Five women the Ṛgveda names
The corpus is not silent about women. It names them, quotes them speaking in the first person, and in several cases attributes whole hymns to them. This is what those passages say, and what remains disputed about them.
The Ṛgveda is a collection of roughly 1,028 hymns arranged in ten maṇḍalas. Its composition is placed at c. 1500–1200 BCE on the mainstream chronology and earlier on others; we give the range rather than pick one.
Authorship is assigned not by the hymns themselves but by traditional indices — chiefly the Sarvānukramaṇī attributed to Kātyāyana, and the Bṛhaddevatā. Around two dozen women appear in those lists as ṛṣikās. Five are set out below.
The indices that assign these hymns are centuries later than the hymns. Anyone who wants to discount the attributions starts there, and the objection is a fair one. It applies equally to every male ṛṣi named in the same lists, which is the part usually left out. We have not found a version of the objection that removes the women without also removing Vasiṣṭha and Viśvāmitra.
Lopāmudrā
लोपामुद्राRV 1.179 is a dialogue. Lopāmudrā speaks first, and what she says is a complaint with an argument inside it: she has grown old waiting while her husband Agastya pursued austerities, the years have gone, and she presses her claim on him. Agastya answers. The exchange ends with him conceding the point.
The hymn is not a description of a woman being persuaded. It is a woman making a case and winning it, preserved in the corpus with her name on it.
Ghoṣā
घोषाTwo consecutive hymns, RV 10.39 and 10.40, are attributed to her. Both address the Aśvins, the twin physicians. She is named as the daughter of Kakṣīvat, himself a named ṛṣi, and she is referred to elsewhere in the corpus at 1.117.7 and 1.122.5.
The traditional account attached to her holds that she suffered a disfiguring skin affliction, remained unmarried in her father's house into middle age, and was cured by the Aśvins. Two hymns, not one — which places her among the more substantial contributors in the tenth maṇḍala.
Mudgalānī
मुद्गलानीRV 10.102 describes a chariot contest fought to recover stolen cattle. Mudgalānī — named as the wife of Mudgala — holds the reins. The hymn's language is that of a race and a fight at once, and the winning of it is credited to the driving.
Chariot driving is not a domestic activity in this corpus. It sits alongside the warrior vocabulary of the rest of the collection.
Romaśā
रोमशाAt RV 1.126.7 a woman speaks to her husband in the first person, frankly, about her own body, and asserts that she is grown and not a child. The verse is brief and unembarrassed.
It is worth noting for a plain reason: nineteenth-century translators found this verse difficult, and their difficulty is visible in how they rendered it. The verse itself is not coy.
Viśpalā
विश्पलाShe composes nothing and speaks no line. She appears once, at RV 1.116.15, as the subject of a single act: her leg is severed in the contest of Khela, and the Aśvins fit her with a replacement made of metal — jaṅghā āyasī.
Two things follow from the verse without any interpretation being needed. She was present at a contest in which legs are lost. And the text records a prosthesis fitted and functioning — plausibly the earliest such reference in any surviving literature.
One line, half a verse, and no biography attached. It is the shortest entry here and the hardest to argue with.
What cuts the other way
The same corpus contains verses read as dismissive of women, and the ancillary prose literature that follows it contains more. RV 8.33.17 is the verse most often produced for that purpose. It is taken in Note 06, with the two verses that follow it — which turn out to be addressed to a man who has just been turned into a woman.
Both sets of passages are in the same collection. A reading that accounts for only one set is not a reading.
Five named women, or two dozen, across roughly a thousand hymns is not a demographic claim. It says nothing about how most women in these centuries lived, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
What it establishes is narrower: composing a hymn, driving a war chariot, arguing with a husband and winning, and being fitted with a working prosthesis were all things a woman could be recorded doing in the earliest text of the tradition. Whether that is a lot or a little is the reader's judgement, not ours.
Sources
Primary references above are to maṇḍala, hymn and verse and can be checked in any standard edition.