A History of Gender in The Historiography of Latin America

The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America
Sueann Caulfield
Hispanic American Historical Review, 81:3-4, August-November 2001,

pp. 449-490 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
For additional information about this article

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The History of Gender in the

Historiography of Latin America
Sueann Caulfield
Writing in 1972, Ann Pescatello bemoaned the underdevelopment of Latin

American womens studies, a eld so much in its infancy that it was difcult to
identify major trends and authors, much less conduct research.1 Seven years
later, Asuncin Lavrin observed that historians still lagged behind social scientists in lling in the gaps and pointed out directions that Latin American
womens history might take.2 Scholars have since followed the paths Lavrin
indicated, provoking a steady ow in work that focuses on women, and since
the mid-1980s, and a great surge of studies that use gender as a category of
analysis. Twenty-odd years after Lavrins prophetic essay, the eld that she and
a small group of Latin American and Latin Americanist colleagues pioneered
is again exceedingly difcult to review. The problem now, however, is the large
quantity of signicant work, the variety of topics, theoretical approaches and
methodologies, and the multiple ways in which this scholarship has inuenced
how we understand Latin American history.
This essay will not attempt to cover all of these topics, approaches and
methods, much less all of the signicant works in the eld. It will leave to a
future historian, for instance, the task of evaluating whether gender analysis
has moved from margin to center in the ways historians have integrated it,
or at least mentioned it, in studies that do not specically focus on gender or
The author would like to thank Maria Clementina Pereira Cunha, Gilbert M. Joseph,
Roger Kittleson, Cristiana Schettini Pereira, and Barbara Weinstein for insights and
suggestions that have greatly enriched this essay. Eileen Findlay, Lara Putnam, and Rebecca
Scott provided extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of the text.
1. Ann Pescatello, The Female in Ibero-America, Latin American Research Review 7,
no. 2 (1972): 125.
2. Asuncin Lavrin, Some Final Considerations on Trends and Issues in Latin
American Womens History, in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives, ed. Asuncin
Lavrin ( Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978).
Hispanic American Historical Review 81:3 4
Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press
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women.3 Although this trend is as signicant as the outpouring of publications

with gender in the title (or, more commonly, in the subtitle), this essay will
be largely limited to what I consider exemplary and representative studies that
use gender as a primary, or at least major, tool of analysis.
Emphasis on books in which gender is a primary analytical category brings
with it a second limitation: a focus on scholarship published in the United
States, where over the past six years there has been a torrent of monographs
that deal primarily with gender. Gender analysis has not been as central a concern in the different national historiographies in Latin America. This is despite
the existence of an extraordinarily rich and broad-ranging Latin American
scholarship on the kinds of topics that are especially attractive to gender historians, such as the family, sexuality, and racial or ethnic mixture, as well as a
wealth of literature on womens roles in labor, politics, and everyday life. The
analytical methods that Latin American scholars bring to these topics are diverse,
emerging as they do from national and local historiographies with their own trajectories and different relationships to North American and European scholarship.
This is not to say that Latin American work is more provincial than that produced
outside the region. On the contrary, Latin American scholars, especially those who
work in the larger nations (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Mexico) with welldeveloped research centers, including centers dedicated to research on women or
gender, are vigorous participants in international scholarly dialogues. Recent multivolume collections on the history of private life in Brazil or the history of mentalities in Mexico, with obvious reference to French literature in these areas, are
good illustrations of the different placement of topics and issues that would certainly undergo more explicit gender analysisand the works might well include
gender in the titlesif published in the United States.4
3. Comparison by different national audiences would be especially interesting; it has
become almost obligatory for U.S.-based authors to consider gender, but this not true of
those publishing in Latin America.
4. Fernando A. Novais, ed., Histria da vida privada no Brasil, 4 vols. (So Paulo:
Companhia das Letras, 1997 1998). In Mexico, several volumes of collected works have
been edited by the Seminario de Historia de las Mentalidades at the Instituto Nacional de
Antropologa e Historia, beginning with Solange Alberro and Serge Gruzinski, eds.,
Introduccin a la historia de las mentalidades: Seminario de las mentalidades y religion en el Mxico
colonial (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia, 1979). Other volumes
include Solange Alberro et al., ed., Seis ensayos sobre el discurso colonial relativo a la comunidad
domstica: Matrimonio, familia y sexualidad a travs de los cronistas del siglo XVI, el Nuevo
Testamento y el Santo Oficio de la Inquisicin (Mexico City: Departamento de Investigaciones
Histricas, Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia, 1980); Seminario de Historia de
las Mentalidades y Religin en Mxico Colonial, ed., Familia y sexualidad en Nueva Espaa:
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The best of the scholarship produced in the United States both builds on
the respective national historiography and participates in an international dialogue. Yet, as Mary Kay Vaughan has noted in her recent essay on the new
cultural history in Mexico, there is a lamentable lack of dialogue between U.S.
and Latin American scholars.5 North American scholars rely upon Latin
American empirical research, which is frequently incorporated into U.S.
theoretical and scholarly agendas, not vice versa. Latin Americans, for their
part, do not generally view Latin America as a coherent regional eld, and,
especially in the case of Brazil, are more likely to read French, British, or U.S.
scholarship than that of other Latin American nations. Of course, the explanation for the difference in North American and Latin American conceptions of
the hemisphere, and the relatively slow circulation of research among Latin
American nations, are complex. For our purposes, it is simply worth noting
that scholarship produced in the U.S. has brought a specic set of concerns to
gender history. While it is possible to perceive certain common theoretical
concerns and narrative strategies among recent works on gender in Latin
America produced in the United States including the near universal adoption of the term gender this is more difcult to do with the more varied
recent Latin American scholarship.
I will argue, however, that it is possible to trace in very broad strokes the
development of certain scholarly trends in the international literature on
women and gender in Latin America over the past three decades, in which
Latin American production plays a leading role. In synthesizing both political
processes and scholarship on the region as a whole, I will inevitably overlook
Memoria del primer simposio de historia de las mentalidadesFamilia, Matrimonio y Sexualidad

en Nueva Espaa (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1982); idem, Familia y poder
en Nueva Espaa: Memoria del tercer simposio de historia de las mentalidades (Mexico City:
Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia, 1991); idem, Comunidades domsticas en la
sociedad novohispana: Formas de unin y transmisin cultural: Memoria del IV Simposio de
Historia de las Mentalidades (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia,
1994); idem, Vida cotidiana y cultura en el Mxico virreinal: Antologa (Mexico City: Instituto
Nacional de Antropologa e Historia, 2000); idem, La memoria y el olvido: Segundo simposio
de historia de las mentalidades (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia,
1985); idem, El placer de pecar & el afn de normar (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de
Antropologa e Historia and Ed. J. Mortiz, 1988); and Antonio Guzmn Vzquez and
Lourdes Martnez O., eds., Del dicho al hecho: Transgresiones y pautas culturales en la Nueva
Espaa (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia, 1989).
5. Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics in the Mexican
Revolution, HAHR 79, no. 2 (1999).
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or even distort debates and contributions that are crucial to distinct national
cases. The periodization also shifts when one focuses on individual nations.
This is evident in comparing my synthesis of the literature of the region to
Thomas Klubocks discussion of gender history in Chile. While our narratives
are similar in some ways, Klubocks discussion of the political context, periodization, and particular contributions is much more specic and detailed than
mine.
Finally, I will not discuss the development of the history of homosexuality.
This area of gender historiography has emerged in different ways in the scholarship of both Latin Americans and U.S.-based Latin Americanists, as Martin
Nesvig shows in his comprehensive review in this issue. It is one of the most
promising new directions in Latin American gender history, but Nesvigs
review would make a discussion here redundant.
With these limitations in mind, this essay will examine the history of
political and scholarly trends that have inuenced gender analysis in the historiography of Latin America (excluding the French- and English-speaking
Caribbean). I see this history as falling into three overlapping periods. The
rst covers the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, when initial efforts were made to
carve out a space for historical perspectives within the burgeoning eld of
Latin American womens studies, then dominated by the social sciences. While
the interdisciplinarity of the early womens studies literature left an evident
mark on subsequent scholarship on gender, the terms of the most fervent
political and theoretical debates that surrounded Latin American womens
studies now seem indelibly dated to the 1970s. Yet the debates over the role
of U.S.-based feminists in dening a scholarly agenda; the links between Latin
American feminist militancy, working-class womens movements, and scholarly production; the relevance of Latin Americas (dependant) position in the
world economy to womens status; and the relationship of scholarship on
women to U.S. imperialism and Latin American political struggles shaped
the trajectory of scholarship long after the political moment had shifted.6
6. These debates are apparent in the questions addressed in a 1974 research seminar
held at the CIDHAL (Comunicacin, Intercambio y Desarrollo Humano en la Amrica
Latina) research center in Cuernavaca, Mexico, sponsored by the Social Science Research
Council and led by Elsa Chaney, Helen Safa, and Aurelia Guadalupe Snchez Morales:
How is womens participation in the labor force conditioned by the process of unequal
development? How are the issues of sex and class to be dealt with in researching and
organizing women? For whom and by whom is research to be carried out? See Meri
Knaster, Women in Latin America: The State of Research, 1975, Latin American Research
Review 11, no. 1 (1976): 12.
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Political shifts, of course, also inuenced scholarly trajectories. As the

