Some Well-Behaved Women Who Changed History (Part 1)
- Apr 22
- 2 min read
The following is a condensed version of The President’s Lecture, given at Mt. Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on March 12, 2026. I’m grateful to the President, Dr. Todd Olson, and to Dr. Bryan Cross for the invitation to speak at this historically Catholic institution.
In the course of writing The Golden Thread with my friend, Allen Guelzo, I tried to give a just appreciation of the roles played by women in Western societies from the Greeks through the European Renaissance. This wasn’t a major theme of the history, which focused on political, intellectual and cultural history, but I did consult some of the standard literature on the history of women from time to time. To my surprise, this literature was mostly silent about some key female figures that kept cropping up in the original sources. I eventually concluded that the dominant perspective of modern feminist historiography is a poor lens through which to view the actual role many women have played in history, particularly Christian women.
This evening I’m going to discuss some very powerful Christian women who lived in the sixth century of our era, which in my periodization counts as the earliest period of Christendom, approximately the same as the period of “late antiquity” in the dominant usage of ancient historians today. In this first period of Christendom the role of women in the geopolitics of the Western, Latin-speaking part of the Christian world was particularly salient. We can fairly say that, without the agency of powerful women, the history of Christendom and the West would have been far different. Without them, Christendom would have been much less peaceful, less unified in religious doctrine, and likely much, much smaller. Yet they have been overlooked or their role minimized by historians of women today…