Evaluating Compensation for Working Women in the Roman Empire

Epigraphic and papyrological evidence demonstrates that women could hold a wide variety of labor roles within the Roman economy. However, their monetary compensation for this work has been widely debated and overshadowed by regional differences. Papyrological texts from Roman Egypt provide the best evidence for real wage rates from the 1st-3rd centuries C.E. but their references to working women are largely limited to contracts for wet nurses. Yet during the same period in the Roman West, funerary inscriptions demonstrate that women were employed as barbers, cobblers, gold-spinners, midwives, and doctors, among other occupations. Disciplinary divisions perpetuate this regional disparity. Whereas economic historians tend to focus on the ample economic data preserved in papyrological sources, epigraphers tend to focus on the social role of working women in other parts of the Empire. This gap prompts me to evaluate compensation for female labor in the Roman economy. In doing so, I build upon Robert C. Allen’s “consumption baskets” model that calculates household subsistence thresholds at “respectability” and “bare bones” levels for a small family using the maximum price and wage data from Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices (301 C.E.). Substituting the maximum values in Allen’s model for real price and wage data from Roman Egypt, Walter Scheidel suggests that women and children in low-income families most likely had to contribute to household subsistence, but the papyrological record limits his consideration of female earning potential to wet nurses. In this paper, I propose that we can better conceptualize the potential contributions of working women to household subsistence by using the Edict to infer wage rates for female-held occupations known from the epigraphic record and papyrological texts lacking wage rates. This approach suggests that working women could have made significant contributions to household subsistence, especially in some skilled occupations. By evaluating compensation for working women in the Roman Empire and moving towards better estimating their contributions to household subsistence, this paper grants a more substantial role to female labor in the Roman economy.