Women Of Jeme PDF Download

This dissertation examines the roles of women in a corpus of evidence from a Lat e Antique town in southern Egypt. The town of Jeme is known from extensive Copti c textual material and archaeological evidence from the seventh and eighth centu ries CE; these sources preserve an unusually extensive record of the activities of women and make the corpus particularly conducive for a study of women's roles in an urban population. The material from Jeme can even be set against the writ ings of contemporary religious figures in the region that show the writer's idea ls of women's roles directly opposed to the actual behavior of women reflected i n the Jeme texts. The legal documents from Jeme use the designation "the woman of Jeme" to identif y the women who lived in the town; this designation is examined with respect to the different sides of Jemean life. A close reading of the basic discourse of ge nder in the Jeme texts reveals a simple male/female division that is supplemente d by gender ambiguities known from other Late Antique sources. Women appear most frequently in the Jeme sources in relation to the major social structures in th eir lives: family and community. Although formally constrained from official rol es, the women of Jeme could maintain a high degree of autonomy in the home and o utside it. Within the religious life of Jeme, women were involved both spiritual ly and economically, while certain female religious figures pervaded the literar y and artistic environment of Christianity in the region around Jeme. The econom y was a part of Jemean life in which women were visible and active; although eng aged in a variety of transactions, women are found most frequently involved in m oneylending and related businesses. Given the customary nature of the legal syst em at Jeme, women's legal status is understood better from the documentation pre viously discussed than from the codified law. Although the women of Jeme cannot be described as having been the legal equal of the men of Jeme, they exercised a greater amount of autonomy than was theoretically possible under the law of the ir time.