Chapter 2 Gendering Fecunditas
In: Fertility, Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Reproduction at RomeSearch for other papers by Angela Hug in
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Abstract
This chapter explores the tension between the medical understanding of the causes of infertility in the Roman world and how elite society defined the virtue of fecunditas. It focuses on the gendered division of responsibility for the production of legitimate children and the impact such a division had on both men and women. The chapter argues that the Romans’ ideas about fecunditas cannot be reduced to our modern definitions of fertility or fecundity and offers instead a framework which sees fecunditas as inherently hierarchical, demonstrated by some women more than others. Reports in the literary sources of demographic outliers, multiple births, and disappointing offspring reveal the male authors’ interest in evaluating the success or failure of individual women’s fecunditas. No woman could be guaranteed to be judged as having excelled at fecunditas, no matter how many children she bore.