This sizeable study aims to identify and delineate evolving forms of social and political participation by élite matronae in the Roman Republic, from the late third century through the second century b.c. Valentini begins by reviewing, in her Introduction, studies of women in antiquity over the last forty years, both placed in the larger context of women's history more generally and focused on Roman women. In this Introduction, as elsewhere, she draws on a wide, international bibliography of scholarship on both Roman history and women in antiquity. She states that she is seeking ‘lines of evolution’ that compete to identify with precision ‘what defines itself in a given period as mos and what by contrast is qualified through the category of novitas’ (xxix). This sort of remark leads one to expect consistent attention to the development and evolution of women's public activity, with a focus on novitas, but the book does not actually proceed in such fashion — discussion of novitas is spotty at best.

In the following chapters, V. reviews a number of crises involving women in the later Republic, repeatedly recurring to the same episodes. She begins with the controversy over repealing the Lex Oppia, then moves on to other familiar events and names, with no evident order: Claudia Quinta, the Bacchanalia, the tale of the poisonous wives of 331, Quarta Hostilia, Licinia and Publilia/Publicia in 154, the public actions taken by the wife and mother of Coriolanus, the intervention of the Sabine women in the war between their natal families and their husbands, the female disturbance stirred up by the mother of Papirius, Hortensia and the triumvirs, and more. V. goes back and forth to draw out various points — for example, women accused of crime were handed to their families for private punishment; women employed elaborate forms of lamentation in taking public action on behalf of the state; during the later Republic, hired professional mourners, praeficae, performed extravagant public lamentation at a funeral, while the family's matronae were expected to behave with nearly masculine composure; a growing tendency for élite houses to display in their atria stemmata (family trees) that would have featured female ancestors. The final chapter is a series of short biographies of female members of the Cornelii Scipiones. These sketches are interesting, but only weakly connected to the rest of the book.

Perhaps the most central interest, and certainly the most interesting element, of this book is V.'s argument for an ordo matronarum, a term for which she cites abundant lexical evidence. She understands this group to be highly organized, disciplined, self-regulating — and recognized by the state as an official, authorized organization. On the latter point, her arguments are not persuasive, but she does succeed in drawing attention to élite matronae as an enduring and organized group that was highly conscious of itself, its status and the methods available to its members for pursuing public action or for influencing male relatives. She rightly distinguishes between mere mulieres and élite matronae, a distinction that supports her argument for the organized, dedicated, public-minded ordo matronarum, which is clearly not the Roman equivalent of a Ladies' Auxiliary.

Chronology is virtually irrelevant here: throughout, V. regularly jumps a hundred years or more to bring together episodes of like nature. She thus treats her primary historical era as virtually synchronous, rather than as a substantial period marked by upheaval and numerous military/political crises. As a result, the reading experience can be somewhat dizzying, as one goes from 331 to 154 b.c. in the blink of an eye. There are signs of haste or carelessness throughout: the book is plagued with misspellings, typographical errors — often in citations to ancient sources and in quotations from ancient sources — and mistakes in bibliographical citations. (Readers may particularly want to have their own copies of Livy at hand, but cannot count on accurate citations.) V.'s references to her own internal discussions are remarkably vague (no more than infra or supra). Philological evidence and arguments are sometimes weak. The prose is often wordy and occasionally hard to follow. The review of funerary procedures is needlessly long and detailed. It is surprising to see not a single reference to the decreased usage, among élite families, of manus marriages for their daughters, as that pattern would support V.'s intermittent argument that rôles for élite women evolved perceptibly in the mid to late Republic.

But V. brings the ordo matronarum to light, and demonstrates that what might seem to have been ad hoc responses by women to individual public crises were instead almost certainly actions taken by a long-running, self-governing social organization with public political concerns. If she does not establish that the Senate recognized this women's group as an official institution, she shows that élite Roman women always saw themselves as having a right to take action, in an organized, self-determined, and public way, when the safety of Rome so required.