Missing, Presumed…Absent? Where Were All the Ancient Women?

08/16/22 • 20 min

In our season intro we ask: Why aren't women in our ancient history textbooks? What is antiquity? How were women imagined in ancient Mediterranean societies? And why does women's history matter?

Meet the North African woman Perpetua, whose prison diary from Carthage is one of the few surviving literary texts written by an ancient woman. And meet your podcast hosts, Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley.
Women Who Went Before is written, produced, and edited by Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley. The music is composed and produced by Moses Sun.
Episode show notes: https://womenwhowentbefore.com/missing-presumed-absent/
Sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, and the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University
Views expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individuals, and do not represent Princeton University.

In our season intro we ask: Why aren't women in our ancient history textbooks? What is antiquity? How were women imagined in ancient Mediterranean societies? And why does women's history matter?

Next Episode

Invisible Women and How they Make History

We talk to Dr. Sarit Kattan Gribetz about history’s nameless faces, the news negativity bias, and how to raid ancient texts to find women.
How were women named and anonymized in Jewish and Christian texts? When did bene Yisra’el mean "sons of Israel" in the Hebrew Bible, and when did it include the daughters too? What do we know about female scribes in antiquity? Who was Rav Hisda's daughter? And how do biases shape what scholars find?
Episode show notes: womenwhowentbefore.com/invisible-women
Women Who Went Before is written, produced, and edited by Emily Chesley and Rebekah Haigh.
The music is composed and produced by Moses Sun.
Sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, and the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University
Views expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individuals, and do not represent Princeton University.

Women Who Went Before - Missing, Presumed…Absent? Where Were All the Ancient Women?

Transcript

Narrator: It’s been a few days since we were brought into prison. Honestly, I’m still terrified. I’ve never faced such pitch darkness before. How cruel this is! The mob crowding in makes the heat stifling; and the soldiers tried to extort us. Most of all, I’ve been consumed worrying about my infant in this dungeon.
Tertius and Pomponius, the dear deacons who ministered to us, paid a bribe so we could be released for a few hours to revive ourselves in a better part o