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. Women could own property and often controlled their own business activities and finances. Man and woman with scroll and writing tablet, Pompeii (ArtArch)

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.

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. Lifestyle Changes 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

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. 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... Is this relationship real or fictional? It may have elements of both. Lesbia may have been a real woman known as... Catullus

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. After their breakup, he was prosecuted for political violence. explicit sexual scenes provide racy domestic décor...

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, daughter of Augustus 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. Ovid suffered the same fate.

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? The New Woman

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