The murmurs ebb; onto the stage I enter.
I am trying, standing in the door,
To discover in the distant echoes
What the coming years may hold in store.

–Boris Pasternak, “Hamlet” (from the poems of Yurii Zhivago, trans. Ann Pasternak Slater

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One sunny, almost-spring day last week I was out walking in my Maine neighborhood; various neighbors in side yards were either raking leaves or shifting around piles of almost-melted snow. One of them greeted me as I passed and remarked that coronavirus was a “sign from above” that we need to live better lives. His view would be shared by many who over millennia have tried to make sense of the suffering that comes with monumental disruption. The claim that there is no such thing as a natural disaster rightly asks us to consider how differential responses and pre-existing infrastructures make a huge difference—but perhaps downplays the extent to which nature does, after all, play a starring role. And not just, as some nature writers might have us think, as a mode of consolation, but as the evil star, the dis-aster, the killer.

How do we tell the stories of disaster?

That is the question du jour, and it’s also the question I put before my group of 28 undergrads in January, when we embarked on what would be my last time teaching a class I call Catastrophes and Hope at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. The college is a residential liberal arts school with about 2,000 students. Most of the kids in my class are environmental studies majors, with a few from psych and lit thrown in. With the possible exception of the two aspiring writers in the bunch, I’m not sure they knew what they were in for.

“Environmental Studies” after all can suggest something vaguely policy-oriented, providing aspiring greens with tools for social change, an understanding of the basics of ecology, some key terms like Anthropocene and resilience. Cost benefit analysis and GIS. But my background is in Russian lit, and Catastrophes and Hope has become more adamantly humanistic the longer I’ve taught it. I’ve wanted them to read poetry, not policy. The work we engage with offers up voices of pain, rage and longing, testimony at least as important as the work of theorists and planners.

We start with Noah, not just in the Genesis version but in the Koran and a feminist midrash that is one long lamentation (all those dead bodies, floating in the surrounding sea: even medieval icons urge that anguish). We move on to modern inundations and arks: The Day After Tomorrow, whose Hollywood aesthetic we all blithely critiqued, particularly the ridiculously rapid onset of a world-changing disaster (a week! How silly!). We read Candide, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Doctor Zhivago (how much pain—environmental, human, cultural—do civil wars rain down on the heads of the innocent?); and then Svetlana Alexievich’s magisterial Voices from Chernobyl. We finish with Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke. 

It’s a syllabus filled with legends, warnings, trauma; war, dismemberment, famine; lyrical horror, a bit of humor, and pithy take-homes, including this gem from Voltaire, spoken to Candide by a man in Surinam, about how he lost his limbs to a slave master: “It’s the price I pay for the sugar you love to eat.” Indeed.

This is, however, the first time I’ve had to contend with disaster in the midst of teaching a course on the topic.  Social scientists think about “hazards” (naturally occurring, things like fire or flood that can be essential parts of ecosystems) and how they become disastrous for humans, plotting how environment and social relationships all play into vulnerability. As [the geographer] Nigel Clark puts it in Inhuman Nature, “what are catastrophes for soft, fleshy creatures like us are for the earth merely minor and mundane readjustments.” The word itself—dis-aster—has something to do with stars, with being born under a bad one. It’s a view of the catastrophic that has more to do with fate than human foibles.

When the college went to distance-learning in mid-March, I had decisions to make about transitioning to a kind of teaching I’d never done before. Given the size of my classes, and the geographical spread of where students live, I opted against what we’re calling “synchronous” classes on line: instead I made short video presentations that students can watch at their own convenience, and then split the class into groups of seven or eight students. They meet twice a week to discuss readings, and someone posts for the group on our course blog. I’ve also asked them to write individual posts that can be about anything.

