Economics and gender: The socioeconomic religious status of women in Asia Minor in the first two centuries of the common era

This dissertation is an investigation of texts about women's religious status in western Turkey in the first two centuries of the common era. The study relies on an approach that differs from those used in most scholarship on these texts. The theoretical framework draws from historical materialist feminism, using kyriarchy as a model to analyze the sources. The sources for women's socioeconomic and religious status include inscriptions and iconography in addition to literary texts. The innovative critical approach enables an historical interpretation that integrates a wide range of sources in a robust analysis of gender.;While a few scholars have proposed that wealthy women held positions of religious leadership in antiquity, a majority maintain that women's secondary status precluded or limited such leadership. I argue that interpretations of texts about women's religious status have been based on incomplete analyses of gender and socioeconomics. Assessment of women's religious status depends on study of the socioeconomic institutions of the household (marriage and slavery) and patronage.;Careful examination of these institutions shows that women's socioeconomic status was conditioned by marital status, wealth, legal standing, and occupational status. I argue that wealthy freeborn women's marital status determined their socioeconomic status so that wealthy widows held positions of leadership in their households. In addition, slave women in some occupations had access to wealth. Since wealth and leadership were intimately connected in Asia Minor, women who controlled wealth served as leaders through their patronage of religious groups. Thus women's socioeconomic status determined their religious status.;I suggest that spiritualized and depoliticized interpretations of patronage, marriage, and slavery have accompanied understandings that women's secondary status in antiquity prevented their access to religious leadership. However, adequate analysis of gender makes visible its interactions with other determinants of status, whether access to wealth, race or ethnicity, colonial and legal status, age, disability, and lifestyle. Spiritualized and depoliticized interpretations of marriage, patronage, and slavery have also accompanied exclusion of materialist analysis from religious and theological studies.