The Role of Women in Julius Caesar

            The women characters in Julius Caesar are not themselves instrumental in the plot and therefore have little importance as characters in their own right. To a certain extent, they serve to illuminate the more personal, as opposed to the public, sides of their respective husbands. They also provide elements of love and loyalty in a play that is largely concerned with death and intrigue. .
             Portia is the more fully described of the two women and provides a portrait of a woman of above average strength and quality. Throughout the play, references to womanly qualities are used to denote the weaker sides of men's characters. Women are supposedly weak physically and intellectually. Thus for a man to be called womanly is an insult to his strength of character. Cassius is especially prone to making such equations between women and weakness and less worthy qualities of character. In pointing to the cowardice of the population in accepting Caesar's rule, he states .
             Our father's minds are dead.
             And we are governed by our mothers" spirits. (I.iii.82-3).
             Portia is an example of a woman who does not conform to the prevailing idea of the limitations of women in general. As the wife of Brutus and the daughter of Cato, she regards herself as necessarily stronger than the rest of her sex. To prove herself, she wounds herself in the thigh to show she is physically capable of bearing pain. So, too, she concludes, has she the strength of mind to bear Brutus's secret. .
             But Portia also retains her womanly qualities. Worried at her husband's melancholy mood, his troubled thoughts and his new impatience, she persistently uses her womanly guile to draw his secret from him. She is aware that Brutus's anxiety is not a physical sickness. As his wife, it is her right to share his every thought, and she appeals to him, through love, and on her knees, to divulge his secret. Portia demands that he remember their marriage vows. He should treat her as a wife, not as a harlot who would only know the outer man, not the inner, thus instilling a guilt in him.