Gender and manumission: Freedwomen in ancient Rome

This dissertation investigates manumission as a social, political, and economic institution that wrought an extraordinary and underappreciated transformation of an individual from property to citizen. Rome was unique among classical polities in that it bestowed freed slaves with full citizenship, granting them rights nearly equal to those of freeborn individuals. This project speaks to the inherent complexity of the process that created citizens out of slaves, and examines how different types of Romans understood and rationalized this process. At stake in the discussion about how to make an authentic citizen from a slave was the matter of defining "citizenship" itself.; This project takes as its subject the distinct problem posed by the manumission of female slaves, for whom the already-complex passage to citizenship was made still more dramatic by the fact that their respectability depended primarily upon one characteristic: sexuality. The sexual identities of a female slave and a female citizen were fundamentally incompatible, as the former was principally defined by her sexual availability and the latter by her sexual integrity. Accordingly, those evaluating the manumission process needed to reconcile a woman's experiences as a slave with the expectations and moral rigor required of the female citizen. Nowhere more clearly than through the figure of the freedwoman can modern scholars perceive how Romans understood, debated, and experienced the radical transition from slave to citizen, the various social factors that impinged upon this process, and the community stakes in the institution of manumission. This dissertation explains how it was possible and what it meant for female slaves, who were among the lowest individuals in Roman society, to become respectable citizens.