Professor Costlow on the last day of classes before Bates College closed down because of the coronavirus pandemic. Photo: Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

The individual posts are what has been most interesting to me: the writing has become more informal and also more observant. It is often deeply moving, sometimes melancholy, sometimes wry and self-deprecating. They write about time, and disappointment. They write about being bored; about loving their families and being annoyed with them. They write about trees coming into blossom, and slow internet, but they also write about fear, and having to work, and family businesses that must close; they worry about parents who work at hospitals, and elderly grandparents, and whether or not they’ll be able to afford Bates come fall. I’ve asked two students for permission to use quotes from their blog posts:

One student says that amidst the feeling of being “stuck” she’s been “working to mindfully change this mindset of stuckness” into something like safety. “Rather than saying I’m stuck at home I encourage myself to say I’m safe at home.”

Another writes of worrying about a grandmother he calls Big G “for sass.” “She told me that she made a collage. It spelled hope. Her nursing home has been infected by the virus. I cried.”

Through all this, the formality and caution of our “normal” classroom has begun to erode. We peer into each other’s bedrooms, family pets join class, I see other members of the household moving in the background, we share recipes and news about the weather. Students who had never spoken in class now participate in their zoom square, and make interesting observations on the blog. It’s not all great, by any means. There are students who are no-shows, as there were before. It’s harder to focus on a common text, to sustain conversation and push deeper into the meaning of an image or passage…

One day we stage a reading of Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl, with each student sharing a section they’ve chosen and rehearsed. The point isn’t to offer commentary, but simply to bring these voices into our shared audio space, to inhabit someone else’s moment of attenuation and confusion. In an essay called “Confronting the Worst: Writing and Catastrophe,” Alexievich talks about her books as “novels of voices.” As she wrote her books on Chernobyl and Soviet experiences of war, she “began to understand that what I was hearing people say on the street and in the crowds was much more effectively capturing what was going on than anything I was reading in print.” My hope is that her symphony of “human feelings and human turmoil” might help us find our own voices.

I originally started teaching the course because I was tired of hearing environmentalists say that climate change was so unprecedented that no previous human experience was relevant to dealing with it. My experience of life first in the Soviet Union and then in post-Soviet Russia had convinced me of the opposite: that people in extraordinarily constrained political and economic conditions make lives of dignity, lives inflected with moments of joy and commitment. I wanted my students to read a book like Zhivago because it’s about a society that comes apart, lives that are profoundly—viciously—unsettled, and yet there are forms of endurance, too.

Over the years I’ve taught Pasternak’s novel I’ve come increasingly to appreciate just how dark the novel’s vision is, how much violence and suffering it contains. The book begins with a funeral and the boy Zhivago standing on his mother’s grave, howling like a young wolf. The liturgical ritual of burial is interrupted by something feral and raw. It’s not just revolutions that interrupt human culture. The boy who will become a poet howls like a peasant woman. Maybe this is what death teaches us: to howl our way beyond cliché and false comfort.

The course discussions have never focused much on hope; it’s the easiest part of the course to ignore, despite my urging that we consider George Frederick Watt’s haunting painting of a masked woman and her stringless harp. The image hung in Nelson Mandela’s cell, and led Obama to title his memoir The Audacity of Hope. I try to convince my students that hope is everywhere in these stories, lying hidden in plain sight… But the frisson of disaster is enticing, and so we head toward the edge of the cliff, in the company of various idiots and saints, whose lives (thank God!) we don’t actually have to live.

This semester I invited students to write on resilience in Zhivago: one of the students who took the prompt produced a remarkably moving paper, insisting that there’s nothing remotely like resilience in the novel. Nature may continue, but humans are unfaithful and die; the only ones left in a destroyed village are those near death themselves. Maybe this student’s resistance to the word is in fact something to feel hopeful about (the novel speaks powerfully to the catastrophe of political rhetoric). Pace my student, there is hope, maybe even resilience, in Zhivago’s world: it’s just not pretty. It’s Voltaire’s resilience, not Pangloss’s, born of bitter experience.

There are of course vast differences between this moment and almost every disaster we’ve read about over the past three months. My house has not sustained weeks of high water; there has been no earthquake; I have not been ordered to gather my belongings and leave forever the house in which I’ve raised my children; crowds have not gathered to burn at the stake or otherwise attack miscreants held responsible for the current suffering. My pantry is well stocked; I have a house full of books, a neighborhood to walk in, technology that brings me into the homes of my friends. But something has been disrupted, and something beyond death and economic decline might come of this moment.

