When in Rome, Do as the Rebel Women Do
A journey through history to tell Cato the Elder to eff off.
Imagine for a moment that you are in Rome in 195 BCE. The Colosseum won’t be built for another 250+ years. The Forum, however, has been around since the days of Romulus, and many important government buildings and temples are located there. The Forum was built in the center of Rome, and this is where I want you to imagine yourself now.
Outside, women have blockaded the Forum and blocked all the roads leading to the Forum so that the voting men have no choice but to hear their pleas—give us our rights back!
The day previously, Cato the Elder defended the Lex Oppia with an impassioned speech about how women need to be under the control of their fathers, brothers, and husbands, and giving women a taste of equality will make them ungovernable. “The very moment [women] begin to be your equals, they will be your superiors,” Cato warned the voting men. Cato was repulsed that women would campaign for the repeal of this law by approaching voting men (who weren’t their husbands!) and presenting their case. (Read all that he said, according to Livy)
What is Oppian Law and Why Did It Matter?
The Oppian Law was put into place twenty years earlier as an emergency measure during the Second Punic War. This law forbade women from wearing more than a half ounce of gold, from wearing multi-colored tunics (specifically banning women from wearing the color purple, which was labor-intensive to make, and therefore expensive), and from using a carriage within one mile of the city of Rome (unless it was a religious festival or other public ritual). On top of limiting what a woman could wear and how she could travel, it also limited the wealth she could accumulate. Women had very little power in ancient Rome, and this law prevented women from gaining influence through monetary gain.
The women of Rome and the surrounding villages had enough. The war was over and prosperity was returning to the region. So the women flooded the streets with their presence, blocking all the roads so that there was no way around them, and blockading the Forum so the voting men couldn’t escape listening to the women’s pleas for the repeal of this unjust law.
The Word of Titus Livius and My Suspicions
I have no proof, as we only have the word of Titus Livius, a.k.a. Livy to go off of, but I believe the women campaigned quietly for some time to get this law removed, but the voting men didn’t feel it was an urgent matter and dragged their feet.
I also believe that there was a woman or a group of women at the center of the efforts to get this law repealed. Someone had to come up with the idea to block all the streets so the men couldn’t avoid the women on their way to vote. Someone had to prime the women to act, to prepare them to set their cooking and household management responsibilities aside, to encourage them to disobey their fathers and husbands in order to take to the streets in protest. This was masterful organizing in the days before the internet, before it was easy to send a message with the click of a button. I wish we knew more about the women behind this uprising so we could learn from them.
While men like Livy could ignore the forces behind the movement, they couldn’t ignore the movement itself. The men voted to repeal the Lex Coppia and restore the women their rights. The multitude of wives and daughters and sisters and aunts who came out in support of the repeal were powerful together, even though they had limited power at home and in society.
A Women’s Rights First
This was the first recorded uprising in support of women’s rights. For the last 2,218 years, women have been fighting for recognition of their rights as human beings. We are still fighting for equality and the recognition of our rights today.
The arguments against recognizing women’s rights haven’t changed over the last two millennia. The people who argue against supporting women’s rights see women as irresponsible and lacking in self control. Just look at some of the arguments used by anti-abortion advocates: if a woman doesn’t want to get pregnant, she should just keep her legs shut! Or, listen to people argue against women in seats of power, like the presidency. “Women are too irrational to be President, they’ll start a nuclear war when they’re on their period.”
It’s a little depressing to realize we have been fighting this disinformation campaign for the last 2,200 years. It’s incredible how entrenched these faulty ideas are in our society, and how they’ve influenced many aspects of our current culture, our laws, and social mores. It’s encouraging to see how much progress we’ve made towards equality over the past 250 years, but we still have a ways to go.
Wrap Up
If there’s one thing we can take away from this history lesson, it is the knowledge that we can accomplish great things if we come together and fight for the betterment of everyone. Personal power means very little when there is a collective with a cohesive mission.
Share this with a friend and ask them, “What should our collective mission be?”