Katherine Bain 
Women’s Socioeconomic Status and Religious Leadership in Asia Minor 
In the First Two Centuries C.E.

Moving beyond discussions of patriarchy and prescribed ‘;women’s roles’ in the Roman world, Katherine 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 women’s leadership in social associationsincluding Jewish and Christian congregationswas even more frequent than has been imagined.