Women and Women's Writings from Antiquity Through the Middle Ages | Jennifer A. Sheridan (Essay Date 1998)
JENNIFER A. SHERIDAN (ESSAY DATE 1998)
SOURCE: Sheridan, Jennifer A. "Not at a Loss for Words: The Economic Power of Literate Women in Late Antique Egypt." Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 128 (1998): 189-203.
In the following excerpt, Sheridan discusses female literacy in Roman Egypt during the early centuries of the common era.
A literate woman was a rarity in the Graeco-Roman world. Only among the upper socio-economic classes could one expect to find any women who could read or write.1 Ancient men, themselves mostly illiterate, were clearly unsettled by the idea of a literate woman. It is apparent, in a number of sarcastic quips preserved from antiquity, that men understood the power that literacy might bestow on a woman. A fragment of a comic play, for example, reads "The man who teaches a woman letters does not do well; he gives more poison to a frightening...
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