What did it mean to be a woman in colonial Spanish America? Given the many advances in women's rights since the nineteenth century, we might assume that colonial women had few rights and were fully subordinated to male authority in the family and in society—but we'd be wrong. In this provocative study, Kimberly Gauderman undermines the long-accepted patriarchal model of colonial society by uncovering the active participation of indigenous, mestiza, and Spanish women of all social classes in many aspects of civil life in seventeenth-century Quito. Gauderman draws on records of criminal and civil proceedings, notarial records, and city council records to reveal women's use of legal and extra-legal means to achieve personal and economic goals; their often successful attempts to confront men's physical violence, adultery, lack of financial support, and broken promises of marriage; women's control over property; and their participation in the local, interregional, and international economies. This research clearly demonstrates that authority in colonial society was less hierarchical and more decentralized than the patriarchal model suggests, which gave women substantial control over economic and social resources.

* Undermines the long-accepted patriarchal model of colonial society by uncovering the active participation of indigenous, mestiza, and Spanish women of all social classes in many aspects of civil life in seventeenth-century Quito

"The story of how ordinary Andean men and women maintained their family and community lives in the shadow of Colonial Ecuador's leading textile mill"--Provided by publisher.

Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito

Set Against The Backdrop Of The tumultuous late colonial and early republican periods in Quito, Ecuador (1765-1830), this study views the relationship between the increasingly centralized power of Bourbon governance and the local operation of social authority through the lens of women's legal, economic, and social status. Black uses judicial documents, legal literatures, and institutional materials to examine women's changing legal, social, and economic status during the Bourbon reforms. By documenting the progressive removal of limits to patriarchal power in the waning years of the Spanish Empire in Quito, this study traces the genealogy of legal patriarchy in Spanish America. Traditionally, scholars have viewed patriarchy and racism as the two pillars of stability in the tumultuous decades following independence. In the face of rampant political and economic instability, this view holds, inherited hierarchies of gender and race provided social constancy. Black challenges that thesis in the case of gender, demonstrating that strict patriarchal control was not a modernization of colonial gender domination, but rather the product of Spanish America's own particular embrace of modernity. Bourbon attempts to restrict women's access to legal resources, he shows, were largely unsuccessful. Independence and republican government, however, helped to suborn women's social, economic, and legal interests to those of their male spouses and/or relatives.

Surveying the varied experiences of women in colonial Spanish and Portuguese America, this book traces the effects of conquest, colonisation, and settlement on colonial women, beginning with the cultures that would produce Latin America.