Home > Feminism > Women and Women's Writings from Antiquity Through the Middle Ages - Judith Evans Grubbs (Essay Date 2002)

Women and Women's Writings from Antiquity Through the Middle Ages - Judith Evans Grubbs (Essay Date 2002)

JUDITH EVANS GRUBBS (ESSAY DATE 2002)

SOURCE: Grubbs, Judith Evans. “The Status of Women in Roman Law.” In Women and the Law in the Roman Empire: A Sourcebook on Marriage, Divorce, and Widow–hood, pp. 16-80. London: Routledge, 2002.

In the following excerpt, Grubbs details the legal status of women in imperial Rome.

Forms of Legal Power: Potestas, Manus and Tutela Impuberum

In ancient Rome, virtually all free Roman women were under one of the following three types of legal authority: patria potestas (“paternal power”), manus (subordination to a husband’s legal power), or tutela (“guardianship”), for those not under potestas or manus. (Slavewomen, like slavemen, would be under the control of their master or mistress.) By the reign of Augustus, manus had practically disappeared, and Augustus himself weakened tutela...

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