Moving beyond discussions of patriarchy and prescribed "women's roles" in the Roman world, Katherine Bain explores what inscriptional data from Asia Minor can tell us about the actual socioeconomic status of women in the first and second centuries C.E. Her findings suggest that outside of the prescriptive lenses of the upper classes, women were described, in honorary and funerary inscriptions, in terms that mirrored the socioeconomic status of men, suggesting that women's leadership in social associations-including Jewish and Christian congregations-was even more frequent than has been imagined.

By Katherine Bain