By ancient standards, adult Roman women, when no longer under the control of a pater familias, enjoyed considerable freedom.

Greek writers often remark upon Roman womens social and economic power, although it seems still rather con­stricted to modern eyes. The decline of manus marriage (Cases 37-40) and the rise of free divorce (Cases 75-80) meant that women were also not legally subjected to the authority of husbands.

Still, classical Roman private law retained from its archaic period some restric­tions on womens freedom; as Papinian dryly observes (D. 1.5.9): “In many areas of our law the condition of women is inferior to that of men.” The most striking re­striction is that women were subject to permanent tutelage even after they reached adulthood. An adult sui iuris womans tutor was originally intended mainly to safe­guard her property, especially in the interests of near relatives who could expect to inherit after her death; the intrusion on her autonomy was popularly justified by in­sisting on her “weakness of judgment,” which rendered her susceptible to double­dealing by the unscrupulous.

Antiqua">Already by the late Republic, however, the tutor’s role had been reduced to what was usually little more than a petty hindrance. Cicero, clearly tapping into a wellspring of popular resentment, describes this development as the consequence of misapplied juristic ingenuity (Pro Murena 27). And in fact, as we shall see, there is good evidence that some jurists were skeptical of the traditional arguments for tutelage of women.

Rather more serious are the restrictions that, in Rome as in other premodern societies, were placed on women's participation in the public domain. Women were excluded altogether from such civic responsibilities as voting, holding magis­tracies, and so on; and this is justified by positing certain “male duties” (officia vir­ilia), a conventional sphere of male civic privilege. As the “weakness of judgment” argument declined in effectiveness, the strength of the “male duties” argument seems to have increased during the classical period; the most notable instance is its use in a decree of the Senate barring women from using their credit on behalf of third parties.

In the end, the Roman legal sources on this subject are not especially consis­tent, but they do tacitly imply an image of adult women as somehow “too pure” for the rigors of this world, hence as requiring shelter from at least the more forceful stresses of social and political life. This image, which we have good reason to be­lieve many upper-class Roman women would have found either quaint or fantas­tic, is perhaps most clearly perceptible in the curious Roman approach to sexual harassment.