This is my last term teaching, so I won’t be returning next fall to a classroom. If I did have more semesters ahead of me I hope I would resist returning to something called “normal.” Zhivago returns from WWI to a Moscow on the eve of revolution; he longs for the life he’d lived before, but it is not to be. What might teachers learn from this moment of what is called “distance” learning, brought about because we’ve been reminded that in some sense there is no such thing as distance? My students are grappling with the existential realities of texts that have always seemed to be about some other life: maybe what’s needed isn’t a different body of stories, but a new way of reading them, of entering into their realities and making them our own… Time, horror, impatience, what nature offers us and what it doesn’t and in fact can’t.

In early April I had a three-act dream about my Bates colleagues, some living and some dead, who visited me in different rooms. One of the rooms is a vast but overly full storehouse, a kind of machine shop with hanging fluorescent lights. My desk is in a dusty, airless corner. The next room is smaller, and has a big round table and a four-poster bed. The final room is actually a transplant from my childhood home, with a big open archway between rooms, a row of potted flowering plants sitting on the floor where the rooms meet. Even before the coronavirus too much of my life as a teacher felt like living in a machine shop; even at a place as well-heeled as my college, the classes are too big, and the students too often are looking for tools instead of questions. Too many of our conversations feel abstract, not connected to human experience and intuition.

But paradoxically enough, this experience of teaching about disaster in disaster, distanced but strangely intimate, reminds me of what teaching can be—what teaching could and must be, if we hope to avoid the worst repercussions of the inevitable evil stars of our future. Zhivago and his family planted potatoes in well-composted ground, and in the evening they read novels and talked about them. People who survived Chernobyl became mystics convinced that we must change our relationship with the more-than-human world. The men and women who survived Katrina speak now with blistering clarity about the forces that undid their lives.

We have always existed within this symphony of voices, stretching all the way back in time. Candide can get to the garden only by leaving his sheltered home, following the path of misery and mischief to its end. Where do we head when this thing ends, when we encounter the sign post that instead of Catastrophe reads “Hope”? These voices urge audacity, and perseverance.

Alexander Lukashenko, the first and only president of Belarus, a man who is often referred to as Europe’s sole dictator, has been lashing out like a cornered animal since mass protests began in his country following his dubious re-election in early August. It’s clear that most Belarusians actually supported Lukashenko’s opponent, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a woman who has since fled with her children to Lithuania.

The anti-Lukashenko opposition, comprising hundreds of thousands of people, has never been so vocal, and thousands of protestors have been detained by state police, beaten, and tortured. When it became clear that protestors would not be deterred by such violent reactionary tactics, Lukashenko’s administration began targeting leaders in the uprising.

One day after 200,000 protestors staged a demonstration in Minsk, a Coordination Council was formed to work toward a peaceful resolution to a national crisis.

Since then, however, most members of the council have been arrested or exiled, including, most recently, lawyer Maxim Znak. Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian journalist and historian who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, is the last original member of the Coordination Council who is active in Belarus.

Last month, Alexievich had been the subject of a criminal investigation by Belarusian authorities who accused her of undermining national security. Despite the intimidation attempts, Alexievich has refused to leave her country.

After people in ski masks attempted to break into her apartment, Alexievich, arguably the most popular Belarusian cultural figure, asked supporters to come to her home in Minsk. By Wednesday morning, pictures were circulating of Alexievich surrounded by journalists, fans, and sympathetic European diplomats.

In a conversation with the New Yorker‘s Masha Gessen this week, Alexievich called this show of support “resistance through presence.” Thousands of volunteers have submitted themselves for consideration to join a new version of the Coordination Council called the Expanded Council, whose members will be anonymous.

Despite her fear and uncertainty, Alexievich knows that her actions carry weight for the people of Belarus. “I don’t want people to lose the last remaining hope,” she told Gessen. “So I’m going to be here to the end.”