self-assured combativeness of the late 1970s feminism and partisan politics
gave way to more fragmented political identications by the end of the 1980s,
in the Americas and elsewhere, new debates and topics emerged in the scholarship on Latin American women. At the same time, institutional resources in
Latin America for historical research and research on women improved dramatically in nations recovering from years of dictatorship, which resulted in a
sharp rise in archival-based research produced in the region, especially in
Brazil and, later, in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. Partly in response to these
political and institutional changes and partly because of the shifts in national
and international scholarly trends, an interest in women spread to different
historical subelds.
A renewed interest in colonial history, focused now on sexuality, moral
order, and everyday life, is one trend that highlighted women as subjects of
history after the mid-1980s, particularly in Mexico and Brazil.7 Another is the
overlap of three subelds that are especially dynamic in Latin America: family
history; a social history inuenced by European micro-history and the new
social history in the United States;8 and a strain of cultural history that is
heavily inuenced by Foucault, the French history of mentalities, and other
7. There are several reasons for renewed attention to colonial history, including the
rise in archival research; the retreat from the notion that research should serve immediate
political goals; and the so-called historical turn in international social sciences. As new
kinds of political identications that arose in many parts of the world, older explanatory
models (or grand theory), including marxism and dependency theory, were attacked as
static, homogenizing, and deterministic. In the late 1970s, Lavrin published one of the rst
historical studies of women in colonial Latin America. By 1995, when Kecia Ali published a
bibliographical review of historical works on gender in modern Latin America published
from about 1980 to the mid-1990s, the majority of studies on women focused on the
colonial period. Asuncin Lavrin, In Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico: The
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, in Lavrin, Latin American Women; and Kecia Ali,
The Historiography of Women in Modern Latin America: An Overview and Bibliography
of the Recent Literature, Duke-Univ. of North Carolina Program in Latin American
Studies Working Paper Series, no. 18 (1995).
8. The literature is often called nueva histria in Puerto Rico, nueva histria social in
Mexico, and histria social da cultura in Brazil. For the relationship between these subelds
and gender history, see Flix V. Matos Rodrguez, Womens History in Puerto Rican
Historiography: The Last Thirty Years, in Puerto Rican Womens History: New Perspectives,
ed. Flix V. Matos Rodrguez and Linda C. Delgado ( New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998); and
Carmen Ramos Escandn, La nueva historia, el feminismo y la mujer, in Gnero e historia:
La historiografa sobre la mujer, ed. Carmen Ramos Escandn (Mexico City: Univ.
Autnoma Metropolitana, 1992).
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theories of discourse and representation that have been grouped together under
the label post-structuralist or (usually by social historians critical of it) postmodern. As these three subelds came together, the patriarchal family, long
recognized as a central political and economic institution in Latin American
history, was reexamined by social historians, demographers and historical
anthropologists interested in women, everyday life and nonelite historical
actors. Even more prevalent, as Klubock shows for recent scholarship in Chile,
was the combination of social histories of everyday life with cultural analysis
that emphasized the power of symbolic representation and discourses of liberal professionals. A good deal of research clustered around topics such as
prostitution, criminality, or public health and hygiene campaigns in urban centers at the turn of the last century. The shift to small units of analysis in these
studies represented a departure from grand theories of the 1960s and 1970s,
which seemed ill-suited to the political and intellectual climate of the 1980s
and 1990s.
Finally, the 1980s saw a shift to analysis of gender rather than women,
especially among U.S.-based scholars, with frequent citation of the work of
Joan Scott. Using gender as a category has helped deect the frequent criticism that studies of women were too narrow, for gender is a relational concept
that implies a focus on men as well. More importantly, gender is a broader
analytical category that includes consideration of how female and male subjects are socially constructed and positioned and how representations of femininity and masculinity structure institutional power. This analytical shift has
characterized histories written by both U.S. and Latin American scholars,
although Latin American historians have been less enthusiastic about theorizing or adopting the term gender.9
9. In Brazil, the term gender has been debated and adopted by feminist social
scientists to a much greater extent than by historians. Interesting Brazilian contributions to
debates among North American and French feminist theorists are Elena Varikas, Gnero,
experincia e subjetividade: A propsito do desacordo Tilly-Scott, Cadernos Pagu 3 (1994);
and Maria Odila Silva Dias, Teoria e mtodo dos estudos feministas: Perspectiva histrica
e hermenutica do cotidiano, in Uma questo de gnero, ed. Albertina de Oliveira Costa and
Cristina Bruschini (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Rosa dos Tempos, 1992). For a critique of how
Brazilian historians have studied women and gender, see Maria Clementina Pereira Cunha,
De historiadoras, brasileiras e escandinavas: Loucuras, folias e relaes de gneros no
Brasil (sculo XIX e XX), Tempo: Revista do Departamento de Histria da Universidade Federal
Fluminense 5 (1998). Cunha complains that Brazilian womens historians, including some
who use the term gender, have fallen prey to postmodern theories of power that obscure
differences among women as well as womens agency, with the result that Brazilian women
look similar to women in Scandinavia or anywhere else in the world. Cunha demonstrates
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Methodological innovations in the historical scholarship on women and

gender over the course of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s resulted in the collection of vast amounts of data, the accumulation of a rich array of closely analyzed case studies of family and community life, and compelling new ways to
understand social identities and power structures in Latin American history. A
recent group of monographs has built upon this scholarship, using similar
methods and sources while attempting to resolve some of its theoretical tensions and interpretive limits. It is signicant that these books were written by
scholars based in the United States, for they display a common immersion in
recent debates in U.S. historiography, particularly regarding the relationship
between feminist theory, social history, and post-structuralism. In some works,
innovative theoretical approaches lie subtly behind the narrative. In others,
grand theory has charged back in, setting ambitious goals for multilevel
analyses of politics and power.10
in her own work on mental illness and carnival that gender analysis can illuminate specic
forms of domination in Brazil as well as specic womens choices and experiences. Mary
Del Priore, more concerned about recovering womens agency than emphasizing
differences among women, argues that gender has not yet been theorized sufciently in a
Brazilian context and more work is needed to recover womens experiences and voices in
Brazil. Her own work on colonial women falls more squarely within a womens history
framework. See Mary Del Priore, Histria das mulheres: As vozes do silncio, in
Historiografia brasileira em perspectiva, ed. Marcos Cezar de Freitas (So Paulo: Contexto,
2000). I thank Cristiana Schettini Pereira for drawing my attention to Del Priores essay.
For a discussion of the use of gender and gender analysis in Mexican social history, see
Ramos Escandn, La nueva historia.
10. In the rst category, I would include Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and
the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999) and Ann Twinam,
Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish
America (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999). In the second, the most theoretically
informed works are Steve J. Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in
Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995) and Ana Mara
Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexicos Northern Frontier
(Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1995). Others on this list, although with theoretical
discussions that are less ambitious and, probably for this reason, better supported in their
narratives, are three scholars who studied under Stern (as well as Florencia Mallon and
Francisco Scarano) at the University of Wisconsin: Sarah C. Chambers, From Subjects to
Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780 1854 (University Park:
Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1999); Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises:
Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920 1950 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina
Press, 2000); and Eileen Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto
Rico, 1870 1920 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999). Scholars of their generation trained
elsewhere include the following: Thomas Miller Klubock, Contested Communities: Class,
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These authors have taken some new directions, including giving attention
to both masculinity and femininity. They have also relinquished dichotomous
concepts of power and resistance, and with them, stable notions of identity.
Although historians continue to read documents against the grain, they are
increasingly attuned to contemporary terminology, especially in colonial studies.
One result is that an emphasis on honor runs through new scholarship on both
colonial and modern topics. Another is that there is a specicity lacking in earlier works on gendered discourses of power, which in the end could make one
site look very similar to the next. Historians are asking quite a bit of gender:
How did religious orders reproduce colonial social and economic structures?
How did liberal ideals and vocabulary spread? How was republican citizenship
constructed? How did socialist or capitalist states achieve hegemony? Why did
local communities respond to the call to war? The nal section of this essay will
look briey at some of the ways in which these questions are being answered.
Antecedents of Latin American Womens History:
Womens Studies in the Social Sciences
As someone who nished graduate school in the mid-1990s, I feel fortunate to

have arrived on the scene after the groundwork of womens history in Latin
America had been laid. Unlike the generation before me, I could consult bibliographies and reviews of the eld; learn from theoretical debates and
methodologies of published work; and receive support and advice from established scholars in the eld.11 Moreover, in the United States, gender analysis
Gender, and Politics in Chiles El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904 1951 (Durham: Duke Univ.
Press, 1998); Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men and
Women in Colombias Industrial Experiment, 1905 1960 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press,
2000); Sueann Cauleld, In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity, and Nation in
Early-Twentieth-Century Brazil (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000); Heidi Tinsman, Partners
in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform,
1950 1973 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, forthcoming); and Lara Putnams forthcoming
monograph, tentatively titled Public Women and One-Pant Men: Gender and Labor Migration
in Caribbean Costa Rica (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, forthcoming). Other
excellent recent monographs on gender in Latin America retain more of a social history
perspective: Cheryl English Martin, Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in
the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996); and Christine Hnefeldt,
Liberalism in the Bedroom: Quarreling Spouses in Nineteenth-Century Lima (University Park:
Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2000).
11. The most frequently cited bibliographies are as follows: Knaster, Women in
Latin America; and idem, Women in Spanish America: An Annotated Bibliography from
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was recognized as cutting edge in the 1990s. In contrast to the professional

barriers previous generations encountered, those of us working on gender
over the past decade found university doors and employment options wide
open.
Still, one cannot help but feel somewhat envious of the sense of exhilarating political possibility that marked the early Latin American womens studies
literature and professional gatherings. Dramatic political transformations
throughout the region either promised to open up or threatened to shut down
opportunities to end womens oppression; either way, a heightened sense of
urgency surrounded scholarly work. Reading through reviews and introductory essays to collections and bibliographies on women in Latin American that
appeared in the 1970s and early 1980s, one gets a strong sense of what John
French and Daniel James call the passionate partisanship that inspired early
works, most of which sought to theorize the relationship between capitalism
and patriarchy, identied as the roots of womens oppression.12 Anthropologist
Florence Babb remembers, with some nostalgia, that scholars argued with the
certainty and conviction of the time for historical materialist approaches that
would light the path toward structural change and even socialist feminist revolution.13 Whether they embarked on projects with immediate practical relevance or worked to construct far-reaching theoretical models, feminist social
scientists saw the potential of scholarship to reshape the social-sexual order.
Moreover, interdisciplinary approaches and collaborative research on women
seemed poised to transform the academic disciplines, since traditional theories
and methods could not account for womens experiences.
No less important than individual research projects was the creation of a
Pre-Conquest to Contemporary Times (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977); Marysa Navarro,

Research on Latin American Women, Signs 5, no. 1 (1979), which reviews the literature
produced by Latin America-based scholars; Pescatello, The Female in Ibero-America;
and K. Lynn Stoner, Directions in Latin American Womens History, 1977 1984,
Latin American Research Review 22, no. 2 (1987). For more recent scholarship on modern
Latin America, see Ali, The Historiography of Women; for colonial Latin America,
see Susan Migden Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2000).
12. John D. French and Daniel James, Squaring the Circle: Womens Factory Labor,
Gender Ideology, and Necessity, in The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers:
From Household and Factory to the Union Hall and Ballot Box, ed. John D. French and Daniel
James (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1997), esp. 3.
13. Florence E. Babb, Gender and Sexuality in LAP, Latin American Perspectives 25,
no. 6 (1998): 28 29.
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vibrant scholarly community committed to the collective endeavor of uncovering womens conditions and experiences. With the proliferation of conferences and symposia, along with published collections, debates, reviews, bibliographies and, later, research centers and institutes dedicated to promoting
womens studies in Latin America, political and disciplinary ssures appeared,
sometimes along class lines; often separating north and south. Latin American
researchers sometimes bristled at what they saw as a North American commitment to a bourgeois and imperialist feminist agenda, while some North Americans interpreted the Latin American commitments to partisan political agendas or structural dependency theory as misguided or backward.14
Of course, disagreement about the primacy of sex or class (with racial or
ethnic discrimination added as a form of class oppression) also emerged among
scholars of the same nationality.15 Yet the strong marxist position in Latin
American social sciences, adopted by prominent U.S.-based Latin Americanists, prevailed in much of the signicant research. The prevalence of dependency analysis, emphasis on class oppression, and early criticism of North
American feminists meant that from the start, women were generally studied in the context of their class and region. Class and sex were frequently seen
as independent variables that might be weighted differently in different settings: class inequalities were more important in the Third World, while sexual inequalities could take precedence in industrialized nations.16 Although
there were notable exceptions, particularly in the North American political
science literature on womens political participation, class analysis inuenced
interpretations of data as well as the topics favored. These included the effects
of development on women, womens roles in social and political change, and
women in the urban and rural labor force, including the informal sector.17
14. See Marysa Navarro, Research on Latin American Women, Signs 5, no. 1
(1979): 114.
15. For a discussion of feminist debates and rifts as they emerged in the biannual
feminist encuentros since 1981, see Marysa Navarro-Aranguren, Nancy Saporta Sternbacch,
Patricia Chuchryk, and Sonia E. Alvarez, Feminisms in Latin America: From Bogota to
San Bernadino, Signs 17, no. 2 (1992). Their observations are summarized in Jane S.
Jaquette, Introduction: From Transition to Participation Womens Movements and
Democratic Politics, in The Womens Movement in Latin America: Feminism and the Transition
to Democracy, ed. Jane Jaquette (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 5 6.
16. See, for example, June Nash and Helen Icken Safa, eds., Sex and Class in Latin
America: Womens Perspectives on Politics, Economics, and the Family in the Third World ( New
York: Praeger, 1976), x.
17. See the two collections edited by June C. Nash and Helen Icken Safa: Sex and
Class; and Women and Change in Latin America (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey,
1986). See also Navarro, Research on Latin American Women.
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Notwithstanding the historical materialist approach of some of the early

