instructions on the classics. At the age of fifteen, they should receive adult education. Why is [women’s education] alone not following this as a principle?

Ban Zhao was one the most famous female scholars of her time, and Lessons for Women, which she wrote for her daughters, has become a foundational text in Chinese women’s letters. Despite writing within the confines of Confucian teachings, with their acceptance of women’s inferior status, Ban Zhao argued against domestic violence, in favor of women’s education, and for women’s moral and ethical virtues instead of purely physical charms.

203

VIBIA PERPETUA

A Martyr’s Vision

I knew I should have to fight not against wild beasts but against the Fiend; but I knew the victory would be mine.

Perpetua, a young mother, was martyred for practicing Christianity in defiance of the governor of Carthage’s edict. Remarkably, she kept a diary throughout her imprisonment and trial—often chronicling her prophetic dreams—which offers one of the oldest surviving texts written by a woman in the ancient world.

240–74

HISTORIA AUGUSTA

Zenobia of Palmyra

Her eyes were black and powerful, her spirit divinely great, and her beauty incredible. So white were her teeth that many thought she had pearls in place of them. Her voice was clear and like that of a man. Her sternness, when necessity demanded, was that of a tyrant; her clemency, when her sense of right called for it, that of a good emperor.

A queen of the city-state of Palmyra, in what is today Syria, Septimia Zenobia (Bat-Zabbai in Aramaic) battled the Roman Empire, expanding her territory and declaring her land independent from Rome before she was captured. She was said by historians to have been intelligent and well read, able to hunt and drink like a man, and fiercely ambitious. This description was given of her by a Roman historian writing a century after her death.

263

AURELIA THAISOUS

A Mother Seeks Legal Independence

[Laws long ago have been made], most eminent Prefect, which empower women who are adorned with the right of three children to be mistresses of themselves and act without a guardian in whatever business they transact, especially those who know how to write. Accordingly, as I too enjoy the happy honor of being blessed with children and as I am a literate woman able to write with a high degree of ease, it is with abundant security that I appeal to your highness by this my application with the object of being enabled to accomplish without hindrance whatever business I henceforth transact, and I beg you to keep it without prejudice to my rights in your eminence’s office, in order that I may obtain your support and acknowledge my unfailing gratitude. Farewell. I, Aurelia Thaisous also called Lolliane, have sent this for presentation.

Under the rule of the Roman Empire, Egypt became the first Mediterranean civilization to offer women a path to legal equality. Once a woman had given birth to three live children, she could gain independent rights with respect to buying and selling land, entering contracts (including those pertaining to marriage, divorce, and child custody), and receiving or bequeathing inheritances. Here, a citizen writes to Egypt’s Roman governor seeking the right to conduct all such business on her own.

300s

SYNCLETICA OF ALEXANDRIA

Let Us Women Not Be Misled

Let us women not be misled by the thought that those in the world are without cares. For perhaps in comparison they struggle more than we do. For toward women generally there is great hostility in the world. They bear children with difficulty and risk, and they suffer patiently through nursing, and they share illnesses with their sick children—and these things they endure without having any limit to their travail … For in giving birth women die in labor; and yet, in failing to give birth, they waste away, under reproaches that they are barren and unfruitful.

Syncletica of Alexandria was one of a group of female Christian ascetics who led religious communities devoted to seeking religious salvation and aiding the poor in the deserts of what is today Egypt, Israel, and Syria. One of the best-known of these desert mothers, Syncletica, upon the death of her parents, gave away her inherited wealth and moved from the city to the desert, where her teachings gathered a community of female disciples.

300s–400s

OLYMPIAS

Unsuited for the Conjugal Life

If my King, the Lord Jesus Christ, wanted me to be joined with a man, he would not have taken away my first husband immediately. Since he knew that I was unsuited for the conjugal life and was not able to please a man, he freed him, Nebridius, from the bond and delivered me of this very burdensome yoke and servitude to a husband, having placed upon my mind the happy yoke of continence.

Born to a powerful Christian family in Constantinople in the fourth century, Olympias was groomed to become a suitable wife for a government official. Married to the city’s prefect in 386, she was soon widowed and inherited an enormous fortune. To evade the fate of another arranged marriage, and thus a husband controlling her resources, Olympias successfully appealed to the emperor to allow her to instead live a life of Christian ascetism. Free of a spouse, Olympias chose to use her inheritance to support the Church of Constantinople and to build and run a women’s monastery.

ca. 439

SOCRATES SCHOLASTICUS

Of Hypatia the Female Philosopher

There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. Such was her self-possession and ease of manner, arising from the refinement and cultivation of her mind, that she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates, without ever losing in an assembly of men that dignified modesty of deportment for which she was conspicuous, and which gained for her universal respect and admiration.

Alexandria