Where are women in the fall of the western Roman empire?

by alriclofgar

As I review my reading lists on late antiquity in the west (or the 'fall of the western Roman empire', if you will), I'm struck by the near total absence of women in discussions of social change. The big threads / debates in the field seem to focus almost entirely on men:

Barbarians invaded and destroyed everything (women are raped, but otherwise invisible)
The empire ended, in the west, because of civil war (no women participate in this political struggle, except as mothers or wives supporting the male players)
The empire was religiously transformed (overwhelmingly focuses on male bishops, with female ascetics occupying the fringes, and being generally less important than the male senatorial elite)
A period of slow economic change (but no focus on women's work or changing role in the economy)

I can think of exceptions. There are famous religious women, especially when it comes to moments of conversion, and Cooper, for example, has written about changes in marriage, or Bowes about changes in private female religious practice.

But I get the sense that the entire question of whether or not the Roman empire declined, fell, transformed, or what have you is framed entirely from a male perspective. Does a 'decline' and 'fall' even work from the perspective of late antique women?

Am I missing something? Has anyone talked about what late antique regionalization / localization meant for the female half of the Roman world, or - specifically - looked at what women thought and experienced in response to their changing fortunes?

Her focus might be a little later than what you're thinking about. But have you read Julia Smith, Europe After Rome? (Surely you have, and it's just the later time frame?) Of all the recent "redefining early medieval" takes, she probably focuses the most on women (and to some extent men-as-men). And, as you indicate, this fits well with her overall take on the EMA as a period of diverse and dynamic creation of new entities, rather than the mourning of the old.

One interesting point emerges vs. Wickham when you situate Smith's unnarrative within the historiography of medieval women. Wickham goes full-in on the golden age for peasants idea. But the 'golden age' has a history of its own in the historiography on medieval women. When medievalists started paying serious attention to women, one of the earliest arguments that got a lot of airplay with this idea of the early Middle Ages as the age of great abbesses and powerful queens, in contrast to their later medieval sisters whose attempts at power were consistently and institutionally circumscribed by their husbands, abbots, bishops and popes. There was a subsequent reaction against this idea from social historians, pointing out that three abbesses and five queens are not "women"; as well as from other work on the LMA pointing out other ways in which women worked with and against the legal structures. Smith is not willing to go explicitly where her line of argument is taking her, and my guess is that she doesn't want to upset that historiographical balance.