Selena Ross (Rutgers University)
There is no shortage of literary evidence concerning the gendered division of labor in the Roman world, with women working primarily inside the home. This naturally excludes them from most discussions of agricultural labor, both in antiquity and today. It is true that, within the already small body of evidence concerning agricultural labor, we have particularly little evidence of the role of women in this field; Scheidel (1995; 1996) rightly refers to the women who worked in ancient agriculture as “The Most Silent Women of Greece and Rome”. Silence is not absence: we do have evidence for the involvement of women – free(d) and enslaved – across the various levels of agriculture: owners, managers, workers. In this paper, I focus on the evidence we have of women’s involvement within the livestock industry of Roman Italy. Drawing on literary, artistic, and epigraphic evidence, I demonstrate the diverse ways in which women were involved in this area of agricultural work. I argue that our understanding of what qualifies as domestic work – and therefore socially acceptable for women – is too narrow compared to Roman standards. When we expand our definition to match theirs, we can see that the many women working in this area were not exceptions, but the norm.
I begin with an investigation of sedentary farming practices: from small or subsistence- level farms keeping animals for household consumption to wealthy estates raising animals for profit. Through a careful reading of our literary sources supplemented with comparative data, it is apparent that women and girls would often be responsible for tending certain animals near the house as an extension of their household duties across this diverse range of sedentary systems (Columella, Rust. 12.4.8-9). This includes not only small animals such as poultry but also small numbers of larger livestock such as sheep, pigs, and even dairy cows. While the recommendation that, for example, the vilica oversee the cleaning of the stables (Columella, Rust. 12.4.8) and the raising of vulnerable young animals (Columella, Rust. 12.1.3) may at first appear to defy the traditional gendered division of labor, the framing of these recommendations makes it clear that, like produce from the garden, animals raised close to the villa fall within the Roman understanding of domestic work.
Having established the involvement of women in sedentary animal husbandry, I then turn to women away from a typical domestic location, focusing on those who accompanied herdsmen through the practice of transhumance as attested by Varro (Rust. 2.10.6-8). These women are said to accompany the men for the purposes of cooking, companionship, and reproduction – consistent with their presumed domestic role even in the hills. However, additional evidence, even within the same text, indicates that these women were also responsible for tasks more directly involving the care of animals. With our understanding of domestic work expanded to include certain forms of animal husbandry, we can see how women were an important and accepted part of the rural labor force, both at home and in the hills.