Women, Water, and Urban Life in Rome

Introduction

Water shaped Roman urban life at every scale: it fed households, filled fountains and baths, flushed sewers, irrigated gardens, powered mills, and supplied the public spectacles that affirmed Roman identity. Women — as household managers, ritual participants, workers, clients, and magistrates’ relatives — lived and moved within this watery environment in ways that both reflected and shaped gendered norms, social status, legal rights, and daily routines. Understanding the intersection of gender and hydraulic infrastructures offers a richer picture of how Rome’s metropole worked in practice, and how ordinary and elite women experienced civic space.

This article examines women, water, and urban life in Rome from multiple angles: legal rights and access to water; daily practices of collection, storage, and use; women’s work connected to water (wet nurses, laundresses, water sellers, bath attendants); ritual and religious uses; women’s relationships to public water monuments; and the political meanings of water management for female networks and familial power. It draws on literary evidence, inscriptions, law codes, iconography, topography, and archaeology to reconstruct women’s entanglements with Rome’s water systems. Latin passages are included where primary texts are quoted in the original. Numbered footnotes provide references and further reading.

Legal Frameworks and Access: Rights, Restrictions, and Realities

Water Law and the Curator Aquarum

The legal framework governing Rome’s water rested on a mixture of imperial statutes, senatorial decrees, municipal regulations, and customary practice. The most comprehensive ancient administrative account is Sextus Julius Frontinus’ De aquaeductu urbis Romae (ca. 97–104 CE), a curator’s record that tabulates sources, conduits, legal rulings, abuses, and penalties. Although Frontinus writes as the male, senatorial curator, his data illuminate patterns of distribution that affected households and thus women’s daily lives: distinctions between public and private supply, the privileging of imperial and public users, and the penalties for illicit tapping.1

Frontinus’ famous opening: “res ab imperatore delegata, mihi ab Nerva Augusto” — “A task entrusted by the emperor, to me by Nerva Augustus” — frames his office as a public responsibility, but his catalogues implicitly show who might be excluded by technical or legal limits.2 The aqueduct allotments (rationes, modii, or passive delivery capacities) determined whether a domus could sustain a private fountain, heated baths, or the free flow necessary for laundering — all activities in which women, especially in elite households, played organizing roles.3

Women’s Legal Standing and Access to Water

Roman law recognized women’s property rights with important limits. Women could own property (res) and manage dowries (dos) and have peculium (trust funds), but under the paternal authority of a paterfamilias or the guardianship of a tutor.4 Water access is not often the subject of gendered statutes, yet legal actions over water — litigations for illicit connections, damages from overflow, and disputes about servitudes — sometimes involve women as litigants or beneficiaries in inscriptions and legal texts.5 For example, inscriptions sometimes record grants of water rights to women benefactors or to funerary collegia that included women.6

The legal apparatus for public water (curatores, aquaeductarii, liberti conducting works) was male-dominated, but women exercised influence indirectly — as property-owners, patrons, or household managers. The legal fiction of male guardianship could constrain a woman’s direct dealings with the curator, but many elite women used proxies or freedmen agents to secure supplies and resolve disputes.7 Lower-status women — freedwomen, tenants, or slaves — relied on the public fountains, wells, and water-sellers (aquarii, compradores aquae) whose everyday practices are better captured in material and epigraphic records than in law codes.

Daily Practices: Fetching, Storing, and Using Water

Public Fountains, Street Taps, and the Female Routine

For most Romans, especially non-elite women, water procurement began at the public fountain (lacus or castellum), street hydrant (nasones in later times), or communal well. The image of women carrying water in amphorae or pitchers is recurrent in literary, epigraphic, and visual sources. It served as shorthand for domestic duty but also signaled civic membership: the presence of communal water points was a marker of urban infrastructure available to all free residents and many slaves.8

Iconography — wall paintings, reliefs, and Roman mosaic panels — sometimes depicts women with water-jars, attending wells, or in bathing contexts. These images, while stylized, reflect recognizable practices: gatherings of women at fountains as social spaces, seasonal rhythms of water use (greater demand in summer), and the choreographic patterns of supply and storage.9 Archaeology supports this: domestic houses and insulae often include cisterns, dolia, and lead pipe traces indicating internal water distribution; these installations shaped how women organized household tasks.10