womens studies research, little of it was actually conducted by historians
before the early 1980s. Instead, political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists employed a variety of methods for collection of data, mostly on contemporary societies, to test broad theoretical concepts or models. With the hindsight of two decades of vigorous historical research on gender, concepts such
as capitalist patriarchy for understanding the exploitation of womens labor,
both domestic and extradomestic, or marianismo for explaining womens political power as an extension of her venerated position in the traditional Iberian
home, seem overly rigid and ahistorical.18 Although some historians have
retained modied versions of these concepts in specic contexts, most recent
scholarship has developed more complex and exible theoretical frameworks
for analyzing how gender has intersected with class and ethnicity to structure
politics or the social relations of production.19
18. For the theory of capitalist patriarchy, see the classic work by Brazilian sociologist
Heleieth I. B. Safoti, Women in Class Society, trans. Michael Vale ( New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1978). In this inuential essay on women in Brazil, and under capitalism in
general, Safoti argued that women constituted a reserve labor force. This position was
qualied by subsequent social science research that showed that women were the primary
or even preferred labor force in specic labor markets. See June C. Nash, A Decade of
Research on Women in Latin America, in Nash and Safa, Women and Change, 9; Mara
Patrcia Fernndez-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I And My People: Women and Industry in Mexicos
Frontier (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1983); and June Nash and Maria Patrcia
Fernndez-Kelly, eds., Women, Men and the International Division of Labor (Albany: State
Univ. of New York Press, 1983). The concept of marianismo holds that as a result of
traditional Iberian values transported to the Americas with colonization, Latin American
women wield power by extending into the public sphere their roles as mothers and
guardians of morality in the home. See Evelyn Stephens, Marianismo: The Other Face
of Machismo in Latin America, in Female and Male in Latin America: Essays, ed. Ann
Pescatello (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1973); and Elsa Chaney, Supermadre:
Women in Politics in Latin America (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1979). Developed by North
American political scientists, the concept was never popular among Latin American
scholars, who tended to see it as exoticising. Jane Jaquettes analysis of womens political
empowerment as based on sex differentiation is a more carefully constructed observation
that insisted on a broader interpretation of political participation than voting or state ofce
holding. By considering different class positions, and by arguing that men, too, played
gender-specic roles in politics, Jaquette showed that womens specic participation in
politics could result in a broad variety of outcomes. See Jane S. Jaquette, Female Political
Participation in Latin America, in Nash and Safa, Sex and Class.
19. Silvia Marina Arrom, in The Women of Mexico City, 1790 1857 (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1985), 259 67, argues that marianismo can be useful if seen not as a timeless
Iberian tradition, but as a Latin American parallel to the Anglo cult of true womanhood,
an ideological innovation of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Arrom argues that in
Mexico, marianismo did not lead to womens empowerment in the public sphere; on the
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As easy as it is to criticize theories developed before much empirical historical research was amassed, however, it is difcult to deny the lasting impact
that the early social science research on Latin American women has had on the
historiography on gender, especially but not exclusively in Latin America.
Studies collected in June Nash and Helen Safas 1976 volume, Sex and Class in
Latin America, showed that womens political action varied by class, ethnicity,
and region and that the public and private realms were intertwined themes
historians continue to develop. That volume, and the body of work on women
and work that it represents, is also relevant to new research in labor history. In
the introduction to a 1997 collection of some of the most innovative labor history of Latin America published in English in the past decade, coeditors John
French and Daniel James identify Nash and Safa as precursors.20 Nashs 1979
ethnographic study of a Bolivian mining community, according to the editors,
even anticipated the objectives of todays cohort of gender-conscious Latin
American labor historians.21
Historian Heidi Tinsman, whose research on gender and agrarian reform
in Chile is featured in this special issue of the HAHR as well as in the French
and James collection, also recognizes the importance for subsequent gender
historians of the early social science scholarship on womens labor, especially
the international literature on women in development and women in revolutionary societies.22 Much of this literature dealt with Latin America, including
signicant contributions by U.S.-based scholars (for example, Nash, Safa, and
Maria Patrcia Fernandez-Kelly) and scholars of rural households, production,
and labor (for example, Eleanor Leacock, Carmen Diana Deere, and Magdalena Len).23 In addition to their own eld research, these scholars pubcontrary, it accompanied their increasing connement to motherhood and the home. More
recently, Asuncin Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and
Uruguay, 1890 1940 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1995), 13, retrieves the concept
of marianismo to argue that feminists in the Southern Cone since 1910 used an ideology
of social mission based on gender functions and attributes to justify their participation in
politics.
20. French and James, Squaring the Circle, 3. The studies they cite are the two
collections edited by Nash and Safa cited in notes 16 17; and Fernndez-Kelly, For
We Are Sold.
21. French and James, Squaring the Circle, 3. The ethnography is June C. Nash,
We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines
( New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1979).
22. Tinsman, introduction to Partners in Conflict. I thank Heidi Tinsman for
permission to cite this manuscript.
23. Good examples of the voluminous literature are collected in Nash and
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lished extensively in Spanish and English, including edited volumes that

brought together research produced in the United States and Latin America.24
By the mid-1980s, this kind of collaboration had done much to lessen the
divide between North and Latin American research.25
Some researchers demonstrated the need to reform public policies in order
to benet women equally; othersmost commonly Latin American scholars
rejected altogether the concept of development, which they believed was
informed by a uniform notion of progress imposed by the wealthy nations on a
homogenized Third World.26 Although, as Marysa Navarro demonstrated in
Fernndez-Kelly, Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor; Eleanor Leacock and
Helen Icken Safa, Womens Work: Development and the Division of Labor by Gender (South
Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey, 1986); Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena Len, eds.,
Rural Women and State Policy: Feminist Perspectives on Latin American Agricultural Development
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1987); idem, La mujer y la poltica agraria en Amrica Latina
(Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1986); and Lourdes Benera and Martha Roldn, The
Crossroads of Class and Gender: Industrial Homework, Subcontracting, and Household Dynamics in
Mexico City (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987).
24. In addition to the Nash and Safa volumes, see Magdalena Len de Leal, ed., La
mujer y el desarrollo en Colombia (Bogota: Asociacin Colombiana para el Estudio de la
Poblacin, 1977); Magdalena Len de Leal and Carmen Diana Deere, eds., Mujer y
capitalismo agrario: Estudio de cuatro regiones colombianas (Bogota: Asociacin Colombiana
para el Estudio de la Poblacin, 1980); Magdalena Len de Leal et al., Debate sobre la mujer
en Amrica Latina y el Caribe: Discusin acerca de la unidad produccinreproduccin (Bogot:
Asociacin Colombiana para el Estudio de la Poblacin, 1982); Carmen Diana Deere and
Magdalena Len del Leal, Women in Andean Agriculture: Peasant Production and Rural Wage
Employment in Colombia and Peru (Geneva: International Labour Ofce, 1982); Magdalena
Len de Leal, ed., Las trabajadoras del agro (Bogot: Asociacin Colombiana para el Estudio
de la Poblacin, 1982); Carmen Diana Deere, Household and Class Relations: Peasants and
Landlords in Northern Peru (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990); Magdalena Len de
Leal, Mara del Carmen Feijo, and Programa Latinoamericano de Investigacin y
Formacin sobre la Mujer (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales), Tiempo y espacio:
Las luchas sociales de las mujeres latinoamericanas (Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de
Ciencias Sociales, 1993); Magdalena Len de Leal et al., eds., Mujeres y participacin poltica:
Avances y desafos en Amrica Latina (Bogota: TM Editores, 1994).
25. June Nash recognizes the importance of this North-South collaboration in 1986,
in the preface to Nash and Safa, Women and Change. Knaster, Women in Latin America,
6 13, describes institutional collaboration between North American and Latin American
scholars and funding agencies.
26. See, for example, Lourdes Benera and Gita Sen, Accumulation, Reproduction,
and Womens Role in Economic Development: Boserup Revisited, in Leacock and Safa,
Womens Work; and Marta Zabaleta, Research on Latin American Women: In Search of
Our Political Independence, Bulletin of Latin American Research 5, no. 2 (1986).
462
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a 1979 review, it was the international development literature and conferences

of the 1970s that rst led Latin American social scientists to study women,
Latin Americans were generally more concerned with national policy and
issues than with comparative or international research.27 This, together with
obvious international inequalities in resources for publishing and distribution,
often contributed to making their work less visible among the international
scholarship as a whole. Yet, the bulk of data on womens labor, poverty, household composition, family roles, and education were produced locally, often
with sponsorship of new research centers and in some cases international
funding.28
Working within or against development, scholars amassed a wealth of data
on the sexual division of labor and inequities in salary, education, and access to
state benets, as well as analyses of the complex relationships between local cultural norms, national and international political goals and ideologies, and the
interests of local and international employers. The data showed conclusively
the differential impact on women and men of economic and technological
change brought by development projects, industrialization, and shifting strategies of multinational corporations.29 They also demonstrated that these changes
27. Navarro, Research on Latin American Women. Navarro provides a
comprehensive list of studies on women written by Latin America-based researchers in
the 1970s.
28. Probably the best example is the Fundao Carlos Chagas in So Paulo, Brazil,
where the Ford Foundation has sponsored annual fellowships and publication programs for
studies of women since the late 1970s. Cristina Bruschini, Fulvia Rosemberg, and Albertina
Costa have conducted and supervised original research and edited numerous collections
that have resulted from these programs. See Del Priore, Histria das mulheres, for a
discussion of this program and its importance to the development of womens history in
Brazil. Another internationally funded organization is the United Nations Center of Latin
American Demography (CELADE) in Santiago, Chile. Navarro also mentions Centro
Brasileiro de Anlisis e Planejamiento (CEBRAP), the Centro de Estudios de Poblacin
(CENEP), the Centro de Estudios del Estado y Sociedad (CEDES) in Buenos Aires, and
the Asociacin Colombiana para el Estudio de la Poblacin in Bogot, Colombia. For a list
of organizations and conferences that promoted research on women in the late 1970s, see
Knaster, Women in Latin America, 6 12.
29. Studies on women and development were often published as articles rather than
books; see the articles in Nash and Safa, Sex and Class; idem, Women and Change; Nash and
Fernndez-Kelly, Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor; Leacock and Safa,
Womens Work; Deere and Magdalena Len, Rural Women and State Policy. See also
Fernndez-Kelly, For We are Sold; Querubina Henrquez de Paredes, Maritza Izaguirre P.,
and Ins Vargas Delaunoy, Participacin de la mujer en el desarrollo de Amrica Latina y el
Caribe (Santiago: UNICEF; Imp. Cergnar, 1975); Helen Icken Safa, The Urban Poor of
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affected sex roles and family relations in complex ways and provoked a variety of
individual and collective responses. As Tinsman notes, the answer to the question of whether development, as conceived by national and international capitalist policymakers, improved womens status was generally no. Womens wages
might have increased with new factory work, but their status relative to men fell.
Development policies in socialist Cuba or Chile were generally more favorable
to women than those of capitalist countries, but even there, limits to womens
full participation in decision-making tempered the gains.30
One social science research project that started out in this general vein
a study of rural family structure after the Cuban Revolution merits special
mention because of its later importance to historians. Anthropologist Verena
Martnez-Aliers Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (1974)
is based on church and state regulations regarding marriage, interracial couples petitions for permission to marry, and judicial cases of seduction and
elopement, discovered by the author while awaiting authorization in Havana
to return to the countryside.31 The resulting book was a pathbreaking historical study of the intersection of race, gender, and class in the maintenance of
social hierarchy, and of the importance of sexuality and marriage to religious
and secular authorities.
Puerto Rico: A Study in Development and Inequality ( New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1974); Eva Alterman Blay, Trabalho domesticado: A mulher na indstria paulista (So Paulo:
Ed. tica, 1978); Xulma Rechini de Lattes, Ruth A. Sautu, and Catalina H. Wainerman,
Participacin de las mujeres en la actividad econmica de la Argentina, Bolivia y Paraguay (Buenos
Aires: CENEP, 1977); Len de Leal, La mujer y el desarrollo. For the article-length studies
published before 1980, see Navarro, Research on Latin American Women.
30. The best examples are Carmen Diana Deere, Rural Women and Agrarian
Reform in Peru, Chile, and Cuba, in Nash and Safa, Women and Change; Deere and Len,
Rural Women and State Policy; idem, La mujer y la poltica agraria; Susan Daufman Purcell,
Modernizing Women for a Modern Society: The Cuban Case, in Female and Male in
Latin America: Essays, ed. Ann Pescatello (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1973);
Muriel Nazzari, The Woman Question in Cuba: An Analysis of Material Constaints on Its
Solution, Signs 9 (1983); Maxine Molyneaux, Mobilization Without Emancipation:
Womens Interests and the State in Nicaragua, Feminist Studies 11 (1985); and idem, The
Politics of Abortion in Nicaragua: Revolutionary Pragmatism or Feminism in the Realm of
Necessity? Feminist Review 29 (1988). For an account of the disillusionment of a formerly
optimistic feminist observer of the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, see Margaret
Randall, Gathering Rage: The Failure of Twentieth-Century Revolutions to Develop a Feminist
Agenda ( New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992).
31. Verena Martnez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba; A
Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society ( New York: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1974).
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Womens History
In 1978, Asuncin Lavrin cited similar documents legal records of divorce,