I became interested in oral history after encountering Studs Terkel’s Working and the early works of Svetlana Alexievich and even Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, which could be read as the most entertaining fictional oral history ever. My book New Yorkers is a portrait of the city featuring nearly 80 real narrators. Each voice is part of a chorus that, I hope, will reflect the vitality and resilience of the place.

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Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time
(Random House Trade)

When I read her books, I marvel at how Svetlana Alexievich is both there and not there, never overbearing but present in outline in her encounters as she introduces a span of Russian voices that brings me—a resident of the west—into the memories and even the textures of the last days of the USSR. I go back to this book whenever I’m curious why is Russia the way it is. It’s all there in Secondhand Time—not just the recent past but intimations of what the country will become. In awarding her the 2015 Nobel prize the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy said that Alexievich’s work amounts to ”a history of emotions—a history of the soul, if you wish.“ The great lesson from Alexievich is that if this history is to be soulful, its language cannot come from those who are paid to think, paid to speak, whose words are dulled by any sort of PR officialspeak.

For anyone writing oral history, this official language is death. It’s not language at all. Alexievich knows how to sit with her interviewees and appreciate that they may be strange, morose, reticent, but ultimately willing to offer a version of their story that hasn’t been drained of life. The encounters are intimate. I can almost smell the kitchens where these conversations take place and throughout the text Alexievich is alive to the pauses, the recalcitrance of human encounters. ”She falls silent“ is a phrase repeated over and over. I love Secondhand Time for the moments when Alexievich’s presence is fully revealed. She steps into the scene. The journalist merges, even just for a moment, with the subject. At the end of a particularly brutal and moving section in which an Armenian refugee offers up an account of a pogrom, Alexievich concludes with the italics: [And both of us cry].

Ronald Blythe, Akenfield
(New York Review of Books)

I know this book inside and out. I know its cramped typesetting and I’ve nearly memorized the intro in which the great English writer Ronald Blythe describes his interviewing project, which unfolded in 1966-67 and was published in ’69. Perhaps because I wrote a follow-up of sorts in 2006 I know the flatlands and hollowlands of the villages in East Anglia where Blythe conducted his interviews with farmers, orchard workers, thatchers and saddlers. (This was all long before I showed up in the era of commuters, gravel drives and gourmet pub lunches.) Blythe’s eloquent introduction features one tell-tale line: ”The book is more the work of a poet than a trained historian“—which is probably why he is alive to all the chewy language of the region, all that Suffolk voice, with its peculiarities and phrasings that occasionally seems to be plucked straight from the old testament.

While working on my own book, Return to Akenfield, I heard some of those old voices in council homes in the village, including when I visited an ancient rag rug picker. In 1966 Blythe’s interviewees reflected on the great industrial changes of the early 20th and even late 19th centuries. There are plenty of high points in his epic, but I always love the way the book ends, with the gravedigger, ”Tender“ Russ, whose two budgies, Boy and Girl, drown out any bad news that comes across on the radio. ”Dust to dust they say, It makes me laugh,“ Russ says. This is Suffolk. ”Mud to mud, more like.“ Russ tells Blythe he wants to be cremated. ”Straight from the flames to the winds, and let that be that.“

Jean Stein and George Plimpton, Edie: An American Biography
(Grove Press)

Stein worked with Plimpton to produce an oral history that was ostensibly about the actress and fashion model Edie Sedgwick. It must be. She’s there in the title. She peers out from the cover of my edition. But the brilliance of the book is in its structure and the way Edie swerves away from Edie. Sedgwick ”touched so many worlds,“ Stein once said in an interview, ”These different, alienated worlds in the 1960s—and the story is as much about all of those people as it is about her.“ Words like ”tapestry“ and ”chorus“ often get thrown around in discussions of these voice-driven books, but Edie is truly orchestral. Stein used Sedgwick’s brief life to investigate both the main players and peripheral figures of the Pop art scene in New York, as well as a whole cast that connects to Sedgwick’s patrician New England roots. The resulting book allows for a surprising variety of tone, and ends up an account of an entire era giving way to the next. All the while the narrative moves toward and away and around the tragic, wide-eyed figure at its centre.

