ABSTRACT
In this first segment of our discussion of the Republic, organized protests by women were, to a large extent, built around the longrunning conflict of the orders, the plebeian struggle for parity with the patricians.1 The particular aspect of that conflict with which we are here concerned centres on 331-295 BC. The issues were women’s disabilities in both the private and public sectors. Two questions of private law were prominent: the inferior status of women in manus marriages, in which the wife was ‘as a daughter to her husband’;2 and the disadvantaged position of women in the matter of divorce. Although belonging to the private sector, these questions generated organized action which can quite properly be described as political. This chapter also adverts significantly to intermarriage between patricians and plebeians, an issue which was unequivocally political.
