International Women’s Day is a moment to celebrate women’s achievements, recognise the struggles that shaped them and look ahead to the work still to be done.
Across the world, some women have stepped into leadership, challenged expectations and reshaped societies.
Stories remain one of the most powerful ways to explore what courage, resilience and ambition could look like in practice.
This is one reason the world of the Roma Nova series resonates with readers. It imagines a society founded by Romans who refused to surrender their religious and cultural independence and who built a state where women would over time hold authority, lead armies and govern a nation. It is not a utopia. Like the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, it has its fair share of politics, danger, greed and ambition. But crucially, it’s a world where women’s visibility and power are natural rather than questioned.
For International Women’s Day, that feels especially relevant.
Roma Nova’s women shoulder responsibility, make difficult decisions and accept the consequences. Their strength is not simply physical or political; it lies in their determination to protect their people and their values.
Take Carina Mitela, the heroine of INCEPTIO, CARINA, PERFIDITAS and SUCCESSIO. Carina is forced to flee from her homeland to Roma Nova – a society strange to her. She must learn quickly who to trust and how to fight back. Her journey is one of identity and courage where she discovers what she is capable of achieving.
Carina represents a familiar challenge for many women: stepping into roles that feel daunting, unfamiliar or overwhelming. She learns that leadership requires persistence, emotional resilience and the ability to make choices especially when no option is perfect.
Aurelia Mitela, Carina’s grandmother, is a master, no, a mistress of strategy and long-term thinking. She understands that political power requires patience as well as strength. Her influence and actions show how experience, wisdom and sheer grit can shape a nation’s future.
Julia Bacausa in JULIA PRIMA demonstrates another form of courage. Caught in the harsh consequences of religious conflict, she carves out her own path, sometimes obeying her society’s norms, but sometimes not! But she learns a great deal along the way. She won’t put up with any nonsense, though, something she leaves as an inheritance to her daughter Lucilla in EXSILIUM.
Across the series, women lead intelligence services, command security forces, manage government and defend their country. Their authority is accepted as normal – perhaps the most radical idea of all. Because when women’s leadership is treated as routine, the focus shifts away from whether they belong there and towards what they actually do.
International Women’s Day often highlights pioneers – the first woman to do this, the first to achieve that. These achievements deserve recognition. But the goal is a world where women’s presence in leadership at any level no longer requires special comment.
Roma Nova offers a glimpse of that possibility. The women of Roma Nova succeed not because the path is easy, but because they refuse to give up when it becomes difficult. That message feels particularly powerful today.
Victory
Around the world, women continue to push boundaries in every field. They run countries, lead global companies, command space missions, drive scientific breakthroughs and create cultural change. Many women run charities, schools and small, local businesses. Yet progress is uneven and barriers to visibility, let alone leadership, still exist for many women.
Stories help us imagine alternatives. They allow us to explore what might happen if societies were built differently, if talent mattered more than gender and if courage, intelligence and competence were the only qualifications required for leadership.
The Roma Nova series asks a simple question: what if a state had evolved where women normally held power?
The answer is not perfection. It is complexity, ambition and humanity. Women in Roma Nova make mistakes, face criticism and encounter opposition. But they continue to lead, to protect their people and to shape their nation’s destiny.
And that, perhaps, is the spirit worth celebrating on International Women’s Day.
In reality, women have always led, innovated and defended what matters most, but in a covert or subtle way. Sometimes history recorded their achievements; more often, it overlooked them. Although, thankfully, research continues to unearth hidden ‘herstory’, fiction can take us much further along that road by imagining what could be so.
And once we imagine, then we have set a goal for ourselves to pursue in the real world.
Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers – INCEPTIO, CARINA (novella), PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, NEXUS (novella), INSURRECTIO and RETALIO, and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories. Audiobooks are available for four of the series. Double Identity, a contemporary conspiracy, starts a new series of thrillers. JULIA PRIMA, Roma Nova story set in the late 4th century, starts the Foundation stories. The sequel, EXSILIUM, is now out.
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