Roman Aristocratic Mother Family Status Study

This thesis researches the status of the ancient Roman mother in the higher social class. The paper can be divided into two parts, the introduction and the main body.The introduction deals with the present national and foreign study conditions of woman history , especially the study conditions of Roman women history.The main body includes three parts. The first part discusses the feature of the Roman family. The object of the second part is the status of the Roman mother in the higher social class. It develops from five aspects: the influence of mother on military matters,political affairs , marriage arrangement,acting as guardian and special position of the widow. Then it arrives at the conclusion that the status of the Roman mother in the higher social class was relatively high in the family .The third part probes into the reasons of the situation. It develops from five parts: the mother's power of economic disposition—that is ,her ability to bestow political support ,dowry and inheritances—has primary signaficance for the elite family, race relationship, the change of marriage , traditions of advocating mothers and the decline of the fatherly power.Indeed, it should be pointed out that although the status of the Roman mother was greatly improved, we could not aggrandize the improvement. To begin with, it is just relative improvement, when compared with the status of women in other ancient countries. Second, women here studied are just part of women at that time, that is, women the higher social class , while excluding a great number of lower-class women. In fact, the status of lower-class women didn't substantially improve. In addition, the improvement at that time could not change the position of men who ruled over women, and women all the same belonged to the inferior gender.