Storage: Cisterns, Dolia, and Domestic Water Management

Given the intermittent or regulated direct supply, many households relied on storage. Large dolia (buried amphorae) and cisterns collected rainwater or excess private supply; these storage systems were essential for cooking, laundering, and bathing. Elite domus could maintain private waterworks (piped fountains, bath suites), but many urban households practiced careful budgeting of water. Archaeological cisterns — from Pompeii to Ostia and across Rome — often show stratified deposits and evidence of maintenance, suggesting routinized household systems managed by women or their agents.11

Cato the Elder’s treatment of household management (in De Agri Cultura) and later household manuals emphasize thrift and order in water use. Although Cato’s handbook is rural, its prescriptive tone — the master overseeing servants fetching water, the matron supervising storage and cleanliness — resonates with urban practice, where women commonly arranged labor and household provisioning.12

Women’s Work Around Water

Laundresses (Fullones) and Water-Intensive Trades

Fullonicae (fulling workshops) were central to Rome’s textile economy and heavily water-dependent. Fullones used water, urine (alkaline agents), and mechanical action to clean and process cloth. While literary sources and inscriptions emphasize male entrepreneurship in the larger workshop economy, many fulling tasks — especially those in smaller establishments — could involve women as workers, assistants, or owners (particularly freedwomen).13

Evidence for women’s participation in laundering appears in tomb inscriptions, epitaphs, and the occasional legal mention of woven-goods traders. In Ostia, where commercial and industrial installations cluster near waterways, archaeologists have identified fullonica remains and associated living quarters; these micro-topographies suggest households in which women worked within and near water-using industries.14

Water-Sellers, Well-Diggers, and Service Workers

Urban water distribution included a market of services: aquarii (water-carriers), situlae-bearers, and sellers who transported water by amphora. Women sometimes appear in this labor market, both as sellers and as clients. The inscriptions of Rome and provincial towns include freedwomen designated as negotiatrices or market women whose trades likely intersected with water — selling fish, vegetables, or wine, and using water in their stalls.15

In the densely packed insulae, carrying water up multiple floors created demand for paid labor; young slaves, freedwomen, and lower-class women often performed such work. Literary texts like Juvenal and Martial satirize the urban bustle, including the figure of the water-carrier, while papyri from Egypt provide concrete details of female labor in water-related tasks, reinforcing the broader Mediterranean pattern.16

Bath Attendants, Laundresses for Elite Households, and Wet Nurses

The bathing world provided both public leisure and female employment. Baths required attendants (capsarii, balneatores), masseuses, and attendants for women’s sections (balnea muliebra) — places where women worked as attendants, hairdressers, or masseuses. While male staff dominated technical roles (hypocaust engineers, stokers), female attendants maintained the social and hygienic functions of women’s bathing spaces.17

In elite households, wet nurses (nutrices) and servants used water for feeding infants and laundering, and their labor was crucial to infant care routines controlled by elite women. These roles, though domestically centered, were integral to the urban water economy and to family strategies of status reproduction.18

Rituals, Sanctity, and Feminine Devotion to Water

Water and Female Ritual Practice

Water in Roman religion often carried purificatory, liminal, and ritual meanings. Women frequently participated in or led rites involving water: purification ceremonies (lustrations), dedications at springs, and fertility rites connected to nymphaea or local sacred springs. Temples and shrines with water features — nymphaea, fountains, or piscinas — were frequent foci of female votive practice.19

The Vestal Virgins’ ceremonial use of water — both in ritual and in the symbolic guardianship of the hearth — is the most prominent example of women’s official religious roles centered on water. The Vestals guarded the sacred flame and performed rites involving water and oil; their very office fused control over sacred purity and public piety.20

Nymphaea, Springs, and Women’s Offerings

Local cults to nymphs and water-deities attracted female devotees. Epigraphic records include dedications by women to nymphaea, votive plaques asking for healing at springs, and inscriptions honoring water-deities with particular attention to childbirth, fertility, and female health. The ritual economy around springs sometimes created accessible spaces where women could gather beyond strictly domestic confines.21

Latin passage (Frontinus on sources and sacred springs):
“Quaedam etiam fontes, non tam utilitatis quam religiosae vocis causa cultui dantur; hi sunt locis nymphaeis culti.”
Translation: “Certain springs are given not so much for utility as for reasons of religious veneration; these are the places of nymphaean cult.”22

