Felicia Durkhart's assertion that women in ancient Rome “enjoyed relatively equal standing” with ancient Roman men has served as a rallying point for feminist scholars eager to demonstrate that misconceptions about gender in history abound. For instance, Darla Moore's seminal 1981 essay “The Women Who Nurtured an Empire” showed that the ancient Romans might have recognized the necessity of women to the empire's continuance, but habitually treated them with contempt and abuse. More recently, however, feminist scholars have recognized that neither Durkhart's glib assessment of women's situation nor Moore's dour one adequately describes the dynamics of power and gender in ancient Rome. Several recent studies by these scholars give special attention to the ways in which women's rights and status changed over time, injecting much-needed nuance into the discussion.
The criticism that Durkhart and Moore oversimplify matters is also leveraged against those works that examine women's status with little or no attempt to take into account the quality of evidence available. Since details of the lives of often-oppressed populations are notoriously difficult for historians to ascertain, any description of women's lives in ancient times should be tempered by some acknowledgment that what evidence does exist can only offer limited perspectives. John Evans, among others, attempts to remedy these errors by contextualizing each source used in its immediate setting, as well as describing the larger social and historical forces, from household traditions to wartime conventions and symbols, that his interpretations take into account. Evans is therefore able to integrate studies that have previously been siloed due to the methods and concerns of the subjects' usual scholars and allows the insights of feminist studies and political analysis to be brought to bear on one another, and moreover focuses on the changes to household dynamics and economies over years of war and imperial expansion. Evans does acknowledge that upper-class women's fortunes did, at least, improve as the empire enriched itself, but concludes that the average woman likely faced increasing economic uncertainty and violence in times of war, demonstrating that men's decisions in remote centers of power affected more than just their immediate subordinates.