Medieval Women's Rights

Setting the Stage for Today

Historian Sara Butler explores challenges women faced in the Middle Ages and how they stirred "feminist" rumblings of discontent, challenging rhetoric of the day and finding ways to subvert it.

The medieval church gave birth to the misogynistic rhetoric that continues to hinder women’s progress in the West today, but it also witnessed the first real “feminist” rumblings of discontent. Medieval women were not content to be victims of oppression: they challenged the rhetoric, and when that didn’t work, they found ways to work around it. Historian Sara Butler will speak about women in the Middle Ages and how they faced many of the same challenges that we do today.

Sara M. Butler earned her honors B.A. in history from York University (1995), her M.A. from the University of Toronto (1996), and her Ph.D. from Dalhousie University (2001), where she worked with C.J. Neville. She spent twelve years at Loyola University New Orleans, attaining the rank of Gregory F. Curtin, S.J., Distinguished Professor and where she founded the Legal Studies interdisciplinary minor program and co-founded the History Pre-law major, before joining The Ohio State in autumn of 2016. 

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