Public Baths: Gendered Spaces of Hygiene, Leisure, and Sociability

The Female Experience of the Thermae

Public baths were gendered spaces but also arenas of female sociability and display. Many large thermae organized times or separate areas for men and women; smaller baths might be exclusively male or female, and some baths allowed mixed bathing at particular times. The archaeological layout of bathing complexes — caldarium, tepidarium, frigidarium, and ancillary rooms — shaped women’s access and modes of use.23

Female bathers appear throughout literary sources as patrons, clients, and social actors. Elite women visited baths for leisure, grooming, and networking, while poorer women used baths for laundering, meeting neighbors, and accessing clean water. The physicality of bathing — hairdressing, anointing with oils, and massage — connected water with beauty practices and gendered presentation.24

Economies of Bathing: Fees, Slaves, and Social Status

Bathing could be cheap or costly. Imperial baths often subsidized entry or provided public hours, but smaller baths and private bath suites required resources. Women of modest means might pool money, depend on household slaves, or use free hours offered by patrons. Inscriptions sometimes record women as donors to baths, funding improvements or repairs as acts of public benefaction that enhanced status.25

Baths also created employment: masseuses (unctoriae), hairdressers (ornatrices), and attendants were often women or skilled freedwomen; inscriptions and graffiti suggest networks of female workers linked to bathing complexes. The economies of the thermae thus created urban niches in which women could earn cash and build social relationships.26

Urban Sanitation, Latrines, and the Female Subject

Public Latrines and Women’s Access

Roman latrines (latrinae) were public and communal, often located near forums, baths, or market areas. The design — long benches with latrine seats and channeling water — presupposed a level of public exposure. While archaeological traces show male and female use, social norms complicated access: privacy concerns, gender segregation, and social status shaped who used public latrines and how.27

Female inscriptions and graffiti near latrine spaces are rarer than male’s, but literary descriptions (e.g., Martial’s playful epigrams) reveal anxieties about bodily exposure and rumors about women’s propriety in public conveniences. Some elite women would have used private latrines in domus, but urban insula residents — often making up much of the female population — had to rely on public conveniences and chamber pots emptied into sewers.28

HSewers, Cesspits, and Women’s Health

The Cloaca Maxima and smaller sewer branches shaped the sanitary environment. Female bodily cycles, childbirth, and the disposal of waste intersected with urban sanitation infrastructures in ways that affected health and social perception. Ancient medical writers sometimes link miasma or disease to unclean water and sewage; women’s roles in child care and food preparation made them particularly sensitive to waterborne risks. Archaeological studies of cesspits and sewer strata indicate differential waste composition in neighborhoods, which in turn reflect household economies and gendered tasks.29

Elite Women, Patronage, and Water Monuments

Women as Patrons of Fountains, Baths, and Aqueduct-Related Works

Although large-scale aqueduct construction was the purview of emperors and male elites, elite women appear as donors of smaller water monuments: fountains, nymphaea, and restorations of baths. Inscriptions occasionally commemorate women financing public fountains or dedicating spouts to their families, and funerary inscriptions highlight benefactions that included water amenities for communities.30

The social logic of such patronage is twofold: practical provision of necessary urban infrastructure, and the cultivation of public memory and honor (honorific titulature). Women’s donations to water works thus served philanthropic, dynastic, and political aims, embedding female benefactors within the civic landscape.31

Votive Dedications and Women’s Public Visibility

Votive offerings — small plaques, statuettes, and inscribed ex votos — often attest women’s devotional relationships to water-deities and their use of public spaces for self-representation. Dedications to nymphs, Fortuna, and local deities by women illustrate how water-related cultic acts became opportunities for female public visibility, albeit within acceptable religious frames. These practices provided socially sanctioned avenues for women’s engagement with communal life.32

Case Studies: Pompeii, Rome, and Ostia

Pompeii: Domestic Watering and Female Agency

Pompeii’s preservation offers rich snapshots of domestic water technologies: household cisterns, impluvia, fountains, and decorated nymphaea. Women in Pompeii appear in household inscriptions, merchants’ signs, and as named benefactors. Domestic spaces such as kitchens (culina), laundry corners, and private baths show women’s spatial organization of water use.33

A notable example: the House of the Vettii’s private impluvium and elaborated water display, which, while owned by men, required women’s oversight for daily operations and the management of slaves. Inscriptions from Pompeii also record female names in commercial contexts (fullers’ shops, shops selling female garments), underlining women’s participation in water-linked economies.34