Studs Terkel, Hard Times
(New Press)

Certain images linger from Hard Times, Terkel’s sprawling account of the Great Depression. A man who worked the San Francisco waterfront describes the scene when four jobs were offered to a crowd of hungry workers:—“a thousand men would fight like a pack of Alaskan dogs” over them. I return to Hard Times for its imagery and its range. Terkel created a masterpiece out of dogged legwork. He got there, he tracked down the voices, including those who could provide expert testimony on dust bowl poverty and White House policy. He moves from the accounts of social activists to men riding boxcars. Each time I return to the book with more respect for the rich trove of personal details that might have been lost in the work of other historians. Terkel found fit to gather the quirks of speech and images a person carries with her—the stuff that wouldn’t show up in a polite obituary. And none of it feels like medicine. Terkel entertains throughout. You can tell he’s a collegial interviewer and I love knowing he criss-crossed the US with a clunky recorder. Much of the work that goes into oral histories remains off-screen. How does a writer set the stage to encourage his subject’s eloquence? Studs listened with respect and enthusiasm, and he passed to his readers a sense of discovery. Don’t tell us too much. Let character emerge from cadence, language, word choice. Let a person emerge in her own words.

Tony Parker, People of Providence
(Eland)

I wrote a book about London. Tony Parker was smarter. Instead of the whole city, he chose one housing estate south of the river and spent about eighteen months in the early 80s hanging around and listening to the thoughts of its residents—and you can sense, in each interview, how that time was spent building trust and familiarizing himself with individuals who then gave him, piece by piece, a collage of urban life. The book burbles along—there’s no other word for it—and part of the pleasure is following the flow of London language. The issues of Providence are revealed, including accounts of racism, classism, and the slog of poverty, but Parker is so patient with his interviewees that the large themes end up embedded in the living world of Providence with all its rich details. What I admire about the book is how deep Parker sinks into one setting. Writing about an entire city means a lot of movement, a lot of territory to cover. Parker finds in one tower block an entire world. Travel writing, he reminds us, doesn’t mean straying far.

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New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time by Craig Taylor is available now via W.W. Norton and Company.

Welcome to Lit Century: 100 Years, 100 Books. Combining literary analysis with an in-depth look at historical context, host Catherine Nichols chooses one book for each year of the 20th century, and—along with special guests—takes a deep dive into a hundred years of literature.

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In this episode, Catherine Nichols discusses Svetlana Alexeivich’s 1985 oral history The Unwomanly Face of War with author Megan Buskey. The conversation covers the ways World War II is remembered in Russia versus in the United States, the feminism of the 1970s that created an audience for a book of this kind—and the topics it can’t cover—as well as ways that the experiences of Soviet soldiers in World War II can shed light on the current war in Ukraine.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts! 

From the conversation:

Catherine Nichols: She’s definitely an insightful listener to these stories. To the extent that she’s shaping the stories or that she’s just listening, you definitely have a feeling of—I feel like I know what it would be like to be in a room with her. It might be false, but I think at the end of the book, I had a feeling. You know what it was? It was partly a feeling of optimism about the project itself.

There’s something kind of optimistic about the idea that unsayable things could be said—and that the world was ready to hear things—that has things in common with feminism in the 1970s in other parts of the world also. The idea that if you can just say things clearly, if you can just say what has been unsaid for so long, then that alone is powerful enough to change things and to improve people’s lives. There’s something very hopeful about the project, even if it’s also devastating to read.

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Megan Buskey is the author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family History of Exile and Return (ibidem, 2023). A former Fulbright Fellow to Ukraine, she has been traveling to and studying the former Soviet Union for 20 years. She has written for The Atlantic, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications.

Catherine Nichols is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in many places, including Jezebel, Aeon, and Electric Literature. She lives in Brooklyn.

To have your work compared to a monumental literary title is always an honor and a burden to a writer. My debut novel, 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster is often described as a historical novel similar to Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. Like Pachinko, my novel is a story of a Korean family surviving the turbulence of the 20th century, the most dramatic period of modern Korean history. But some of the early readers of my novel, especially those who read it mainly with Pachinko in mind, voiced a complaint that 8 Lives is at times too dark and too devastating to read.

