Thread by @LauraRbnsn

I think one odd aspect of Christian apologia for passages about wives in the NT that rankle is that we actually really overplay the oppression of women in the first century outside of Christian contexts.
It's obviously not entirely wrong but there's still a fair amount of data

showing women doing things like initiating divorces, arranging their own marriages, and managing their own financial affairs.
In my last article I tried to not overly play the role of the "Rome apologist" but I do think a flattening narrative doesn't really serve anyone well.

I am fairly skeptical of the "hey, this passage in the NT is liberating to women, compared to everyone else out there!" because it's both true and not true. You can't really create a real picture of the practical situation of the women in the Roman Empire by drawing entirely on

the most vituperative, misogynist texts that were circulating in the first century for the same reason you can't depict the practical circumstances of women in the 21rst century from Twitter. Guys using the word "femoid" doesn't mean my name's not on my mortgage.

And also, because I'm obsessed with popular reception of history, the idea of the age where women were property isn't just a thing we construct to make ourselves feel better. It's also, in a sizable portion of online media made for young Americans, framed as a golden age.

The reality is just more complicated. The Romans were, if nothing else, incredibly practical, and there are a lot of practical reasons why a society might not want their daughters to be the property of their husbands. Which is why they didn't arrange things that way.

If it's the first century, and your daughter is married to a guy who just lost everything in a really bad bet on imports, are you going to encourage her to take the dowry and run and get a better husband, or are you going to be so committed to your ideals of the household that

you'd rather your future grandkids were down and out than with a guy with more resources?
I'm sure there's a certain kind of person who'd tend towards the latter but there weren't enough of them in the patrician classes in Rome that it had much influence on their practices.

And you might say to that, "well, that's just replacing the power of the husband with the power of the father."
Sure but the thing about dads is they die.
Which is how you actually do end up with some pretty independent women in the first century.

Obviously none of this makes Rome "feminist" or liberated or whatever (you don't have women senators, e.g.) but there's still a huge gap between that and the first century being a world where women were shut up inside all day and regarded as livestock under the thumbs of men.