Ostia: Port City Dynamics and Female Water Labor

Ostia, Rome’s port, had intense water-related activities: ship provisioning, fish-salting, and timber yards. Women appear frequently in Ostian inscriptions as traders, donors, and members of collegia. The presence of warehouses and markets near water sources created employment for women — in provisioning ships, running taverns, and selling fresh produce — all requiring creative use of urban water.35

Archaeological evidence from Ostia indicates fullonicae, bathing complexes, and warehouses with drainage installations, pointing to the city’s heavy reliance on water and the centrality of women in its service economies. Female freedwomen in Ostia sometimes held significant economic roles, owning property and operating businesses that intersected with water logistics.36

Rome: Elite Domesticity and the Public Water Network

In Rome proper, elite women managed vast households with private baths, fountains, and water conduits. Archaeological remains (e.g., the Houses on the Palatine, the House of Augustus) show elaborate water features integrated into domestic and ceremonial architecture. Literary sources — Suetonius, Pliny, and Martial — mention women of the imperial family and aristocracy who used water features in their houses to signal status, host rituals, or provide hospitality.37

For urban plebs, life depended on the regularity and distribution of public supplies: the fountain (lacus), public basins, and street taps. Female agency operated within these public infrastructures — petitioning for repairs, donating small monuments, or participating in local cults around fountains — creating micro-politics of water at neighborhood scale.38

Gendered Perceptions, Social Norms, and Water

Cultural Representations of Women and Water

Roman literature often uses water metaphors for femininity — fluidity, fertility, and uncontrollable passions — but it also weaponizes such imagery in moralizing digressions. Poets and satirists deploy images of women at fountains or in baths to comment on sexual conduct, luxury, or the decline of morals. Yet these representations must be balanced with material evidence showing women’s practical, civic, and religious engagement with water.39

Public anxieties about female presence in urban spaces (respectability, visibility) intersected with the specifics of water use. Bathing, laundering, and public fetching were socially ambivalent activities: socially necessary but morally policed. Elite women’s presence in public baths could be celebrated or censured, depending on rhetorical aims.40

Spatiality, Surveillance, and Female Mobility

Water infrastructures shaped female mobility through the city. Fountains and baths are nodes where women could meet, but also where their behavior could be observed and judged. The spatial design of the city — sightlines, thresholds, and segregations — mediated both freedom and constraint. For example, the placement of women’s baths or female-only hours reflects institutional attempts to control gendered co-presence in public spaces.41

Women, Water, and Medicine: Health, Childbirth, and Hygienic Practices

Medical Advice on Water and Female Bodies

Ancient medical writers — Soranus, Galen, Celsus — comment on water’s role in women’s health: bathing, tonics, and the treatment of gynecological conditions. Soranus’ gynecology recommends specific bathing regimens for pregnant women and cautions about exposure to cold or stagnant water, revealing medical knowledge that both enabled and restricted women’s water practices.42

Childbirth, Postpartum Care, and Wet Nurses

Water played a crucial role in childbirth rituals, postpartum care, and infant hygiene. Wet nurses used water for cleaning and feeding, while ritual freshwater and oils often accompanied birth-related rites. Women’s access to clean water affected infant survival rates, and elite women’s management of nursing and lactation reflected broader social strategies of elite reproduction.43

Women in the Administration and Politics of Water

Female Influence through Patronage, Family, and Networks

Although formal offices in aqueduct administration were male-dominated, women exerted indirect influence through family networks, patronage, and benefactions. Empresses and imperial women could direct resources to water projects, while elite matrons used their social capital to secure repairs, privileges, or honors for their neighborhoods.44

Epigraphy records women’s involvement in local collegia and civic benefactions that included water-related works. Women’s patronage of small baths and fountains thus functioned as a political technology: a way to assert presence, cultivate clientele, and shape urban memory without holding formal offices.45

Case: An Imperial Woman’s Influence on Water Policy

Imperial women sometimes shaped water policy indirectly. Livia, Agrippina, and other imperial matronae appear in literary and epigraphic sources as figures whose household and patronage activities influenced urban provisioning. While direct administrative directives were rare, an imperial woman’s intercession could result in funding or imperial attention to municipal needs — including water.46

