Late 1st and early 2nd centuries CE

Late 1st and early 2nd centuries CE, as presented in Simone de Beauvoir’s account, is a period of contradiction in the history of Roman women. Some wives shared their husbands’ public standing and responsibilities; other women rejected motherhood or divorced. Yet freedom without avenues for independent action remained largely empty, and the period’s attacks on women helped turn social anxiety into a case against them.

A divided condition

The period followed a history in which women’s legal and economic position had shifted without securing them an equal place in public life. Some Roman matrons could inherit, make wills through the dowry system, share rights over children with fathers, divorce, and remarry. But de Beauvoir stresses that these capacities did not amount to effective emancipation: women lacked the political power and recognized work through which they could put their energies to independent use. The result was a freedom in law that was not matched by the means to act.

That contradiction shaped women’s visible presence in Roman public affairs. De Beauvoir describes them making disturbances in towns, besieging courts, forming plots, and marching along the Tiber with the statue of the Mother of the Gods. These actions show women appearing in public, but not possessing the durable political authority that would make public life their own. In her account, the spectacle of activity coexists with structural powerlessness.

Companionship, refusal, and public judgment

At the end of the first century and the beginning of the second, some women lived as companions and partners to their spouses, in a pattern de Beauvoir compares with the Roman Republic. Plotina shared Trajan’s glory and responsibilities, while Sabina became renowned for good works and was deified in statues during her lifetime. These examples present marital companionship as a real possibility, but not as evidence that women collectively held political power.

Other women refused motherhood, and many divorced. Some matrons even registered as prostitutes to avoid restrictions on their sexual conduct. The range of these choices sits uneasily beside laws that continued to prohibit adultery: women could evade or challenge prescribed roles, but the legal and social framework still sought to regulate them. De Beauvoir presents this not as a straightforward advance, but as a contested condition in which women’s choices and the limits imposed on them remain intertwined.

The period also saw the scandal of the Vestal Virgins in 114, after which their college was disbanded. Set beside the growing visibility of women in public affairs and changes to family life, the episode marks a moment when women’s conduct became a focus of public controversy. The account does not treat it as proof of women’s newfound authority; instead, it belongs to a broader picture of social tensions surrounding women’s place.

Satire and the limits of freedom

Roman literature had previously treated women with respect, but, in de Beauvoir’s account, satirists then turned sharply against contemporary women. Juvenal reproached them for hedonism and gluttony and accused them of aspiring to men’s occupations: politics, legal cases, debate with grammarians and rhetoricians, hunting, chariot racing, fencing, and wrestling. The breadth of these accusations makes women’s visibility itself part of the dispute.

De Beauvoir argues that women did rival men, but mainly through pursuits of amusement and vice, rather than through aims for which they had been educated or given room to act. No recognized objective was offered to them, while action remained forbidden. Her point is not simply that women lacked rights, nor that their individual choices were beyond criticism: it is that the society left them few routes toward consequential public activity, then made their attempts to live outside inherited roles grounds for reproach.

The period’s defining contradiction is therefore a form of false emancipation. Roman women could exercise some legal freedoms, reject motherhood, divorce, and become more publicly conspicuous, yet they remained in a world in which men held mastery and women had little power to shape collective life. Their freedom, as de Beauvoir characterizes it, was freedom without a purpose or effective means of action: a visible change in conduct without an equal transformation of social power.