adultery, concubinage, bigamy, incest, parent-child conicts over marriage
choice, and dispensation of consanguinity to show how everyday practices
diverged from legal and religious prescriptions in colonial New Spain.32 Yet
her article was exploratory and suggestive, written as a guide to further research,
not as an in-depth analysis. It would be another decade before historians began
to work more closely and systematically with these kinds of documents to
uncover everyday practices and moral values and to examine the intersection
of social categories of race, ethnicity, class, and gender.
Lavrin recognized the relevance to historians of the womens studies literature produced by social scientists, and even suggested that historical research
might give support or disproof to some of their theories.33 Yet, there
were factors that distinguished womens history from the more general womens
studies literature. First, the bulk of the early ( pre-1980s) womens history
research was done by U.S.-based scholars. Like the early womens history in
the U.S., and unlike previous Latin American womens studies literature, the
historical research up until the mid-1980s included a number of studies of elite
women, religious women and convents, womens legal rights, dowry and other
property, and prescriptive literature on gender roles and morals.34 Historians
32. Asuncin Lavrin, In Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico: The Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries, in Lavrin, Latin American Women.
33. Ibid., 302.
34. For elite women, see Lavrin, In Search of the Colonial Woman; A. J. R.
Russell-Wood, Female and Family in the Economy and Society of Colonial Brazil, in
Lavrin, Latin American Women; Edith Couturier, Women in a Noble Family: The Mexican
Counts of Regla, 1750 1830, in Latin American Women; Josena Muriel, Cultura femenina
novahispana (Mexico City: Univ. Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 1982); John Tutino,
Power, Class and Family: Men and Women in the Mexican Elite, 1750 1810, The
Americas 39, no. 3 (1983); Sandra F. McGee, The Visible and Invisible Liga Patritica
Argentina, 1919 1928: Gender Roles and the Right Wing, HAHR 64, no. 2 (1984); Arrom,
Women of Mexico City; Carmen Ramos-Escandn, Seoritas porrianas: Mujer e ideologia
en el Mxico progresista, in Presencia y transparencia: La mujer en la historia de Mxico, ed.
Carmen Ramos Escandn et al. (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mxico, 1987), 189; and Julia
Tuon Pablos, Mujeres en Mxico: Una historia olvidada (Mexico City: Planeta, 1987). For
studies of religious women, see Lavrin, Ecclesiastical Reform of Nunneries in New Spain
in the Eighteenth Century, The Americas 22 (1965); and idem, The Role of Nunneries
in the Economy of New Spain in the Eighteenth Century, HAHR 46, no. 4 (1966);
Ann Miriam Gallagher, The Indian Nuns of Mexico Citys Monasterio of Corpus
Christi, 1724 1821, in Lavrin, Latin American Women; Susan A. Soeiro, The Feminine
Orders in Colonial Bahia, Brazil: Economic, Social, and Demographic Implications,
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465
also considered the effects on women of major events such as the conquest or
independence and of womens participation in these and other political events
and movements.35 Although several important works on the history of feminism were written by politically engaged Latin American social scientists looking for antecedents, for the most part, the history of national feminist movements was of greater interest to U.S.-based researchers than to locals.36
1677 1800, in Lavrin, Latin American Women; on law and property, see Asuncin Lavrin
and Edith Couturier, Dowries and Wills: A View of Womens Socio-Economic Role in
Colonial Guadalajara and Puebla, 1640 1790, HAHR 59, no. 2 (1979); Maria Beatriz
Nizza da Silva, Sistema do casamento no Brasil colonial (So Paulo: Univ. de So Paulo, 1984);
Silvia Arrom, Changes in Mexican Family Law in the Nineteenth Century: The Civil
Codes of 1870 and 1884, Journal of Family History 10, no. 3 (1985); Edith Couturier,
Women and the Family in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: Law and Practice, Journal of
Family History 10, no. 3 (1985); and Donna Guy, Lower-Class Families, Women, and the
Law in Nineteenth-Century Argentina, Journal of Family History 10, no. 3 (1985). See also
the historiographical essay on Puerto Rico by Matos Rodrguez, Womens History.
35. Inga Clendinnen, Yucatec Mayan Women and the Spanish Conquest: Role and
Ritual in Historical Reconstruction, Journal of Social History (1982); Irene Marsha
Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987); Evelyn Cherpak, The Participation of Women
in the Independence Movement in Gran Colombia, 1780 1830 in Lavrin, Latin American
Women; Ana Macias, Women and the Mexican Revolution: 1910 1920, The Americas 37
(1980); Shirlene Ann Soto, The Mexican Woman: A Study of Her Participation in the Revolution,
1910 1940 (Palo Alto: R & E Research Associates, 1979).
36. Knaster, Women in Spanish America, lists a number of biographies, essays, and
writings of early feminists published before 1977. Historical monographs by Latin
America-based authors include include Yamile Azize, Luchas de la mujer en Puerto Rico:
1898 1919 (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Fracor, 1979); Branca Moreira Alves, Ideologia e
feminismo: A luta da mulher pelo voto no Brasil (Petrpolis: Vozes, 1980); Maria Amlia da
Almeida Teles, Breve histria do feminismo no Brasil (So Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1993); Edda
A. Gaviola et al., Queremos votar en las prximas elecciones: Historia del movimiento femenino
chileno, 1913 1952 (Santiago: Centro de Anlisis y Divusin de la Condicin de la Mujer,
1986); Alba G. Cassina de Nogara, Las feministas (Montevideo: Instituto Nacional del
Libro, 1989); Clara Murguialday, Nicaragua, revolucin y feminismo, 1977 89 (Madrid: Ed.
Revolucin, 1990); Esperanza Tun Pablos, Mujeres que se organizan: El frente nico pro
derechos de la mujer, 1935 1938 (Mxico City: Univ. Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 1992);
Maritza Villavicencio F., Del silencio a la palabra: Mujeres peruanas en los siglos XIX y XX
(Lima: Centro de la Mujer Peruana Flora Tristn, 1992). Historical monographs published
in English by North America-based scholars include Anna Macas, Against All Odds: The
Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940 ( Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982); Marifran
Carlson, Feminismo! The Womans Movement in Argentina from Its Beginnings to Eva Pern
(Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1988); Shirlene Ann Soto, Emergence of the Modern Mexican
Woman: Her Participation in Revolution and Struggle for Equality, 1910 1940 (Denver: Arden
466
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Womens history continued to lag behind the social sciences in research on

working-class lives until the late 1980s.37
Family History, Everyday Life, and Discourse Analysis
Women also began to appear as agents of family and social history in the 1970s
in ways analogous to their appearance in the social science development literature, that is, in works that were not specically about women and that were
not necessarily feminist. This was true of studies produced both in and outside
of Latin America. As Elizabeth Kuznesof and Robert Oppenheimer point out,
the signicance of the family, especially the elite extended family, to political
and economic structures has always been a major theme in Latin American
historiography.38 Scholarly studies of the family, beginning with Gilberto
Freyres portrait of family life on the colonial Brazilian sugar plantation in
Press, 1990); June Edith Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Womens
Rights in Brazil, 1850 1940 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1990); K. Lynn Stoner, From the
House to the Streets: The Cuban Womans Movement for Legal Reform, 1898 1940 (Durham:
Duke Univ. Press, 1991); Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social
Justice (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1991); Asuncin Lavrin, Women, Feminism,
and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890 1940 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska
Press, 1995); Elisabeth J. Friedman, Unfinished Transitions: Women and The Gendered
Development of Democracy in Venezuela, 1936 1996 (University Park: Pennsylvania State
Univ. Press, 2000).
37. Studies of the history of womens labor were generally written by social scientists;
see, for example, Maria Valria Junho Pena, Mulheres e trabalhadores: Presena feminina na
constituio do sistema fabril (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1981); and Jessita Martins
Rodrigues, A mulher operria: Um estudo sobre tecels (So Paulo: Hucitec, 1979); for a
review of scholarship on womens labor in Puerto Rico, see Altagracia Ortiz, Puerto Rican
Women Workers in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Appraisal of the Literature, in
Rodrguez and Delgado, Puerto Rican Womens History. Among the few works by historians,
see Marysa Navarro, Hidden, Silent, and Anonymous: Women Workers in the Argentine
Trade Union Movement, in The World of Womens Trade Unionism: Comparative Historical
Essays, ed. Norbert C. Soldon ( Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985); Marysa Navarro and
Catalina Wainerman, El trabajo de la mujer en la Argentina: Anlisis de las ideas
dominantes en las primeras dcadas del siglo XX, Cuadernos de CENEP, no. 7 (1979);
Donna Guy, Women, Peonage, and Industrialization: Argentina, 1810 1914, Latin
American Research Review 16, no. 3 (1981); idem, Lower-Class Families. There were a
great number of studies of the history of womens labor after the mid-1980s; see Ali, The
Historiography of Women.
38. Elizabeth Kuznesof and Robert Oppenheimer, The Family and Society in
Nineteenth-Century Latin America: An Historiographical Introduction, Journal of Family
History 10 (1985): 220 21.
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467
1933, depicted it as the dominant force in patronage systems; the circulation of

