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Good morning. Today is International Women’s Day and I am thinking of a well-brought up young woman who was thrown into prison with four companions for breaking the rules of patriarchy: disobeying her father, her husband, and the state. She was nursing an infant son at the time and one of her companions was heavily pregnant. After a brief show trial they were all sentenced to death and duly executed. This could be the sad story of any number of young women who face punishment today for refusing to obey husbands, fathers and a male-run state in which women have no rights and no voice. But this particular story is nearly two thousand years old. It comes from Roman North Africa. The young woman’s name was Vibia Perpetua and her crime was to have chosen to be a Christian. This involved not only breaking the law - Christian men were persecuted too - but a scandalous disregard of accepted ideas of femininity. Yesterday Perpetua was remembered in the calendar of saints. In the days before her execution Perpetua kept a diary in which she recorded a sequence of symbolic dreams. In the first dream she was trying to climb a ladder which was hung with instruments of torture. There was a dragon at the ladder’s foot – she jumped on it and climbed up. She came to a garden where an elderly shepherd welcomed her and gave her a cup of milk. She then dreamt of her little brother who had died of cancer in infancy and was lonely and thirsty in a hot dingy place. Then she saw him healed, drinking freely from a golden bowl. In her final dream she was being oiled all over in preparation for a fight to the death with a huge ugly man. She pummelled her opponent to the ground and stepped on his head. The next day she and her companions were executed. Anyone who thinks women have only recently fought to be regarded as equal, or only recently begun to question male authority, or only recently been regarded as spiritual leaders should consider the story of Perpetua. She was such a new Christian that her dreams contain imagery from both her new faith from her pagan past. To fight her opponent in the ring she was prepared with oil, the oil of Christian anointing, but also the oil of any male wrestler fighting for glory. For her, death was a triumph, but she also kept her sense of propriety. An account of her end describes how she was brought before the crowds in the amphitheatre where she was thrown to the ground and gored by a wild heifer. At which point she re-arranged her tunic and asked for a pin to fasten her hair. That’s not only dying with dignity. It’s dying with style. I find that last gesture of defiance in the face of brutality extraordinarily powerful. Women down the centuries have only asked to be human as they have aspired to change the world.