Browsing by Subject "womanhood"

This thesis discusses various depictions of women’s mental illness and disability in Roman Stoic philosophy, historiography, medical texts, and legislation. The aim of this thesis is to show how mentally ill and disabled women are portrayed in the Roman prose and how healthy women are associated with the masculine ideals. The Roman medicine based itself on a long Greek tradition and native cultural influences and traditions. This synthesis created a medical field in which women are treated as anomalies and as inferior to men. This thinking is reflected in the Roman philosophy, jurisdiction, and historiography as well; women are described as absent-minded and childlike, or uncontrollable, emotional, and even insane. Women’s illness and disability are often used as moral examples in prose. This research aims to show an aspect of illness and disability in Rome that is rarely discussed and less well-known. Male illness and disability are often referred to in Roman literature; it is important to also shed light on the female experience. Lately, disability has become a more popular topic in the research of Antiquity, and so has the focus on marginalised groups such as women, children, and the elderly. The Roman concept of virtue, virtus, that fundamentally defined Roman health, is associated with men and masculinity in the original texts. Thus, an essential viewpoint to women’s illness and disability in this thesis is the concept of virtus. The research is based on the primary sources and research literature that consisted of research on women, disability, mental illness, and health in the Roman context. Methods of various fields were applied, from close reading and narrative analysis to the methods of historical research. The main results of this research show that women existed in a grey zone legally and medically. Philosophy offers a depiction of a perfect and an ideal Roman woman. This character hardly existed in reality, but the virtuous ideal is often contrasted with the unvirtuous, even wicked women of the Roman historiography. The evidence lies in the primary sources that describe healthy and ill women in different contexts. This thesis concludes that mentally ill and disabled women existed in the Roman prose and they were recognised in multiple ways; their professions, backgrounds, treatment, and legal rights are discussed in multiple sources. This information is scattered, vague, and often influenced by the personal opinions of the authors. Mentally ill and disabled women were considered different from healthy women but neither group is considered capable of achieving virtues inherent to men and masculinity in the primary sources. Healthy women could theoretically achieve virtue but in reality, women existed outside the Roman understanding of virtuous health.