capital and political power; the development (or nondevelopment) of modern
social classes; and the conguration of ethnic or racial relations. Up until the
1960s, Brazilian historians saw families of all races and classes as integrated
into this patriarchal, elite family.39 Franois Chevaliers inuential 1954 study
of the self-contained Mexican hacienda depicted a similar dynamic, although
the structure and labor system of the Mexican hacienda and its relationship to
outlaying peasant communities was very different.40 Later studies of landed
elites as well as urban and rural merchants, bureaucrats, and politicians found
that family and kinship networks, which hinged on careful planning of marriages, were the crucial means of accumulating wealth and power in colonial
society.41 Strategies changed in different ways with new political and economic
39. Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, Sexuality, Gender and the Family in Colonial Brazil,
Luso-Brazilian Review 30, no. 1 (1993): 120. For Brazil, the most important scholars who
emphasized the dominance of the patriarchal family in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s are
Oliveira Vianna and Srgio Buarque de Holanda. Mariza Corras comprehensive review of
the scholarship on the Brazilian family, which she attacked as elitist and ultimately racist,
brought the attention of historians to nonelite families, which she argued predominated in
Brazil throughout its history; see her Repensando a famlia patriarcal in Colcha de retalhos
(So Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1982).
40. Franois Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico: The Great Hacienda, trans.
Alvin Eustis (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966 [1954]). An excellent review of
scholarship on the Mexican hacienda is Eric Van Young, Mexican Rural History Since
Chevalier: The Historiography of the Colonial Hacienda, Latin American Research Review
18, no. 3 (1983).
41. Studies of elite family networks and their strategies for economic and political
control, written primarily by U.S.-based scholars, include D. A. Brading, Miners and
Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763 1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971); Doris
M. Ladd, The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780 1826 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press,
1976); Susan Migden Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778 1810: Family and
Commerce (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978); idem, The Bureaucrats Of Buenos
Aires, 1769 1810: Amor al real servicio (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1987); Lavrin and
Couturier, Dowries and Wills; John E. Kicza, Colonial Entrepreneurs, Families and Business
in Bourbon Mexico City (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1983); Diana A. Balmori,
Stuart F. Voss, and Miles Wortman, Notable Family Networks in Latin America (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984); David W. Walker, Kinship, Business, and Politics: The Martnez
del Rio Family in Mexico, 1824 1867 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1986); Linda Lewin,
Politics and Parentela in Paraba: A Case Study of Family-Based Oligarchy in Brazil (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1987); Robert J. Ferry, The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas: Formation
and Crisis, 1567 1767 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989); Tutino, Power, Class
and Family; for a view of social relations and gender roles within mostly middle- and
upper-class families through the early twentieth century, see Dain Edward Borges, The
Family in Bahia, Brazil, 1870 1945 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994). Borges argues
468
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conditions in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the independence wars displaced the traditional families in some regions, but kinship
remained a fundamental way of extending and maintaining power. Population
studies and ethnographies since the 1950s have focused on lower-class family
and kinship systems as well, particularly those of indigenous groups, as primary social institutions and centers of reproduction.42
The family might seem an obvious place to look for female historical
agents, but most historians did not nd them there until the 1970s. They were
blinded by the gure of the omnipotent colonial patriarch and his nineteenthcentury parallel, the caudillo (coronel in Brazil). Elite white women appeared as
instruments in male negotiations to extend the clan through marriage alliances,
which required protecting their virtue by cloistering them in the home;
nonelite women appeared as victims of white male sexual prerogatives, which
resulted in the creation of subordinate mixed-race populations. The nonelite
population that was not a part of the grand estates or closed communities were
assumed to form a disorganized, promiscuous mass in which stable family ties
were an exception.
With the adoption of new methods of quantitative demography and qualitative social and cultural history, this picture began to change. Demographic
studies of communities and households began to challenge the notion that
large, extended families characteristic of the feudal colonial period predominated throughout the region. On the contrary, researchers consistently found
that the average household size in rural and urban areas was small (between
four and six free members), and that it grew in the nineteenth century to
accommodate production for new capitalist markets. Second, these studies
overturned the idea that households and production were invariably patriarchal, for they found between 25 to 45 percent of households headed by
women.43 In the early 1980s, Elizabeth Kuznesof and others concluded that
the numbers of female-headed households rose with the beginnings of urbanthat there was a great deal of continuity in the familys social and cultural signicance.
Alida C. Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaba, 1580 1822
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992) extends the study of the elite family to consider
also nonelite and slave families.
42. Kuznesof and Oppenheimer, The Family and Society, 221 22. Studies of
indigenous populations were initiated by Woodrow Borahs pioneering research on the
sixteenth-century decline of the indigenous population and seventeenth-century economic
depression in Mexico. Woodrow Borah, New Spains Century of Depression (Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 1951).
43. Kuznesof and Oppenheimer, The Family and Society, 223 24.
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469
ization and industrialization as a response to demands for domestic market

production.44 Several historians have uncovered data on illegitimacy and consensual unions by ethnic or class group in local studies, nding both prevalent
principally among the non-white and non-elite populations. Some conclude
from this that lower-class groups disregarded the moral values disseminated by
the church, a nding rejected by more recent cultural historians.45 Even from
a purely demographical standpoint, generalizations about the region remain
tentative. Beyond the nding that female-headed households and illegitimacy
have been unusually high in much of the region from the colonial period to
the present, historians continue to nd tremendous variation in degree and
patterns by region and over time.46
Particularly in Brazil, slave families have been a major focus of demographic studies over the past two decades. Earlier sociological and historical
44. Ibid., 224; and Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, Household Economy and Urban
Development: So Paulo, 1765 to 1836 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986). Muriel Nazzaris
study of the decline of the dowry in over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in So
Paulo concludes that elite family strategies were also changing in response to the
development of capitalism and nance markets, which lessened young mens dependency
on the assets provided by wives dowries and led to the declining economic and social
importance of the extended family. In contrast, Lewin nds that Northeastern families
adapted kinship strategies in ways that maintained the political dominance of elite extended
families. Muriel Nazzari, Disappearance of the Dowry: Women, Families, and Social Change in
So Paulo, Brazil (1600 1900) (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991); and Lewin, Politics and
Parentela.
45. Some examples of studies that argue that the poor majority rejected the moral
teachings of the church regarding concubinage and illegitimacy, see Silvia Arrom,
Marriage Patterns in Mexico City, 1811, Journal of Family History 3, no. 4 (1978); Toms
Calvo, The Warmth of the Hearth: Seventeenth-Century Guadalajara Families, in
Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Asuncin Lavrin (Lincoln: Univ. of
Nebraska Press, 1989); Donald Ramos, Marriage and the Family in Colonial Vila Rica,
HAHR 55, no. 2 (1975); Mary del Priore, Ao sul do corpo: Condio feminina, maternidades e
mentalidades no Brasil colnia (Rio de Janeiro: Jos Olympio, 1993). For the opposing
argument, see, for example, Ronaldo Vainfas, Trpicos dos pecados: Moral, sexualidade e
Inquisio no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Campus, 1989); Sheila de Casto Faria, A colnia em
movimento: Fortuna e famlia no cotidiano colonial: Coleo historia do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Ed.
Nova Fronteira, 1998); Seminario de Historia de las Mentalidades y Religin en Mxico
Colonial, Familia y sexualidad.
46. Demographers have been especially prolic in Brazil, spurred by a boom in local
history and an interest in slave families in the 1980s1990s. See the historiographical
review by Sheila de Castro Faria, Histria da famlia e demograa histrica, in Domnios
da histria: Ensaios de teoria e metodologia, ed. Ciro Flamarion Cardoso and Ronaldo Vainfas
(Rio de Janeiro: Campus, 1997).
470
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accounts held that the disproportion of men to women in Latin American slavery and the dehumanizing treatment slaves suffered resulted in the pathological instability of black families that outlasted slavery by nearly a century. As
Robert Slenes has pointed out, this literature identied black womens promiscuity as the most damaging symptom of this pathology.47 Following the lead of
historians of North American and British Caribbean slavery, historians of
Brazil began in the 1970s to piece together data on marriage, legitimacy, consensual unions, the appearance of mothers and fathers on birth registries,
godparenting, and multigenerational family structures through painstaking
research in local notarial archives and plantation records. Local and regional
studies multiplied over the 1980s and 1990s, showing that whenever possible,
slaves formed families that resembled those of the free population including,
in some cases, stable, lasting, multigenerational family bonds based on both
biological and ctive kin relationships. Family units were much more common
on medium- to large-scale plantations and in prosperous regions, where large
slave populations could be maintained over time. Smaller productive units and
depressed regions showed the kind of inconsistency and disruption of slave
family life that was previously assumed to characterize all of Latin American
slavery.48 Demographic studies of slave families in regions other than the
Caribbean and Brazil have been slow to appear, but those that do exist support
the conclusion that slaves formed family bonds in much the same way as the
free population, even if maintaining these bonds was often difcult.49
47. Robert W. Slenes, Black Homes, White Homilies: Perceptions of the Slave
Family and of Slave Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, in More than Chattel: Black
Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine
(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1996), 127. Slenes elaborates his analysis of the
development of classic and revisionist literature on the slave family in Brazil and its
relationship to the historiography on North American and Caribbean slavery in his Na
senzala, uma flor: Esperanas e recordaes na formao da famlia escrava: Brasil sudeste, sculo
XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1999), 28 43.
48. The bibliography that contributes to these generalizations regarding slave
families, consisting mostly of article-length studies, is now too substantial to cite here. See
the bibliographical discussion and extensive citations in in Slenes, Na senzala, uma flor,
43 53, 62 65 nn. 59 62.
49. For other regions, see David Chandler, Family Bonds and the Bondsman: The
Slave Family in Colonial Colombia, Latin American Research Review 16, no. 2 (1981);
Christine Hnefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Limas Slaves,
1800 1854 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994). For similar desires to form
legitimate families among slaves and the free population, see Faria, Histria da famlia;
idem, A colnia em movimento, esp. 335 59; and Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro, Das cores do
silncio: Os significados da liberdade no Sudeste escravistaBrasil, sculo XIX (Rio de Janeiro:
Arquivo Nacional, 1995).
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Demographic patterns that family historians were uncovering in the late

1970s and 1980s fed the growing elds of social history and a new linguistically
inected cultural history, and vice versa. Inspired, in part, by regional political
processes, especially the replacement of older-style marxist oppositional politics by new, community-based social movements (many of which led by
women), Latin American social historians combined some of the goals of the
new social history from the United States and England with the microhistory
popularized by Carlo Ginsburg.50 As was clear from earlier studies of womens
labor in Latin America, which found most women working as domestics or in
the informal economy, traditional labor history was incapable of accounting
for the ways most women or indeed, most men made a living or resisted
oppression.51 Women were among those previously silenced historical actors
who appeared in studies of the quotidian, or everyday life of urban or (less
commonly) rural lower classes. Many such studies clustered around the late
nineteenth to early twentieth centuries and tapped new sources, including criminal or civil trial testimony, police records, popular literature, and memoirs.
By the mid- to late 1980s, most North American social historians commonly used the term gender and many engaged feminist theory in their discussion of differences in the everyday lives of women and men. This was not
necessarily true of Latin American social historians. The stronger emphasis on
gender by North Americans reects, of course, their insertion in a scholarly
discourse in which feminists have had a strong voice since the early 1980s. In
Latin America, rifts between autonomous feminists, party militants and popular movements led by women emerged in the 1980s, just as social historians
were focusing on everyday life and alternative forms of resistance among the
popular sectors.52 Many social historians sympathies laid with the militant
and popular movements, rather than with the mostly middle-class feminists.
These historians were therefore not inspired to pursue a self-identied feminist framework in studies of womens historical agency.53 Instead, as was true
of the rst generation of Latin American social science research on women,
innovative class analysis guided social historians to revise previous views of
women as passively conned to the domestic sphere.
50. See note 8.
51. Navarro, Research on Latin American Women, 116 17.
52. See Navarro-Aranguren, Saporta Sternbacch, Chuchryk, and Alvarez, Feminisms
in Latin America; Jaquette, Introduction: From Transition to Participation.
53. Historians greater sympathy for militant and popular movements may also be
reected in Latin Americans greater interest in womens labor, prostitution, criminality,
and everyday life, and lesser interest in the history of feminist movements, as compared to
North Americans. See Ali, The Historiography of Women.
472
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A central question leading this research was, in the tradition of E. P.

