The most important part about this article Women in Business Life by Jane F Gardner is the fact that it shows hard carved evidence showing how women interacted in the business world. The tablets show women interacting in businesses in the following ways, lending money, borrowing, recovering debts and going to law in pursuit of claims, on behalf of either themselves or their clients. The tablets show and prove that women were used in business and had the same rights as the men did. Theses wooden wax tablets do not have enough evidence to support the idea that men or women were used more for business transactions and there is no other way to know unless someone today builds a time machine to go back and find the truth. But women in society were just at a lower social standing then men were. For instant when it came to witnesses for wills men would much more likely oblige each other.
There were two emerging patterns in all of the receipt tablets that were shown in this article. First a declaration by the contractor that his client had acknowledged receipt of the proceeds of the auction which he had promised to pay. Second if the creditor is a man on a receipt tablet either a first person statement in writing that he had gotten his payment, or one written in third person on his behalf was written. If the creditor is a women on the receipt tablets then always a statement always written on her behalf and never a first person declaration. This shows social order again in the society of the Romans were women were below the men.
The tablets used in this article were all discovered at Murecine, near Pornpeii in 1959. About 170 of these wooden waxes carved tablets have been published. They all date in AD 26-61 but most are from AD 35-55. But only a few were mentioned in this article. Findings and discoveries of tablets help us learn about roman society and how it functioned. It’s always very exciting to see what humans did thousands of years ago and how we evolved.
The only dislike I have about this article is when they talk about the uses of Roman currency and I had to go look up and learn what 20000 HS stood for. Other than that this article was very informative about women interactions in the market place.