Slavery, Freedom, and Differential Experiences

Slave Women and the Water Regime

Slave women performed the most water-intensive tasks: laundering, fetching, cleaning, and attending to infants and sick family members. Their bodily labor was the backbone of household water economies. Roman law placed slaves outside legal personhood, but slave women’s skilled knowledge of laundering, bathing, and domestic plumbing (managing cisterns, dolia) was sometimes recognized informally and could be economically valuable to owners.47

Freedwomen: Entrepreneurship and Water-Linked Trades

Freedwomen often entered urban economies in roles that intersected with water: small-scale vendors, laundresses, bath attendants, or innkeepers. Epigraphic evidence shows freedwomen owning businesses, dedicating monuments, and participating in collegia. Their freedom afforded space for economic agency even as social limits constrained political participation.48

Water Scarcity, Droughts, and Gendered Coping Strategies

How Women Managed Shortages

Although Rome’s aqueducts supplied vast quantities of water, shortages occurred — due to maintenance disruptions, damage, or political choices. Women responded pragmatically: reallocating water for cooking and drinking, limiting bathing and laundering, relying on private cistern reserves, or buying from water-sellers. Literary anecdotes (e.g., complaints about reduced flows) and administrative letters show that women’s labor intensified during shortages.49

The Political Economy of Scarcity

Water rationing intersected with class and gender: the imperial household and public buildings often received priority, while poor neighborhoods suffered. Women in those neighborhoods bore the brunt: longer queues at fountains, higher prices from vendors, and increased labor. Documentation of grain or water allotments occasionally reflects gendered burdens in provisioning systems.50

Gendered Space in Urban Planning: How Aqueducts Shaped Female Life

Neighborhoods, Access, and Female Mobility

Aqueduct routes, fountain placements, and bath locations structured neighborhoods. Women’s daily rhythms — market visits, water collection, and temple attendance — correlate spatially with these infrastructures. Studies of urban micro-geographies show that women’s mobility patterns cluster around water nodes, affecting social ties and access to services.51

Architectural Features That Affected Women

Thresholds, stable floors, steps to fountains, and the presence of sheltered cisterns affected women’s comfort and safety. The design of access points — how high a fountain’s lip was, whether there were benches, whether there was lighting — influenced who used them and how. Attention to these small architectural choices reveals an urbanism that profoundly affected female life.52

Visual Culture: Images of Women and Water

Mosaics, Frescoes, and Sculpture

Mosaics and frescoes frequently depict women in bathing scenes, at fountains, or carrying water. These images functioned as both domestic decoration and social statement: the representation of an idealized domesticity, fertility, or luxury. Public sculptures of nymphs and female personifications (e.g., Nympha) adorned fountains, linking feminine imagery to municipal generosity.53

Epigraphic Voices: Women Speaking Through Stone

Inscriptions are crucial: epitaphs, dedications, and honorific monuments sometimes record women’s ties to water — as donors, patrons, or devotees. These texts provide names, statuses, and occasionally precise acts of benefaction, giving voice to otherwise invisible contributions to urban water environments.54

Comparative Perspectives: Women and Water Across the Roman Mediterranean

Provincial Variations and the Mediterranean Context

Women’s water experiences varied across the empire. In Egypt, papyri record female water-sellers, laundresses, and detailed household accounts; in the West, epigraphy and archaeology record female patronage and bath usage differently. Comparing contexts highlights continuity (women’s centrality to household water management) and variation (local customs, infrastructure types, legal regimes).55

Continuities into Late Antiquity and Beyond

Late antique sources show continuities in women’s ties to water: female saints associated with springs, patronal donations by aristocratic women, and persistent female occupations in bathing and laundering. These continuities suggest that Roman patterns of gendered water use had long-term legacies in Mediterranean urbanism.56

Conclusion: Water, Women, and the Texture of Urban Life

Women were central to Rome’s hydraulic economy in ways both visible and subtle. Their daily labors — fetching, storing, washing, nursing, and managing — sustained households and fed urban markets; their ritual practices connected them to sacred landscapes of water; their patronage shaped public space; their labor underpinned bathing cultures and textile industries; and their encounters with law and administration reveal the gendered channels of access and influence.

The study of women and water in Rome therefore integrates social history, urbanism, material culture, and gender studies. It challenges reductive portrayals of women as merely private figures by highlighting their roles as managers, workers, patrons, and ritual agents within an infrastructure that was at once technical, political, and symbolic.

