Overview
Letters and legal documents from the Cairo Geniza preserve women’s voices within marriage negotiations, family disputes, business arrangements, travel, illness, poverty, and appeals for assistance. Some women wrote directly, while others dictated to professional scribes, making literacy difficult to measure through signatures alone. The documents reveal women managing property, participating in commerce, arranging household support, and maintaining kinship across long distances. They also document unequal legal and economic conditions. Read carefully, Geniza records move women from the margins of medieval Mediterranean history into the daily operation of families, markets, courts, and charitable institutions.
