Why read Women's Lives, Women's Voices?

Book cover of Women's Lives, Women's Voices: Roman Material Culture and Female Agency in the Bay of Naples

Book description

Literary evidence is often silent about the lives of women in antiquity, particularly those from the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Even when women are considered, they are often seen through the lens of their male counterparts. In this collection, Brenda Longfellow and Molly Swetnam-Burland have gathered an outstanding…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Women's Lives, Women's Voices as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Eve D'Ambra

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It is an anthology of essays that provide a range of topics and approaches to women who lived and worked in these small towns, now spectacularly preserved despite their sudden destruction by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE. The lives lived here tend towards the gritty, workaday world with studies of women in business and trade, although elite women, public priestesses, also make an appearance. Two that feature women's names scratched on walls (graffiti) and drawings of women etched in or painted on Pompeian walls (by Erika Zimmermann Damer and Margaret L. Laird) argue for women's (partial) literacy…

From Eve's list on women in Ancient Rome that cut the clichés.