For quite a long time, you might be forgiven for thinking that female gladiators were no more than a wild fiction. Gladiators, after all, are known to have lived flashy, oftentimes violent lives flexing before cheering crowds. That was hardly expected for Roman women, who were told to be diligent and demure. Sure, except for the fact that, as the Ancient History Encyclopedia points out, many of the writers talking about women were men, and often conservative men at that. The real roles of women in ancient Rome were pretty varied — and that extends to the gladiatorial arena, too.
Though the evidence for them may not be as abundant as it is for male gladiators, we can now be sure that female gladiators existed. According to the Ancient History Encyclopedia, we've uncovered a wide variety of evidence about them, from carvings showing their battles, to alarmist legislation barring certain women from taking part.
They would have probably been called ludia (female entertainers or, in some sources, the girlfriends of male gladiators) or mulieres (women). They are almost never referred to as feminae (ladies), as that would have been usually reserved for higher-class women, who only very occasionally might have been in the arena. Meanwhile, words like gladiatrix or gladiatrices, cool as they are, would have sounded pretty odd to ancient Roman ears. Those terms are purely modern inventions that first pop up in the 19th century.
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