The New Woman

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The New Woman

• Changes in Lifestyle and Imagination

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Often, a cultures ideals of women only apply to
women of the dominant social group. In a society
where womens 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.
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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. Women could
own property and often controlled their own
business activities and finances.
Man and woman with scroll and writing tablet,
Pompeii (ArtArch)
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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. Womens roles became a hot issue in this
time of rapid social change and political
upheaval.
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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 womans changing room at a
public bathhouse.
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Were these women wearing designer workout gear?
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While some thinkers (like Cato the Elder)
believed that womens 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?
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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
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Catullus
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 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. . .
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Clodia
Clodia was from a powerful aristocratic family
and could apparently do as she liked without fear
of anyones 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. After their breakup,
he was prosecuted for political violence.
explicit sexual scenes provide racy domestic
décor . . .
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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

• extravagant spending, gifts, bribes
• one-night stands, indiscriminate sex

• being the aggressor in sexual relationships
• choosing younger, impressionable men

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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 whos 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.
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Propertius
Propertius writes to a fictional lover he calls
Cynthia (one of Venuss 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.
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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
womens lives?
If it was a fantasy was it mens or womens?
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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.
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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.
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Dominant Women
Omphale, the queen who forced the hero Hercules
to do womens work, in womens 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.
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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 emperors daughter.
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Julia
Julia, the daughter of Augustus, was married
first to her fathers best friend (for whom she
bore five children), then to her fathers
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. Ovid suffered the same fate.
Julia, daughter of Augustus
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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?
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finis