Thompson, how the urban poor constructed class identity through everyday
experiences. Historians generally found that the cultural norms, values, and
practices of working-class subjects resisted the disciplinary mechanisms of elite
professionals and state ofcials, who worked to create conditions propitious
for modern capitalism. If the argument was similar to that made by social historians for other times and places, in the best studies, the specicity of the
empirical evidence demonstrated how Latin American cases were unique.
Looking up close at some of the practices discovered by historians of the family, such as the prevalence of female-headed households and the high incidence
of illegitimacy among the lower classes, social historians described the signicance of these practices for poor women and men and for professional elites
and public ofcials in specic contexts. In Puerto Rico, prominent social historians such as Blanca Silvestrini, Fernando Pic, and A. G. Quintero Rivera
made reference to women within larger works on nineteenth-century slavery
or industrialization and wrote essays on womens experience in the factories.54
Brazilian scholarship was especially pathbreaking. Historians such as Maria
Odila Leite da Silva Dias, Sidney Chalhoub, Martha de Abreu Esteves, Margareth Rago, and Rachel Soihet produced studies that led scores of others to
54. See Matos Rodrguez, Womens History, 13, 33 nn. 13 14. The new history
has been criticized for not focusing attention on womens lives; instead, historians include
references to women in studies that mostly involve men. Among the few works specically
about women are Blanca Silvestrini, Women as Workers: The Experience of the Puerto
Rican Woman in the 1930s in The Puerto Rican Woman: Perspectives on Culture, History, and
Society, ed. Edna Acosta-Beln, 2d ed. ( New York: Praeger, 1986); and Fernando Pic, Las
trabajadoras del tabaco en Utuado, Puerto Rico, segn el censo de 1910, Homines 9 (1985).
See Ramos Escandn, La nueva historia, for a discussion of similar dynamics in Mexican
historiography. Ramos Escandns Presencia y transparencia includes works inspired by the
new social history. For Argentina and Chile, where redemocratization was more recent,
feminist activism, concern with womens history, and social histories focusing on gender
have appeared more recently. See Roxana Boixads, Una viuda de mala vida en la colonia
riojana, in Historia de las mujeres en Argentina, ed. Fernanda Gil Lozano, Valeria Silvina
Pita, and Maria Gabriela Ini (Buenos Aires: Taurus, 2000); Gabriela Braccio, Una gavilla
indisoluble: Las teresas en Crdoba (siglo XVIII), in Lozano et al., Historia de las mujeres;
Diana Veneros Ruiz-Tagle, ed., Perfiles revelados: Historias de mujeres en Chile, siglos
XVIIIXX (Santiago: Univ. de Santiago de Chile, 1997); and Lorena Godoy, Elizabeth
Hutchison, Karin Rosemblatt, M. Soledad Zrate, eds., Disciplina y desacato: Construccin de
identidad en Chile, Siglos XIX y XX (Santiago: Sur/CEDEM, 1995). Essays from these
collections are reviewed in Klubocks essay in this issue, Writing the History of Women
and Gender in Twentieth-Century Chile.
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new kinds of documentation, especially trial and police records, and to interpretative framework that borrowed from both national and international
scholarly traditions.55 Collectively, they described the creation of a more or
less (depending on the author) autonomous urban popular culture of resistance. Popular culture, in these works, established less rigorous moral strictures and greater autonomy for women than elite prescription. Again, the degree
of relative moral freedom and autonomy vary by author, with Chalhoub and
Esteves arguing for more and Dias and Soihet, less. All agree, however, that
poor women were not conned in patriarchal homes, but rather headed families, worked in and outside of the home, constructed communities and solidarity networks, and sometimes battled with husbands, neighbors, or urban
authorities in private and public forums, individually or collectively. Most
importantly in terms of the demography of the family, poor women built
strong family ties, even if these were not always based upon legitimate marriage or even stable consensual unions. As Sandra Lauderdale Graham demonstrates in her history of domestic service in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro,
the lives of poor women blurred or even reversed the moral divisions between
private and public space, or the house and the street, that had justied elite
womens seclusion in the colonial period and were reinforced by nineteenthcentury legal and medical professionals.56
In Brazil, at about the same time that social historians focused on the
material lives and experiences of lower-class historical agents, many historians
55. Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias, Quotidiano e poder em So Paulo no sculo XIX: Ana
Gertrudes de Jesus (So Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1984); Sidney Chalhoub, Trabalho, lar e
botequim: O cotidiano dos trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro da Belle Epoque (So Paulo:
Brasiliense, 1986); Martha de Abreu Esteves, Meninas perdidas: Os populares e o cotidiano do
amor no Rio de Janeiro da Belle Epoque (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1989); Rachel Soihet,
Condio feminina e formas de violncia: Mulheres pobres e ordem urbana, 1890 1920 (Rio de
Janeiro: Forense Universitria, 1990). See also, Sueann Cauleld and Martha de Abreu
Esteves, Fifty Years of Virginity in Rio de Janeiro: Sexual Politics and Gender Roles in
Juridical and Popular Discourse, 1890 1940, Luso-Brazilian Review 30, no. 1 (1993).
Margareth Ragos Do cabar ao lar: A utopia da cidade disciplinar: Brasil, 1890 1930 (Rio de
Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1985) uses factory records and especially working-class journals and
newspapers to write a social history of women workers. While not focusing exclusively on
working-class women, Maria Clementina Pereira Cunhas O espelho do mundo: Juquery, a
histria de um asilo (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1986) also ts within this list. Cunhas
study is a fascinating social history of a modern sanitarium in the rst half of the
twentieth-century So Paulo; see Cunha, Loucura, genero feminino.
56. Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and
Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988).
474
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began making use of post-structuralist theories, particularly Foucauldianinspired discourse analysis, to investigate the ways in which gender and sexuality were construed and used to establish social and political power and to bolster state institutions. A few years later, similar approaches appeared in
scholarship on other nations. The research that came out of this for the modern period tended to focus on medical, psychiatric, and juridical discourses
beginning around the mid-nineteenth century, as secular professionals began
to establish themselves as the moral authorities of recently consolidated
republican states.57 Notwithstanding the apparent polarization of this kind of
57. For Brazil, the best examples are Jurandir Freire Costa, Ordem mdica e norma
familiar (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Graal, 1979); Roberto Machado et al., Danao da norma:
Medicina social e constituio da psiquiatra no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Graal, 1978); Magali
Engel, Meretrizes e doutores: Saber mdico e prostituio no Rio de Janeiro (1840 1890) (So
Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1989); and Margareth Rago, Os prazeres da noite: Prostituio e cdigos
da sexualidade feminina em So Paulo (1890 1930) (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1991). See
also Jorge Baln, Profesin y identidad en una sociedad Dividida: La medicina y el origen del
psicoanlisis en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: CEDES, 1988); Donna Guy, Sex and Danger in
Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press,
1991); Maria Celia Bravo y Alejandra Landaburu, Infanticdios: Construccin de la verdad
y control de gnero en el discurso judicial, Maria Gabriela Ini, Cuerpos femeninos y
cuerpos abyectos: La construccin anatmica de la feminidad en la medicina argentina,
and Pablo Ben, Damas, locas y mdicos: La locura expropriada, in Lozano, Pita, and Ini,
Historia de las mujeres; William French, Prostitutes and Guardian Angels: Women, Work,
and the Family in Porrian Mexico, HAHR 72, no. 4 (1992); Rafael Sagredo, La Chiquita,
no. 4002 (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1996); Juan Jos Marn Hernndez, Las causas de la
prostitucin Josena: 1939 1949: Entre lo imaginario y el estigma, Revista de Historia (San
Jos, Costa Rica) 27 (1993); and idem, Prostitucin y pecado en la bella y prspera ciudad
de San Jos (1850 1930), in El Paso del Cometa: Estado, poltica social y culturas populares en
Costa Rica (1800/1950), ed. Ivan Molina Jimnez and Steven Palmer (San Jos: Ed.
Porvenir, 1994); Katherine Elaine Bliss, Prostitution, Revolution and Social Reform in
Mexico City, 1918 1940 (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1996); Mara Emma Mannarelli,
Limpias y modernas: Gnero, higiene y cultura en la Lima del novecientos (Lima: Ed. Flora
Tristn, 1999); Mara Anglica Illanes, En el nombre del pueblo, del estado y de la ciencia
(. . .): Historia social de la salud pblica, Chile, 1880 1973 (hacia una historia social del siglo
XX) (Santiago: Colectivo de Atencin Primaria, 1993); Teresita Martnez-Vergne, Shaping
the Discourse of Space: Charity and its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico
(Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1999); Maria Soledad Zarate Campos, Vicious Women,
Virtuous Women: The Female Delinquent and the Santiago de Chile Correctional House,
1860 1900, in The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Esays on Criminology, Prison
Reform, and Social Control, 1830 1940, ed. Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre (Austin:
Univ. of Texas Press, 1996); Robert Bufngton and Pablo Piccato, Tales of Two Women:
The Narrative Construal of Porrian Reality, The Americas 55, no. 3 (1999); Leyla Flores,
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approach with social histories that emphasized historical agency, some historians borrowed freely from both to write histories of elite discourses and popular resistance to them. In some works, such as that of Esteves and Soihet, this
kind of analysis of elite or ofcial discourse was juxtaposed with analysis of
popular or alternative discourses, with the former establishing xed moral
strictures and the latter, a degree of choice and agency.58 In other works,
emphasis shifted away from material lives, experience, and agency. Instead,
historians investigated the ways professional discourses regarding sexuality and
gender constructed the boundaries of normal and pathological female identities, which in turn shaped state regulation of public space, womens work, and
private morality. This regulatory function, according to these analyses, played
a key role in dening citizenship and imagining the nation.
Taken together, this research shows a uniform desire on the part of
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century professional elites in Latin American
to modernize and civilize urban space and populations. It also demonstrates conclusively that gender played a primary role in dening and representing modernity and civilization, and that women were primary targets for
reformers. Marginal women particularly prostitutes seem to have been
favored objects, but state ofcials and professionals also worked to inculcate
women in moral and civic values they hoped would modernize family life
through education, public health campaigns, and the communications media.
In recent works, Susan Besse and Mary Kay Vaughan have demonstrated for
early-twentieth-century urban Brazil and postrevolutionary rural Mexico,
respectively, that these efforts were not intended to emancipate women, but, in
Vaughans words, to subordinate the household to the interests of national
development. The family and its gender relations were to be rationalized in
the interests of nation-building and development.59
Vida de mujeres de la vida: Prostitucin feminina en Antofogasta (1920 1930), in

