Women and Retail in Roman Italy

Abstract

This chapter explores women's role within the retail trade in Roman Italy in more detail, beginning with their involvement in family businesses, before considering their place in market trading and street vending. For unskilled women who married skilled artisans, retailing the products produced by their husbands may have been the easiest way for them to contribute to the household income. Indeed, for unskilled women, retailing was probably one of the most accessible ways of earning a living in Rome, since women could also work as market traders or street vendors. Women were not only sellers but were also buyers, and the final part of the chapter focuses on the evidence for women's role as customers in the urban centres of Roman Italy. Keywords:commerce; market traders; production businesses; retail trade; Roman Italy; Roman women; street vendors

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 40 citations exist upstream.