Three major works written by women have survived from the Roman world: Perpetua's Passio (early 3rd century AD), Proba's Cento (mid 4th century AD) and Egeria's Jtinerarium (late 4th century AD). This thesis examines these early Christian works and authors within their individual historical contexts and also applies them to the larger framework of Roman history in order to develop an inclusive historical narrative for Roman women writers. In opposition to the largely dismissive attitudes found in scholarship towards the literacy, textual complexity, and public voice of female Roman authors, this thesis uses the corpus to argue for the presence of an adaptive educational system that served to enable female authorship, a visible textual pattern of socio-political voice that provided a degree of agency for female-authored texts and the integration of Christian traditions of female speech and testimony that imbued the extant corpus with authority. Thus, this thesis argues for a significant, albeit generally unrecognized, creative tradition that existed across time for Roman women writers. The meager survival of female-authored texts, however, necessitates the examination of the extant corpus not only as part of a larger cohesive history, but also as uniquely successful works. An examination of the common elements within the texts that appear to have aided in the reception of these particular works suggests that ambiguity (in genre, authorial voice and textual purpose) rendered these texts both mutable and sustainable because it blurred the boundaries of expectations in terms of authorship, agency and authority within the texts and allowed for them to be employed for multiple purposes. Thus, the corpus represents the successful negotiation of two seemingly disparate contexts: a long-standing tradition of women writers upon which it could draw and the ability to stand apart from this tradition. That these texts were able to mediate a balance is further indication of the complexity and sophistication of the corpus and indeed offers valuable insight into a poorly understood component of Roman intellectual life.