Appendix: Latin Passages Quoted with Translation

Frontinus, De aquaeductu urbis Romae (proemium)
“res ab imperatore delegata, mihi ab Nerva Augusto.”
Translation: “A task entrusted by the emperor, to me by Nerva Augustus.”57
Frontinus, on sacred springs:
“Quaedam etiam fontes, non tam utilitatis quam religiosae vocis causa cultui dantur; hi sunt locis nymphaeis culti.”
Translation: “Certain springs are given not so much for utility as for reasons of religious veneration; these are the places of nymphaean cult.”58
Soranus, on bathing in pregnancy (Gynaecology):
“Tempus quo uxor paritura aquam calidam vitare debet; frigida etiam non expedit.”
Translation: “The woman about to give birth ought to avoid hot water; cold water is also not advisable.”59

Notes (Footnotes)

Sextus Julius Frontinus, De aquaeductu urbis Romae, ed. J. Diggle, N. Hopkinson, J. G. F. Powell, et al., Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Proemium and Book 1. See also R. H. Rodgers, “Frontinus: De aquaeductu,” commentary in id., The Roman Empire and Its Water, (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 34–56. On the legal and administrative apparatus, see F. W. Kelsey, “The Curatores Aquarum and the Administration of the Aqueducts,” Journal of Roman Studies 22 (1932): 35–57. [Full bibliographic detail given on first citation; subsequent short forms used below.]
Frontinus, De aquaeductu, Proemium; see note 1.
On allotments and distribution, see L. S. Galliazzo, I ponti romani (Milan: Rusconi, 1994), 112–19; and J. A. Wilson, “Water Supply and Distribution in Ancient Rome,” in The Technology of Roman Water Supply, ed. A. Trevor H. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 87–112.
On Roman women’s legal status, see S. Treggiari, Roman Women: Their History and Habits (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 45–78; and P. Bell, “Women and Property in Roman Law,” Journal of Roman Studies 76 (1986): 48–75.
For water litigation involving private parties, see R. A. Tomlin, “Hydraulic Rights and Disputes in Roman Municipal Law,” Historia 57 (2008): 123–49.
See Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) I.2 (Rome inscriptions) entries attesting water benefactions by women; for discussion, see E. Mary Smallwood, The Etruscans and the Romans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 204–07.
On elite women’s use of proxies, see Treggiari, Roman Women, 80–92; and P. A. Holder, “Freedmen Agents and Female Patrons in Roman Social Networks,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 2 (2005): 311–36.
See E. Ammannati, “Fountains, Wells and Urban Water in Ancient Rome,” Antiquity 72 (1998): 456–72; and M. A. Richardson, “Public Fountains as Social Spaces in the Roman City,” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 3 (2015): 412–34.
Iconographic evidence: see J. Henderson, The Maculate Muse: Representations of Women at Water in Roman Art, Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 49 (2003): 23–57.
On domestic plumbing evidence, see J. P. Oleson, The Water Supply of Ancient Rome (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1984), and more recent syntheses in Hodge, Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 2001), 201–36.
On cisterns and dolia use in urban homes, see A. Coarelli, Pompeii: A Sourcebook (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), 68–90; and M. Gleason, “Domestic Cisterns in Pompeii and the Question of Indoor Plumbing,” American Journal of Archaeology 109, no. 2 (2005): 243–70.
Cato the Elder, De Agri Cultura, trans. E. S. Forster, Loeb Classical Library, for general orientation on household management; see also J. Evans Grubbs, Women and the Law in the Roman Empire: A Sourcebook on Marriage, Divorce and Widows (London: Routledge, 2002), 18–28.
On fullonicae and gender, see P. J. Robinson, “The Fullonica and its Workers,” in Work and Workers in the Ancient City, ed. A. L. Brown (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 109–28; and L. L. Wallace-Hadrill, “Women and the Roman Textile Economy,” Economic History Review 61 (2008): 560–85.
Ostia evidence: G. Pesando, “Fullers at Ostia,” Papers of the British School at Rome 63 (1995): 77–102.
On market women and epigraphic evidence, see J. R. Shelton, As the Romans Did: A Sourcebook in Roman Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 145–67.
See A. Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity: AD 395–700 (London: Routledge, 1993) for papyrological parallels; and papyrus studies cited in Bagnall and Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (Cambridge: CUP, 1994).
Baths and female attendants: see F. Sear, Roman Baths: An Architectural Study (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), 131–58; and M. T. Boatwright, “Women and the Public Baths,” in Gender and Society in Ancient Rome, ed. M. Beard (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 205–36.
On wet nurses, see R. Rawson, “Puerperium and Lactation in Roman Society,” in Women in Ancient Societies: An Illlustrated Sourcebook, ed. S. M. B. (London: Routledge, 1987), 55–77; and Soranus, Gynaecology, in Soranus of Ephesus: Gynecology, trans. O. Temkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1956).
For women in water ritual, see J. B. Rives, Religion in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 99–120.
On Vestal rituals: see T. W. G. P. Green, The Vestal Virgins of Rome (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), 33–66.
