Women throughout history
...social lives of their husbands, brothers, fathers; rather, the Roman home was a public structure, where clients visited, extended families were raised, business was conducted, children were born, and parents honored in death.” (Nardo 43). It is hard for us to understand the vibrancy of a Roman household and the sense that it was the emotional center in the extended, immortal life of a family. Women had dominion in the domestic sphere to order the lives of their children and slaves; although their influence outside the home was through a man's world, inside they were largely independent within their means. It could be said that the woman of the house was its spiritual and moral guardian and the home her primary temple. Up until remarkably recently in Western history, the thought of the emotions of male-female love as, at best, pleasant and, at worst, dangerous when it came to marriage and family. It was irrelevant to the true purpose of marriage, which was to continue and enhance the prestige of the family. This makes it difficult to understand the values of Roman women, raised from birth that emotional self-discipline was the most essential Roman virtue. In all the centuries of Rome's history, permitting a woman to marry for love (particularly in elite families) was a rare exception. Overwhelmingly, the generality was that she married at the direction of her family for its own purposes. Mutual understanding between husband and wife was a pleasant consideration, but not essential. Roman marriages always held an awareness of the power of the father over his wife and children. Roman law and custom gave him unlimited powers to discipline his household as he saw fit. In a Roman household, the reality was that the woman embodied moral authority but the man alone held the power. “Plautus, the marvelous comic playwright from the second century BC, wrote endless satires upon the difficulties men had with their wives, echoed by Cato the Elder in a darker vein when he railed at the disguised attempts of women to rule men. It was a foolish man who, loving or lusting after his wife, relegated his authority to her” (Aries & Duby 96). Another such satire was the Satires of Juvenal, a solider who wrote about the Roman Empire through his satires. Juvenal, like Plautus, wrote about women and portrayed them as childish, frivolous, spendthrift, and manipulative. He writes “women take no account of a daily diminishing fortune, as if it would sprout afresh like a plant from the exhausted safe and she was helping herself from a pile that never grew less, nor ever to stop and consider how much their pleasure cost.” (Kishlansky 83) Like the Classical periods, the women’s traditional roles during the Medieval periods were commonly as wives, mothers, midwives, and women of the church. The traditional roles of domestic influence were placed upon woman not by their choice, but rather by the confinement of the male figure and the Church. Although some women managed to escape from the traditional domestic roles and became writer, poets, physician, and craftswomen. One such women, as mentioned by Madeleine Pelner Cosman in her book Women at Work in Medieval Europe, was the Countess de Dia during the 12th century. “She was one of the best of a group of nearly 20 intelligent, literate, artistically productive women writing poetry…” ( 2) During this time, unlike the classical periods when mutual consent was not considered essential in a marriage, marriages took place only with the consent of the man and the woman, as said by Justianian in his Code (529-565). “Marriage cannot take place unless everyone involved consents, that it, those who are being united…” (Kishlanksy 136) During the Renaissance a woman, like the classical and medieval periods, was also expected to stay at home, manage the household, bear children and make sure they receive a good up bringing. “Most Renaissance women became mothers. Motherhood would define their lives and occupy most of their years.” states Margaret King in her book Women of the Renaissance. Women were looked upon as having only one purpose and that was to procreate. In Of Marriage and Celibacy Martin Luther, a scholar, teacher and pastor during the fifteenth century, states “Men have broad and large chest, and small narrow hips, and have more understanding than the women, who have a but small and narrow breasts, and broad hips, to the end they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children. A wife during this time was expected to be a companion to her husband, but she was always secondary to him and the object of restrictive regulations imposed by him and o...