Women's Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation

by Mary R. Lefkowitz, Maureen B. Fant

This highly acclaimed collection provides a unique look into the public and private lives and legal status of Greek and Roman women of all social classes-from wet nurses, prostitutes, and gladiatrixes to poets, musicians, intellectuals, priestesses, and housewives. The third edition adds new texts to sections throughout the book, vividly describing women's sentiments and circumstances through readings on love, bereavement, and friendship, as well as property rights, breast cancer, female circumcision, and women's roles in ancient religions, including Christianity and pagan cults.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ancient History, Greece, Classics, Feminism, Womens

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Mary R. Lefkowitz (born April 30, 1935), American scholar of Classics. She studied at Wellesley College before obtaining a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Radcliffe College in 1961. Lefkowitz has published on subjects including mythology, women in antiquity, Pindar, and fiction in ancient biography.
She came to the attention of a wider audience through her criticism of the claims of Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization in her book Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History. In Black Athena Revisited (1996), which she edited with Guy MacLean Rogers, her colleague at Wellesley College, the ideas of Martin Bernal are further scrutinized.

Reviews

[Valerie]

This excellent collection of primary source material from women was eye opening about life and social customs in Greece and Rome.

[Logan Drury]

“A wise man therefore must not take a wife. For in the first place his study of philosophy will be hindered, and it is impossible for anyone to attend to his books and his wife.” - St. Jerome

This book is an awesome collection of the very few primary sources we have about women in the ancient world. It’s super eye opening to see how women were viewed back then and a lot of it is not comfortable to read and think through. I thought the commentary provided by Lefkowitz and Fant was insightful and gave helpful backgrounds for the texts.

[Pilar]

Útil como libro de referencia. Bien oganizado y bastante completo.

[Sam Grace]

You wanna understand women in ancient Greece? Buy this book and Sue Blundell's Women in Ancient Greece.

[Danielle Altrogge]

Good resource. Has lots of treasures and gems with lots of dry stuff too.

[John]

Women’s Life in Greece and Rome is such a fascinating collection — I really like how it brings together original sources to show the everyday realities of women instead of just repeating what historians say. It makes the ancient world feel a lot more real and relatable. If anyone’s ever thought about translating or even publishing books like this for wider audiences, this service might be useful: https://www.translation.pk/book-trans...

[kim]

"sappho's poems about wanting to take a nap on a girls tiddy....very validating" - zoom classmate
"thank you for sharing" - my boy prof adam
But also kinda fire and i think i'll enjoy reading this for the years to come. CLASS 261 fire course if anyones wondering.

[James]

A fantastic weapon in the fight to understand the lives of women in classical antiquity. The sources are diverse, well organised and invaluable.

[M]

Just okay.

[Fiona Montgomery]

Strangle organized like a kind of dictionary of references. But how it was presented made me distrustful of its contents. There weren’t a lot of sections anyway that interested me.

[Isabella]

Read this for a class, but genuinely found it both educational and entertaining. I also liked that it was basically only ancient texts cited

[Asha]

This got me through my EPQ, I will be forever grateful 💗