If it were up to me to name one book that was the most influential for 8 Lives, I would choose The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich rather than Pachinko. I came across this groundbreaking work of literature about six years ago when I was just beginning to develop ideas for my debut novel, and it upended my literary world in the best way possible.

Only a half hour after I first opened the book in the University of Hong Kong library, I found myself crying uncontrollably despite the spectators in the room. I’ve never shed so many tears reading a book. The Unwomanly Face of War, an innovative work of literary nonfiction by the Nobel-prize-winning Belarusian journalist, features hundreds of different voices of women from the former Soviet Union, who narrate their pained personal accounts of fighting in the Second World War. This oral history portrays a vast range of human emotions in their full intensities and subtleties, through the raw languages of numerous women who are the firsthand witnesses and survivors of the war’s brutality.

I was surprised by how similar many of their stories were to those of my family I had grown up listening to, the testimonies of war and its ongoing aftermath. The story of rapes committed by Soviet soldiers reminded me of my grandmother’s account of witnessing and narrowly escaping rapes by American soldiers during the Korean War; the landmine accident that took the life of a Russian soldier in his hometown, after surviving years of war, resembled the one that took my grandfather’s leg two decades after the war was over; stories of townspeople killing each other, divided by the conflicting politics of the Germans and the Communist partisans, were identical to those of my grandparents, split by the violent confrontation between Communist guerrillas and the Allied Forces; the hunger the Soviets suffered, during and after the war, was akin to that of my great-aunt who survived a famine in North Korea that wiped out one-third of her region’s population; recurring traumas the soldiers faced even long after they won the war made me think of my sleepless, alcoholic uncle, still reeling from the memories of his inhuman military training as a spy to be sent to North Korea.

Just like my family, the various narrators of The Unwomanly Face of War bore the brunt of war and suffered its aftershocks in the guts. What I admire the most about Alexievich’s writing is that it does not flinch from the atrocities of war, that it lets the survivors speak their own languages, still raw and pulsing with visceral pains. Alexievich writes in the beginning of the book that the manuscript of The Unwomanly Face of War has been rejected by publishers for years under the same verdict: the violence of war described in her work is too horrendous, too realistic. But Alexievich refused to censor or tone down the words of her subjects to make them more palatable.

What I hoped to do with 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster was similar. I tried to depict the pains of my family and those who endured the same brutalities with an unflinching eye. It was indeed agonizing for me to recall the story of my nineteen-year-old grandmother escaping a rape by American soldiers during the Korean War, with my two-year-old father holding her hand and his little sister inside her belly.

For me to write about it in details, while pregnant with my second child, just like my grandmother in her story, was even more painful. It isn’t always easy to gaze at an open wound, but however painful it is to hear such stories or to write about them, it is much more difficult for the wounded to share them. Alexievich writes that countless women she interviewed often cried a lot, shouted. Some swallowed heart pills, called an ambulance after she was gone. Even so, they begged her to come back: “Be sure to come. We’ve been silent so long. Forty years…,” they told her.

Reading hundreds of wounded voices in their raw truths was, to me, devastating. And yet it was also incredibly comforting and uplifting. It was as though they were telling me and my family that we weren’t alone in these memories of hushed atrocities, that our little stories of suffering, although we are no heroes with shiny medals and badges, deserve to be heard—just like theirs.

In the prologue of 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster, an obituarist says “sometimes the best thing you can give to others suffering is your ears.” I hope I have fully given mine to my characters, without turning my eyes away from their open wounds no matter how frightening they might be.

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8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster by Mirinae Lee is available from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

There is a story from the 1970s often told by Roman historians of gender. It goes like this: students at an American college approached their male professor, a revered Roman historian, to request a course on women in Roman history. They, being among the first women ever to study ancient history at this university, wanted to see themselves on their syllabus.

