A Culmination in Traditionalism 1 77 dictionaries tended to extol the accomplishments of transmitters who surpassed average life expectancy. These statistical outliers would be then disproportionately represented in the historical records. The acquisition oi baditb, however, likely extended beyond perfunctory exchanges between children and their sbaykb(a) s. As Bulliet notes, though students would continue their study of baditb beyond their youth, it would not be as useful to formally record their attendance at sessions. In this vein, the teachers that Shuhda, Zaynab, and ‘A’isha encountered before the age of fourteen predominate in their biographies and the three mubaddithas, in turn, appear frequently in the biographies of students they had in their advanced years. Thus biographical sources show similar age structures for male and female baditb transmission. These dictionaries, however, do not provide information for women that would allow conclusive comment on the period between youth and seniority. J Normative constraints on women’s public participation during their marriageable years make it less likely that coeducational involvement would be recorded by biographers and chroniclers. Though the period between puberty and menopause is not well documented in women’s biographies, we can imagine the following probable scenarios for these intervening years. The first possibility is that women, in conformity with religious norms prescribing strict seclusion for women of marriageable age, ceased attending public, coeducational baditb sessions. Instead, they devoted themselves primarily to the private study of collections for which they had received certification in their early childhood. Once they reached an advanced enough age that their public presence did not threaten social order, they would convene classes for male and female students. A second scenario, which finds greater support, is that women’s careers in this domain largely paralleled those of their male counterparts. That is, they may have continued their education in study circles open to both men and women rather than in cloistered or segregated settings. Anecdotal evidence suggests that women participated as auditors in public 119 Bulliet, “Age Structure,” 114-15. 120 Elizabeth Sartain, while researching the biography of Jalal al-Dm al-Suyutl, also found a “surprisingly large” number of women commemorated as hadith transmitters in the ninth/ fifteenth century. She notes that cultural norms prohibiting mixing between men and women of marriageable age left girls up to the age of sexual maturity (ca. ten to thirteen years old) free to attend coeducational classes. Likewise, old women, past the age of sexual attraction, were accepted as teachers of boys and men. See Sartain, Jalal al-Dm alSnyiiti: Biography and Background (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 125-27.