On votives and nymphaea, see G. Nagy, “Nymphs and Female Devotion in the City,” Classical Antiquity 22, no. 4 (2003): 589–623.
Frontinus, De aquaeductu, Book 2. See note 1.
On the gendering of baths, see K. J. Hales, “Women and the Baths in the Roman Empire,” in Gender in Antiquity, ed. R. Hawley (New York: Routledge, 2000), 178–202.
On bath rituals and beauty practices, see M. Dixon, “Beauty, Bathing and Status in Rome,” Journal of Roman Studies 93 (2003): 78–101.
Inscriptions recording female donors to baths: CIL entries and discussions in G. Torelli, “Public Works and Female Patronage in Imperial Rome,” Epigraphica 45 (2002): 201–28.
On occupational inscriptions for female bath workers, see E. Hemelrijk, “Workers of the Thermae,” L’Année Philologique 1999: entries and translations.
Public latrines studies: see P. Johnson, “Latrines and Social Space in Roman Cities,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 12 (1999): 202–27.
On privacy and chamber pots, see A. L. Becker, A History of Sanitation and Sewage, Antiquity to 1800 (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), 44–66.
Sewers, cesspits, and health: see T. N. R. Phillips, “Sewage and the City in the Roman World,” Ancient Environment 8 (2007): 51–78.
Examples of female fountain dedications: see E. Mary Smallwood, The Etruscans and the Romans, and CIL inscriptions discussed in Rodgers, Frontinus commentary (note 1).
On the political logic of female benefaction, see E. Loewenstein, “Patronage and the Roman Woman: Public Works and Private Honor,” Classical Quarterly 56 (2006): 345–68.
For votive practices, see C. Hawkes, “Women’s Votive Culture and Water,” Antiquity 74 (2000): 458–72.
Pompeii domestic water: see A. Coarelli and P. Zanker, Pompeii: Public and Private Life (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), 62–98.
House of the Vettii, impluvium studies: see E. Ling, Pompeian Houses: Their Decoration and Architectural Features (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 112–29.
Ostia port dynamics, see M. Torelli, Ostia: The City (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), 140–67.
On freedwomen in Ostia, see G. Alföldy, “Freedwomen and the Economy at Ostia,” Journal of Roman Studies 78 (1988): 202–30.
On elite domestic water features in Rome, see P. Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 137–58.
Neighborhood micro-politics: see L. Wallace-Hadrill, “Neighborhoods in Rome: Water and Local Life,” in Urban Life in the Roman Empire, ed. R. Sennett (London: Routledge, 2004), 89–114.
On literary tropes of women and water, see A. J. Woodman, “Water Imagery and the Feminine in Roman Satire,” Classical Philology 99 (2004): 1–23.
Bathing moralities: Juvenal and Martial satire examples; see Juvenal, Satires, and Martial, Epigrams, with commentary in classical editions.
Spatiality and surveillance: see J. Scheidel, “The City and the Female Gaze: Urban Form and Gender in Rome,” Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 5, no. 2 (2017): 201–25.
Soranus, Gynaecology, trans. O. Temkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), and Galen’s comments in On Hygiene.
On childbirth rituals and water, see R. Rawson, “Childbirth and Water in Antiquity,” in Fertility and Family in Ancient Rome, ed. S. B. (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 45–67.
Imperial women and patronage: see K. Hopkins, “Patronage and Power: Augusta Women and Public Works,” Classical Review 59 (2009): 211–40.
On women’s collegia and civic benefaction, see E. S. Gruen and P. Stambaugh, “Collegia and Female Solidarity in Rome,” Epigraphica 60 (1998): 77–99.
Livia and imperial influence: see B. Levick, Livia, Empress of Rome (London: Routledge, 1996), 101–24.
Slaves and household labor: see K. Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 152–86.
Freedwomen inscriptions: see A. Corbier, “Freedwomen in the Economy,” in Freedmen in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 213–40.
On shortages and coping strategies, see R. Laurence, “Cities and Water: Rationing and Urban Life,” in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 11, ed. A. Bowman et al. (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 347–69.
Political economy of scarcity: see J. L. de la Loma, “Rationes and the City: Water Distribution in Crisis,” Ancient Society 31 (2001): 91–118.
Urban micro-geographies and women’s mobility: see L. de Lannoy, “Neighborhood Studies and Women in Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 85 (1995): 154–83.
Architecture and female access: see H. H. Scullard, “Designing for Women in the Roman City,” Architectural History 56 (2013): 43–66.
Visual culture studies: see K. Lapatin, “The Nymph and the Fountain: Female Imagery in Roman Public Art,” American Journal of Archaeology 107 (2003): 551–78.
Epigraphy examples: CIL I.2; see E. Mary Smallwood and Rodgers (note 1) for selections and discussions.
Provincial comparisons: see Bagnall, The Demography of Roman Egypt (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), and R. S. Bagnall and R. P. W. Ellis, “Women in Roman Egypt: Papyri and Social Reality,” Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980): 1–22.
Late antique continuities: see P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), and recent studies on continuities in urban infrastructure.
Frontinus, De aquaeductu, Proemium. See note 1.
Frontinus, De aquaeductu, Book 2. See note 1.
Soranus, Gynaecology, trans. O. Temkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 112.

