This chapter considers important female figures in Puccini’s circle. It begins by outlining Puccini’s relationship with his mother, Albina, who died relatively early in the composer’s life, and with his six sisters. The author then discusses Puccini’s relationship with his wife, Elvira, in some detail, considering the circumstances in which the couple met and their subsequent rather strained relationship. Puccini’s affairs with other women are considered, and particular attention is paid to the Doria Manfredi scandal, when a young woman wrongly accused of an affair with the composer committed suicide. The author discusses Puccini’s step-daughter and granddaughter, Simonetta. She also considers his platonic relationships with female friends, most importantly Sybil Seligman.

Chapter 5 attends to the notions of siblinghood between female friends or lovers of the same age group. Drawing on the idealized closeness and harmony afforded to uterine sisters, especially among the matrilenal Akan, a same-sex lover can be invoked as a sibling in order to front a non-sexual connection. Among insiders however, claims to being “of the same blood” signal emotional and sexual attachments. Thereby everyday practices such as bathing, washing, and eating together over extended periods of time emerge as the crucial markers of these familial intimacies. Conversely, it examines the spectre of incest that lingers among same-sex lovers who do share lineage ties and are thus both metaphorically and genealogically related. The chapter argues that female friends who raise children together, take care of each other’s elders, and build joint networks that include male husbands and relatives, do much of the work afforded to (queer) families.

The first chapter deals with women's various roles within their families and households and covers women of all classes indiscriminately (except for the imperial family). It starts with their central positions as wives, throwing light on the traditional wifely virtues and Roman marital ideals but also on marital problems, including divorce and even murder. The first part is followed by separate parts on women's roles as mothers, daughters, grandmothers, siblings and other relations such as aunts and nieces, and on women's roles in foster families and step families, thus presenting a lively overview of women's various familial roles in the course of their lives and the expectations that went with these different roles. The inscriptions and graffiti record feelings of joy at childbirth, love and praise for a happy marriage, attachment between mothers and children and mourning and anger at bereavement. Many epitaphs express the wish to have died first or the hope to be reunited in death.

This chapter draws attention to a familial relationship that has been treated as all but invisible: that between sisters. Although we find examples of this bond in our surviving tragedies, it has long been overshadowed by a focus on male/female relations. This discussion, prompted by the recent productive debate between the fields of classics and political theory over the sisterhood of Antigone, employs close readings of Sophocles’ Tereus and Euripides’ Erechtheus to bring out a feminist interpretation of these texts that places sisterhood front and centre. The chapter shows not only that sisterhood was a more prevalent theme in Greek tragedy than is visible from the extant plays alone, but also that the fragments can be a rich source for scholars working in the area of feminist political theory.