Ruiz-Tagle, Perfiles revelado. For references to additional Chilean works, see Klubocks
essay in this issue, Writing the History of Women and Gender.
58. Esteves, Meninas perdidas; and Soihet, Condio feminina. Soihet describes violence
against women within popular culture, but emphasizes the autonomy women possess
because men do not support them economically.
59. Using a similar discourse, industrialists in So Paulo made remarkable efforts to
reform working class domestic life; see Barbara Weinstein, For Social Peace in Brazil:
Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in So Paulo, 1920 1964 (Chapel Hill:
Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996). Mary Kay Vaughan, Modernizing Patriarchy: State
Policies, Rural Households, and Women in Mexico, 1930 1940, in Hidden Histories of
Gender and the State in Latin America, ed. Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux (Durham:
476
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When the interpretive models, questions, and methodologies that developed in social and cultural history were brought to family history, that eld
underwent a transformation. In fact, the separation of these three subelds
became increasingly articial. For instance, demographic data has receded
further into the footnotes in much of the recent work on slave families in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazil. In the text of several works on the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, historians analyze criminal and civil trial
testimony, wills and testaments, household inventories, marriage impediment
dispensations, travel literature, newspapers, or visual images to describe slaves
social worlds. Historians agree that legitimate marriage and stable family life
was universally desired and frequently achieved by slaves in certain settings
(medium to large holdings in areas of economic stability). What these stories
mean in the larger picture is the subject of debate: Did allowing slaves to form
stable families deter slave rebellion?60 Did slaves choose mates from within
ethnic groups because of intense animosity among them?61 Did slaves and
freed persons use marriage as a way to integrate into free families, eschewing
solidarity or identication with other slaves?62 Or did forming a family give
slaves the ability to construct physical spaces, community ties, and other cultural forms that were reminiscent of Africa?63
Women are half of the equation in these studies, and appear as protagonists in a variety of circumstances. The imbalance in the number of men and
women, womens role in childrearing, and the resulting greater likelihood that
women could marry and form families, are noted throughout these works. Yet,
a sustained discussion of the cultural construction of gender and sexuality that
might allow closer analysis of the internal dynamics of slave families is absent.
As Sandra Lauderdale Graham has demonstrated in a study of the 1856
divorce of a formerly enslaved African couple in Rio de Janeiro, for example,
consideration of gender can clarify hopes and expectations slaves brought to
marriage and the different ways women and men interpreted cultural values
Duke Univ. Press, 2000), 194; idem, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and
Schools in Mexico, 1930 1940 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1997); and Susan K. Besse,
Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914 1940 (Chapel
Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996). See also Borges, The Family in Bahia.
60. Jos Roberto Ges and Manolo Florentino argue that stable families deterred
slave rebellions; see their A paz das senzalas: Famlias escravas e trfico atlntico, Rio de Janeiro,
c. 1790 c. 1850 (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizao Brasileira, 1997).
61. Ibid.
62. Castro, Das cores do silncio.
63. Slenes, Na senzala, uma flor.
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477
such as honor. Another example is the richly documented study of slave families in early-nineteenth-century Lima by Christine Hnefeldt. Hnefeldt argues
that attention to gender relations as well as to womens specic forms of resistance illuminates family strategies for maximizing autonomy under slavery.
Although resting on fragile empirical ground in quantitative terms, Hnefeldt
makes an intriguing argument that womens recourse to the courts and to
religious authorities against abusive masters contributed to rising manumission rates in the rst half of the nineteenth century, higher for women than
men.64
Most of what we know of the moral values and internal dynamics of marriage before the twentieth century comes not from studies of slave families,
but from the rich body of scholarship on marriage, sexuality, and honor in the
colonial period, especially in Brazil and New Spain, that has appeared between
roughly the mid-1980s to the late 1990s. This literature, like that of the modern period described above, has been inuenced by new currents in social and
cultural history. A number of scholars looking for clues to popular daily life
and mentality tapped the records of the Inquisition and of periodic visitas to
regional outposts by bishops and other church ofcials who hoped to bolster
Christian morality in areas it was deemed lacking.65 Solange Alberros monumental work on the Inquisition in New Spain was followed by a host of
smaller-scale studies of different kinds of sexual and social practices sodomy,
concubinage, marriage, bigamy based on documents from the Inquisition as
well as other ecclesiastical and civil courts.66 In Brazil, the most important
64. Lauderdale Graham, House and Street; and Hnefeldt, Paying the Price Of
Freedom.
65. A similar interest in the Spanish Inquisition emerged at around the same time.
See Jos Mara Garca Fuentes, Inquisicin en Granada en el siglo XVI: Fuentes para su estudio
(Granada: Departamento de Historia, Univ. de Granada, 1981); Sara Tilghman Nalle, God
in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500 1650 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992); and Henry Kamen, The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the
Counter Reformation ( New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993).
66. Alberro, La actividad del Santo Oficio; idem, La sexualidad manipulada en Nueva
Espaa: Modalidades de recuperacin y de adaptacin frente a los Tribunales Eclesisticos,
Seminario de Historia de las Mentalidades (1982); idem, Inquisicin y sociedad en Mxico,
15711700 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1988); and idem, Seis ensayos. See
also the collections of articles published on colonial marriage, sexuality, morals, and the
family under the auspices of the Seminario de Historia de las Mentalidades, cited in note 2.
The most well-known collection is Sergio Ortega Noriega, De la santidad a la perversin: O
de porqu no se cumpla la ley de Dios en la sociedad novohispana (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1986).
478
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studies using Inquisition documents were written by Luis Roberto de Barros

Mott, who was specically interested in uncovering a history of gay life by
analyzing sodomy trials; Laura de Mello e Souza, who analyzed the relationships between the persecution of witchcraft and European images of Brazil as
a land of untamed sexuality and demons; Ronaldo Vainfas, who wrote a social
history of family, morality, and sexuality and described the institutional and
religious history of the Inquisition in Brazil. Ligia Bellini wrote one of the few
historical works on same-sex relationships between women, based on Inquisition trials of female sodomists.67
Other studies of colonial sexuality, marriage, and moral values used Inquisition documents as well as a variety of criminal and civil litigation records to
answer questions ranging from how the conquest and Spanish colonization
affected gender relations and ideologies to why the Bourbons attempted to
bolster parental control over their childrens marriages.68 Despite differences
67. Luiz Roberto de Barros Mott, Os pecados da famlia na Bahia de Todos os Santos
(Salvador: Centro de Estudos Baianos, 1982); idem, O sexo proibido: Virgens, gays e escravos
nas garras da Inquisio (Campinas: Ed. Papirus, 1988); idem, Escravido, homossexualidade e
demonologia (So Paulo: Icone, 1988); Laura de Mello e Souza, O diabo e a Terra de Santa
Cruz: Feitiaria e religiosidade popular no Brasil colonial (So Paulo: Companhia das Letras,
1987); Vainfas, Trpicos dos pecados; Ligia Bellini, A coisa obscura: Mulher, sodomia e inquisio
no Brasil colonial (So Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1989). Vainfas ( pp. 143 86) also provides an
interesting analysis of homosexual relationships among both male and females accused of
sodomy, as well as a description of how sodomites were represented in popular culture.
68. See the two outstanding collections on sexuality and honor in English: Lavrin,
Sexuality and Marriage, which brought together some of the best of the scholarship
produced in the 1980s, including research that was incorporated into important
monographs over the following decade; and Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera,
eds., The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque:
Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1998). Two inuential works to appear before the Lavrin
volume were Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over
Marriage Choice, 1574 1821 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988), a study of changes in
the meaning of honor based on documents of parental opposition to childrens marriage
choices and Spanish literary sources; and Ramn A. Gutirrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn
Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500 1846 (Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), an analysis of the Spanish colonization of the northern frontier
from the perspective of gender and everyday life. Seed and Gutirrez come to opposite
conclusions regarding whether parental control over marriage increased (Seeds argument)
or decreased (Gutirrezs argument) in the late-eighteenth century. Subsequent scholarship
favored the argument that it decreased. See Stern, The Secret History of Gender, 384 85 n.
13; Lavrins introduction to Sexuality and Marriage, 17; and Nazzari, Disappearance of the
Dowry. See also Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches. Silverblatt uses inquisition records of
idolatry and other documents to argue that traditionally complementary and reciprocal
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in focus and interpretation among these works, they share a common commitment to describing colonial subjects everyday lives, worldviews, and values
what some call popular culture and others, mentalities as well as the
moral norms disseminated by the church and elite society.
Social and cultural analyses also brought a shift in studies of elite families
in colonial and nineteenth-century Latin America. Scholars found that women
played important roles in arranging childrens marriages, maintaining social
ties, running complex households, and even taking over political functions and
managing property in the absence of a husband.69 Iberian property and inheritance law favored women much more than Northern European laws, and
some, albeit few, women could obtain legal separations without losing their
dowry and their portion of the family estate.70 Elite women were not always so
chaste as prescription demanded, and their honor was not always permanently
stained when they transgressed moral boundaries. Not surprisingly, the chasm
between moral prescription and everyday practices was much more evident
among nonelite families.71
Scholars of colonial marriage and sexuality agree that honor played a critical role in constructing and reproducing legal and social categories and identities; that church, state, and individual families increasingly competed for the
control of marriage and sexuality during the turbulent eighteenth century; and
that some of the social practices of the majority of the population clashed with
gender roles in Andean societies became more unequal as a result of rst Inca expansion
and then the Spanish invasion. She also provides a fascinating description of indigenous
womens religiosity, particularly their roles in preserving ancestor cults by maintaining
secret shrines. More recent ethnohistorical scholarship on the effect of the colonization of
New Spain presents a less romantic vision of pre-Hispanic gender relations, demonstrating
that gender parallelism and complementarity could coexist with gender hierarchy and
subordination. See Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett, eds., Indian
Women of Early Mexico ( Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1997).
69. See Susan Socolows excellent synthesis in the chapter entitled Elite Women, in
The Women of Colonial Latin America. On a mothers role in choosing her childrens marriage
partners, see Ferry, The Colonial Elite, 223 35. An interesting perspective on womens role
in kinship networks is Richard Grahams discussion of womens petitions for patronage for
male relatives from other, well-positioned relatives. See Richard Graham, Patronage and
Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990).
70. On divorce, see Arrom, Women of Mexico City; Hnefeldt, Liberalism in the
Bedroom; and Nizza da Silva, Sistema de casamento no Brasil.
71. This is evident in demographic phenomenon such as the prevalence of
illegitimacy and female-headed households. See discussion above and Socolow, The Women
of Colonial Latin America, chap. 5.
480
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moral prescriptions. There is some debate, however, about the signicance of