Their professor disagreed. To their dismay, he replied that he may as well do a course on Roman dogs. The professor’s meaning was clear: women have no place in history. History is not about women, or children or non-binary people or indeed dogs. History, to him and to an awful lot of people, is the Doing of Important Things. It is winning battles and having Important Opinions In Public. History is politics and public deeds. Women don’t make history.

The history of the Roman Empire is usually told in this mould. It starts with Romulus, moves through Brutus overthrowing Tarquin, bounces through an appallingly tedious list of expansionist battles and generals and consuls, before emerging into the political stab-fest of the Late Republic. From there, it runs through all the emperors, occasionally mentioning a wife or mother to show how badly things can go when women take control, until Constantine invents Christianity and then Attila the Hun rolls up and ruins it.

But the history of Rome and its empire is so much more than just emperors and politicians and generals. History is so much more than Important Things. You and I, right now, are living through history. In the future, history books will be written about the times we live in, and we won’t be in them because we (mostly) do not do Important Things.

History, though, still includes us. It includes women who are not prime ministers or queens or capital-I Important. History happens to women (and men) as much as they make it.

My new book, A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire, is a revisionist history of the Roman Empire with Important Things relegated to the background. This is a history of the things the Roman male historians and biographers never wanted to write about and certainly didn’t want us to be writing about. This is a history of the things the Roman history writers designated as domestic, feminine, boring and worthless. It is a history of individuals, because, to quote Svetlana Alexievich, “this miniature expanse: one person, the individual. It’s where everything really happens.”

By focusing on women, we discover a whole new history of the Roman Empire, one where marriage is as important as war and where what it is to be Roman is constantly being reassessed. Including women in history forces us, as historians, to re-evaluate what a Roman was, what Romanness was, and to confront the immense scope of the Roman Empire. Including women deepens our understanding of Roman history and Roman life.

When Romulus founded Rome, he knew that his city would not be complete until it included women; the history of Rome is equally incomplete without them.

Here are five facts about Roman Women you might not know, but should:

Once you start looking for women in the Roman world, you find loads of them.
If I asked you to imagine ancient Rome, I suspect you would imagine a very masculine space. White men in white togas standing next to white columns, perhaps. Or muscle-bound gladiators beating the life out of each other in the arena. Or maybe rows of helmeted soldiers brandishing swords and shields and sandals. Women do not feature highly in most imagined versions of Rome.

In part, this is the fault of the literary sources, who wrote about men and war and politics, but it is also the fault of modern readers who have refused to look beyond those literary sources. Once we take a step outside to look at other sources, like inscriptions and archaeology and letters, or ask new questions of the histories, we suddenly find ourselves in a world full of women living lives that are full and rich and exciting.

Our eyes are opened to the fact that women are all over the damn place doing all sorts of brilliant and average things, running businesses, teaching, learning, disrupting conspiracies, being integral to state religions and anything else you can think of. The Roman empire was positively littered with average women and they deserve a look in when we imagine it.

The main women we know about are the most elite elites, and they aren’t representative.
One of the main stumbling blocks in writing or learning about Roman women from the literary sources is that they are exclusively interested in the lives of the most rarified elites. Histories were only interested in the imperial family and the senators who surrounded them. The imperial family are, by definition, weird. Their concerns are not the concerns of literally anyone else in the whole empire.

Extrapolating from the experiences of empresses like Livia and Agrippina the Younger to the experiences of Aurelia Macula, a midwife who lived in Maktar, Tunisia is as reasonable as extrapolating the experiences of Queen Victoria to me. Technically, yes, we were both English women but that is the beginning and end of what we have in common.

Senatorial women are equally removed from normal experience because being a Senator was not a job. It was an anti-job. In order to be a Senator, a man had to own over one million sesterces of property and he was not allowed to earn that. These property qualifications were checked with surprising regularity and meant that women of Senatorial rank literally had to come from generational wealth and were banned from making money by normal means not because of their gender, but because of their class.

They also had to abide by morality legislation which specifically only applied to women of Senatorial rank, which was always a small number of women. Their experiences cannot be generalized to other populations, especially to enslaved and formerly enslaved women.