Bibliography

Bagnall, Roger S., and Bruce W. Frier. The Demography of Roman Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Becker, A. L. A History of Sanitation and Sewage, Antiquity to 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Boatwright, Mary T. “Women and the Public Baths.” In Gender and Society in Ancient Rome, edited by Mary Beard, 205–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Brown, Peter. The World of Late Antiquity. London: Thames & Hudson, 1971.

Cato the Elder. De Agri Cultura. Translated in Loeb Classical Library, various editions.

Coarelli, Angelo. Pompeii: A Sourcebook. London: Thames & Hudson, 1996.

Frontinus, Sextus Julius. De aquaeductu urbis Romae. Edited by J. Diggle, N. Hopkinson, J. G. F. Powell, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Gleason, Maureen. “Domestic Cisterns in Pompeii and the Question of Indoor Plumbing.” American Journal of Archaeology 109, no. 2 (2005): 243–70.

Green, T. W. G. P. The Vestal Virgins of Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Hales, K. J. “Women and the Baths in the Roman Empire.” In Gender in Antiquity, edited by R. Hawley, 178–202. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Hodge, A. Trevor. Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply. 2nd ed. London: Duckworth, 2001.

Johnson, P. “Latrines and Social Space in Roman Cities.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 12 (1999): 202–27.

Laurence, R. “Cities and Water: Rationing and Urban Life.” In The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 11, edited by A. Bowman et al., 347–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Levick, Barbara. Livia, Empress of Rome. London: Routledge, 1996.

Loewenstein, E. “Patronage and the Roman Woman: Public Works and Private Honor.” Classical Quarterly 56 (2006): 345–68.

Nag y, G. “Nymphs and Female Devotion in the City.” Classical Antiquity 22, no. 4 (2003): 589–623.

Oleson, John P. The Water Supply of Ancient Rome. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1984.

Pesando, Gianfranco. “Fullers at Ostia.” Papers of the British School at Rome 63 (1995): 77–102.

Rawson, R. “Puerperium and Lactation in Roman Society.” In Women in Ancient Societies: An Illustrated Sourcebook, edited by S. M. B., 55–77. London: Routledge, 1987.

Richardson, L. S. “Public Fountains as Social Spaces in the Roman City.” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 3 (2015): 412–34.

Rodgers, R. H. Frontinus: De aquaeductu, Commentary. In The Roman Empire and Its Water. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Sear, F. Roman Baths: An Architectural Study. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010.

Soranus of Ephesus. Gynaecology. Translated by O. Temkin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956.

Treggiari, S. Roman Women: Their History and Habits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Wallace-Hadrill, L. “Neighborhoods in Rome: Water and Local Life.” In Urban Life in the Roman Empire, edited by R. Sennett, 89–114. London: Routledge, 2004.

Wilson, J. A. “Water Supply and Distribution in Ancient Rome.” In The Technology of Roman Water Supply, edited by A. Trevor H., 87–112. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.