Emily A. Hemelrijk. Hidden Lives, Public Personae

As the culmination of Emily A. Hemelrijk’s investigations over nearly two decades, Hidden Lives, Public Personae seeks a nuanced understanding of the public lives of women living in the Latin West between the first century b.c.e. and the third century c.e. Inspired by Riet van Bremen’s The Limits of Participation: Women and Civic Life in the Greek East in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods (1996), Hemelrijk sidesteps literary evidence that focuses narrowly on Rome and the imperial family. Instead, she gathered roughly 1,400 inscriptions (and combed through many others that she ultimately rejected), mostly from Italy, Spain, Gaul, and North Africa, in order to uncover the public personae of priestesses, benefactresses, patronesses, and “mothers” of cities and collegia (associations). Hemelrijk disproves claims of earlier experts on the provincial civic organization and euergetism (elite benefaction) that women’s civic positions were ceremonial, their honors perfunctory or granted in the expectation of future benefactions. Hemelrijk paints a world in which birth and wealth proved more important factors than sex in granting benefactions, holding priesthoods and civic offices, or receiving honors. Indeed, despite women’s limited range of action and their proportionally small numbers in public life (10–15 percent) compared to their male counterparts, Hemelrijk maintains that elite women’s public lives varied from those of their male relatives more by degree than by species (344).

Ancient history · Elite · Genealogy · Political science · Politics · Public life · Sociology · Classics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies