Moving beyond discussions of patriarchy and prescribed "womens roles" in the Roman worlddiscussions that have relied too much on elite literary sources, in her viewKatherine Bain explores what inscriptional data from Asia Minor can tell us about the actual socioeconomic status of women in the first and second centuries C.E. Her findings suggest that outside of the prescriptive lenses of the upper classes, women were described, in honorary and funerary inscriptions, in terms that mirrored the socioeconomic status of men, suggesting that womens leadership in social associationsand by implication in Jewish and Christian congregations as wellwas even more frequent than has been imagined.
