Not surprising...!
How #Patriarchy Undermined the #RomanRepublic
by Douglas Boin, Nov 24, 2025 2:00 PM
Excerpt: "The men of the republic, who called themselves their society’s 'Chosen Fathers,' enforced this two-tiered society through strict #VotingLaws and limits on women’s #autonomy. Heavily manipulated voting districts ensured that only the voices of the senatorial elite, Rome’s self-proclaimed optimates, or 'best men,' dominated, not progressive champions, freed slaves, or newly-enfranchised citizens. No woman could run for higher office. Women could neither sit on juries, nor exercise their vote.
" 'As soon as women become the equals of men,' the statesman and senator Cato the Elder said in 212 B.C., 'they will have become our masters.'
"Yet as Rome’s republic expanded beyond the capital city, beyond Italy, and gradually acquired its Mediterranean empire, stories of a different sort of woman reset women’s expectations at home. In the eastern Mediterranean, highly educated woman philosophers, avant-garde poets, and above all, the fearless Greek-speaking queens of Egypt, including #Cleopatra, held sway. Inspired by these role models across #Europe, #Africa, and #Asia, #RomanWoman began to challenge the republic’s inequities and ideologies and claim their voices in the male-dominated republic.
"Grandmothers and mothers taught their daughters to read and cultivate their intellectual talents. An educated girl, the new wave of educators argued, knew how to assert herself against a man who 'swaggers through the city acting like a tyrant.' Cato’s quotation comes from a pivotal moment when women and their allies poured into the streets to demand the repeal of a war-time-era tax on their savings. Other women were political leaders who earned the scorn of their contemporaries. Some were erased or forgotten. In one case, the life of an upper-class woman and contemporary of Julius Caesar, Clodia, saw her reputation destroyed by false claims of harlotry, home-wrecking, and husband-killing.
"#Clodia, an unapologetic champion for expanded voting rights for the enfranchised men of Italy, bravely went before an all-male jury in the center of the Roman Forum in April 56 B.C., as the prosecution’s star witness to testify against her day’s runway, endemic corruption. Instead of defending his client from the charges, however, the leading defense attorney, Marcus Tullius Cicero, turned the case into a referendum on Clodia’s character. Transforming Clodia into the trial’s villain, the speech, the Pro Caelio, outlasted Rome’s fall. It has been taught in high school and college classrooms for two millennia as a masterclass of rhetoric, from which countless men in business, law, and politics have learned to emulate Cicero’s #misogyny.
"Trailblazing women like Clodia have always, in the historian’s shorthand, been called “ahead of their time.” But history deserves to be told from another point of view: by pointing out the parade of men who have stubbornly and perennially thwarted progress. Rome’s republic might have survived a bit longer had its own people listened to, not silenced, its women."
Read more:
https://time.com/7326211/roman-republic-women/
Archived version:
https://archive.ph/YJcBB
#RomanWomen #HistoryRepeatsItself #FallOfRome #RomanHistory #USPol #HistoryRepeats #WomensRights #VoterDisenfranchisement