The Roman empire spanned one thousand years and five million square miles, and ninety-nine percent of the women who lived and breathed and laughed and died in that empire were not imperial or senatorial women. The rules of morality, lifestyle and participation in public life that governed the one percent in Rome simply did not apply to everyone else.

Law codes don’t describe reality.
A regularly repeated fact about Roman women is that they had no legal majority; women in the Roman empire were legally children for their entire lives and could do no legal business without a male guardian. In law, this is true but it takes only the most cursory look around the empire to find exceptions which complicate the black and white law.

In the province of Arabia, for example, in the town of Mahoza near modern Baghdad, a woman named Babatha repeatedly petitioned the Roman provincial governor in Petra throughout the 120s C.E. regarding debts owed to her by her deceased husband and the guardianship of her son, Jesus. As a Jewish woman and a non-citizen, she could not represent herself in court and so she was represented by an elite Roman citizen, a woman named Julia Crispina. They later tried to sue one another for unspecified acts of violence. Women apparently appeared in court as a matter of course.

Thirty years before Babatha was born, a woman called Julia Felix died in Pompeii. At the time that Vesuvius erupted, Julia had been in the process of putting her business up for rent and had just neatly painted a To Let sign on her wall. She ran a leisure complex, containing shops, baths, hot food stalls, gardens, apartments and the closest thing the Romans had to a proper restaurant.

In her To Let sign, she is the only listed owner and no guardian or man is mentioned at all. Clearly, the idea that woman could not do legal business is less set in stone than we might want them to be. Women did act as adults and as autonomous beings all the time, all over the empire.

Roman women weren’t caged domestic animals.
The other way in which too much emphasis on aristocratic women in Roman history skews perspectives horribly is that it erases all the working women in the Roman world and from the category of woman. Aristocratic sources written by aristocratic men about the aristocracy, which includes enormous expensive epitaphs for rich women, emphasize domesticity as a woman’s only virtue.

If you only read elite sources about rich people then you get stuck with the impression that Roman women were only allowed to have children and weave wool and stare at the walls of their houses like the protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper. This is a fiction designed by and for a class who prized domesticity as a mark of wealth and luxury because they could afford to own other women who worked for them.

Shift your focus ever so slightly away from the upper classes and you’ll find women working, earning and spending money and living in the world. A terrifying number of these women were enslaved, like Deftri and Amica who drew their feet and their names on a tile that ended up on a temple in Pietrabbondante. Many were formerly enslaved women withprofessions, like Naevia Clara, an educated physician in Rome, or Hispala Faceana, a sex worker. Others were freeborn like Septimia Statonice, a shoemaker, Livinia Primagenia, a perfume-maker who died at 71 years old. All these women survive on tombstones which celebrate them for their domestic achievements.

Even elite women clearly did not really live in a separate domestic “feminine domain”. The wives, sisters and daughters of senators and emperors regularly involved themselves in the daily realities of political life. Even Turia, a profoundly conservative woman of Senatorial rank who is known only from a long epitaph from the Late Republic, is lauded by her husband for fighting several court cases, fighting off a home invasion, personally petitioning Julius Caesar and Octavian, and breaking the law to save his life.

Looking at women, and how they present themselves, humanizes history.
When we write histories of people who are not cis men, we get to rewrite history. We get to add color and humanity to stories that feel well-trodden and we get to contest old tropes. Including enslaved women, freed women, Syrian women, business women, in Roman history undermines the image of ancient Rome as a homogenous, white paragon of an imagined “Western culture” and disrupts the wet dreams of fascists and racists about the European past.

Including these women in our histories of the Roman empire reveals that it was both a multicultural, multiracial empire where women from Iraq, Albania, England and Egypt could all call themselves Roman and a brutal slave state which stole the lives of uncountable millions. Telling the stories of women across the empire reveals Roman army camps to be spaces full of families having birthday parties, and Roman cities to be centered on games where criminals were tortured and murdered for entertainment.

These stories humanize and complicate history, which is after all just stories of people in all our horrible, wonderful glory.

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A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire by Emma Southon is available via Abrams Books.