honor to different social groups; about the reasons church and state policies on
marriage and sexuality changed over time; and about why there was a breach
between popular practices and elite prescriptions. As is true of the national
period scholarship, historians committed to recovering the agency of women,
the popular classes, or subalterns have tended to interpret patterns such as
low marriage rates or illegitimacy as evidence of alternative cultural values
or even resistance to morals dictated by church or state. Those who emphasized the power of political or religious institutions or discursive representation have argued that the population shared elite cultural values (or, in earlier
work, that the lower classes internalized elite values),72 but that the poor were
unable to live by these values, often for material reasons.
Latin American Gender History since 1995:
North American Monographs
Much of the historiography on gender produced over the past ve years has
attempted to cast these debates in new terms. Steve Stern, arguing in 1995 for
the need to move beyond analyses that focused on womens conformity or
deviance to established norms, outlined two insights that he believes previous
scholarship failed to explore: that there was interplay between gender culture
and political culture at all levels of the body politic; and that women and
men developed multiple codes of gender right, obligation, and honor, which
were subject to continual contestation.73 Among the major trends in scholarship published since then has been an attempt to explore the relevance of these
insights to a variety of historical processes. Like Stern, these authors write
72. Verena Martnez-Alier uses this analysis to explain why black Cubans seemed to
prefer to marry someone whiter. Among colored people, she writes, a very general
aspiration was to become as light and to get as far away from slavery as possible. Instead
of developing a consciousness of their own worth they made their own the white
discriminating ideology imposed on them from above. Martnez-Alier, Marriage, Class and
Colour, 96. In the 1980s, as I have argued above, social historians tended to reject this
kind of analysis and to look instead for ways that the culture of subordinated groups
contrasted with that of the elite. In 1995, however, a study by Hebe Castro marked a
departure from both arguments by arguing that slaves and freedpersons aspired to get far
away from slavery by integrating themselves into free poor families. They did not form a
black identity based on a common experience of slavery, but rather insisted that racial
categories should not matter. Castro, Das cores do silncio, esp. 404.
73. Stern, The Secret History of Gender, 19 20.
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about the politics of gender and gendering of politics (in Sterns words) or, in
a formulation akin to that of Joan Scott, the ways gender represented both a
set of power-laden distinctions between women and men and a way of signifying power as sexual difference.74 This focus has helped a new generation of
scholars to resolve the tension between top down or bottom up interpretations of honor, gender, and morality. It has also helped resolve the problem of
explaining, from the perspective of everyday practice and mentality, how
honor, gender, and politics change.
Objecting to Sterns claims of novelty, Susan Socolow has pointed out that
a great deal of previous scholarship on Latin America already had shown that
women challenged patriarchy by citing gender rights and obligations within
marriage, that womens transgressions were common, and that women were
punished within the family.75 New work has taken, it is true, a smaller step
than Stern seems to imply for his own. As I hope to have made clear in this
essay and as several authors, including Stern, note in their introductions
without the body of scholarship created in the 1970s and 1980s, more recent
research would not have been conceivable.76 What is new is a focus on the
interaction between the meaning of gender in everyday life and the role it has
played in political formation, institution building, and power relations in general. Rejecting the notion that gender ideology is always imposed from above
and then either rejected or accommodated below, scholars have found various
ways that gender has been constructed through interaction among those with
and without power. This common theoretical concern brings a unity to works
that are otherwise vastly different.
On the whole, the new scholarship is notable for its methodological eclecticism and empirical rigor. Colonial historians, particularly Kathryn Burns and
Ann Twinam, have combed private and public archives in Spain and the Americas, placing stories of individual lives within the history of warfare, religion,
or imperial administration.77 Both offer compelling accounts of the longue
dure, demonstrating that major watersheds such as Spanish-Incan wars, late
colonial rebellions, and the Bourbon Reforms looks different when gender is
74. Stern, The Secret History of Gender, 21; Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises, 3; Joan
Scott, Gender and the Politics of History ( New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), 42 50.
75. Susan Socolow, Review of Stern, The Secret History of Gender, The Americas 53
(1996).
76. Heidi Tinsman provides an especially interesting account of the ways scholarship
on women in development has paved the way for her study of domestic violence during
Chiles agrarian reform. Tinsman, Introduction to Partners in Conflict.
77. Burns, Colonial Habits; Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets.
482
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at the center of analysis. Scholars such as Sarah Chambers, Eileen Findlay,

Thomas Klubock, Karin Rosemblatt, Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Heidi Tinsman,
and Lara Putnam have combined methods of political, cultural, and social history, juxtaposing sources ranging from government and company records to
notarial and judicial documents to oral history and popular literature in ways
that recast key chapters of national or transnational historical narratives.
While several of these chapters have little in common, there is a striking
similarity in the theoretical approaches that guide these and other new authors.
Foucault appears less in their theoretical discussions than might have been the
case ten years ago, although his perception that power is disseminated through
multiple disciplinary discourses in modern societies remains in the background.78 In the foreground is Bourdieus concept of habitus, and even more
prominently, Gramscis concept of hegemony, often as read by Raymond
Williams, the latter two more prevalent in works on the national period.79
Bourdieus habitus, or the set of norms that dene the parameters and common sense of a group or class, has replaced the broader and potentially essentializing notion of class or ethnic cultures.80 Hegemony has provided a way
of understanding how political and cultural framework or idioms that establish
social order become common to all of society through negotiations albeit on
unequal terms between those who possess authority and those who do not.81
78. For explicit discussion of Foucault, see Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises, 15 16;
and Alonso, Thread of Blood, 117.
79. Works most often cited are Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice
( New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977); Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison
Notebooks ( New York: International Publishers, 1971); and Raymond Williams, Marxism
and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977).
80. See Burns, Colonial Habits, 4; Klubock, Contested Communities, 6. Findlay, Imposing
Decency, 13; Farnsworth-Alvear, Dulcinea in the Factory, 103, 183 84.
81. The notion of hegemony as a meaningful framework comes from William
Roseberry, Hegemony and the Language of Contention, in Everyday forms of State
Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, ed. Gilbert Joseph and
Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), cited in Chambers, From Subjects to
Citizens, 12. See also Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises, 14 16; Klubock, Contested
Communities, 5 6; Farnsworth-Alvear, Dulcinea in the Factory, 163, 230; Tinsmans
introduction to Partners in Conflict. Alonso, Thread of Blood, argues that Gramscis concept of
hegemony as produced in civil society does not allow for analysis of the states role in this
production. She insists on the need to analyze how the state participates, penetrating civil
society through everyday practices of rule. Alonso, Thread of Blood, 115 18. The other
authors cited here analyze these everyday practices, recognizing the potential for this
expanded view of the state in Gramsci. The inuence of Florencia Mallon is evident in
much of this discussion. See especially Mallon, The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern
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483
The presentation of theoretical approaches occupies a position of prominence in several new works, generally in their introductions, and at times
throughout the narrative. This is certainly true of Sterns study of plebeian
notions of gender and honor in late colonial Mexico, based largely on analysis
of testimony in criminal records. Sterns richly detailed account of patterned
relationships among nuclear family, extended kin, and village community is a
powerful contribution to scholarship on family and gender in Latin America.
Rejecting a dichotomous view of accommodation or resistance to dominant
ideology, Stern uses the concept of a patriarchal pact, whereby women and
men accept culturally constructed roles and responsibilities in marriage, but
struggle over their content, bringing in kin and village elders to mediate when
struggles escalate.82 The notion is reminiscent of Richard Boyers patriarchal
contract, but draws on village-level social mores, without Boyers argument
that these values formed part of the general logic of monarchy.83 Sterns
lengthy discussion of previous scholarship and his own theoretical and methodological innovations, however, at times turns theorizing into an end in itself
rather than a tool.84
The same critique applies to Ana Alonsos Thread of Blood. Alonso provides
a fascinating account of the central role played by gender and honor in the
development of a militarized society and in warfare against the Apache on
Mexicos northern frontier in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
She presents a compelling argument that gendered notions of honor structured Namiquipan resistance to new state projects of social control in the
nineteenth century and help explain Namiquipan participation in the revolution. Yet her discussion of theorists, and even of the meaning of honor, too
often distracts attention from her narrative rather than enhancing it. When
the theoretical underpinnings of analysis are disassociated from evidence, it is
difcult to evaluate the validity of each element in her argument. A tendency
toward theoretical abstraction weakens even her discussion of specically
Namiquipan cultural concepts, including her intriguing account of how conditions on the frontier molded the contours of honor. An otherwise forceful
Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History, American Historical Review 99 (1994):
14911515; and idem, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995).
82. Stern, Secret History of Gender, 97 111.
83. Boyer, Women, La Mala Vida, and the Politics of Marriage, in Lavrin, Sexuality
and Marriage, 252 86.
84. This is evident, for example, in his discussion of honor and shame systems
throughout the world. Stern, Secret History of Gender, 15 16.
484
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analysis loses momentum in a crucial section on honor and class, where in lieu
of evidence, a footnote explains that the chapter is based on oral histories,
archival documents, and ethnographic eldwork.85
In other works, theory is used more sparingly as a tool that helps to reveal
a specic historical process and explain how the story ts into or challenges
broader historical narratives. Kathryn Burns, for example, describes the world
of cloistered nuns and the broader spiritual economy in which they lived in
colonial Cuzco as a habitus, where specic kinds of practices, exchanges, and
relationships were common sense.86 To do this, she produces an elegant text
that does not rely on late-twentieth-century jargon, but rather dissects keywords, or the colonial terminology that refers to concepts of property, entitlement, social difference, freedom, and honor that are unfamiliar to modern
sensibilities.87 Understanding these concepts allows her to make sense of
relationships between spiritual and material investments paying for prayers
or endowing women to marry Christ, for example as well as the nuns role
in securing Spanish hegemony and producing the ethnic and class hierarchies that came to characterize colonial Cuzco by the end of the seventeenth
century.
As moneylenders and landowners, convents in Cuzco, like those of New
Spain and Brazil, played a central role in the colonial economy.88 Burns opens
new ground, however, in her account of the logic of social order in and outside
the convent. Sacred marriage to Christ reproduced the logic of patriarchy in a
symbolic and material sense. The convent formed part of elite families strategies to expand kinship networks and maintain honor by arranging marriages;
hence, the daughters of Cuzcos wealthiest families took vows. Within the convent walls, nuns mothered orphaned or abandoned children and maintained
sizeable households of slaves, servants, girls receiving education, women prisoners, and battered wives. After the rst generation, the nuns divided their
society by black or white veils, according to ethnicity and the size of the
dowry. Originally intended to hispanicize mestiza daughters of the conquistadors and guarantee their honor, the convent instead reproduced honor codes
that relegated non-Spanish women to lower-status positions. By indoctrinat-
85. Alonso, Thread of Blood, 251 n. 1.

86. Burns, Colonial Habits, 4.
87. Ibid., 6.
88. See Asuncin Lavrins pathbreaking work on Mexican convents: Ecclesiastical
Reform; and The Role of Nunneries. Susan Soeiro comes to similar conclusions for
Salvador, Brazil; see Soeiro, The Feminine Orders.
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ing the rst generations of Cuzcos indigenous and mestiza elite women, the
convent played a key role in disseminating these honor codes.
Ann Twinams book on elite concepts of honor as expressed in law, politics, and the lives of illegitimates and their families throughout colonial Spanish America refers to theoretical approaches even more sparingly than Burns.
This is purposeful. Theorizing about honor a priori, Twinam insists, has led to
anachronistic assumptions in previous scholarship on Latin America.89 To
avoid this mistake, Twinam outlines a method of emic analysis, one that looks
at her documents from the inside out and listens to the voices of colonial
Spanish Americans. Like Burns, Twinam is interested in understanding the
common sense of honor for colonial elites, and she is even more attuned to
the meaning of their language or vocabulary. Analyzing circumlocutions,
forms of address, terms that expressed intimacy, and, most importantly, the
placement of the word honor (without any qualiers) in texts, she describes
a world that revolved around personal honor, a birthright of the few.90 Yet
while honor was recognized or denied in virtually every public interaction,
private dishonor could sometimes be kept secret or washed away. Unmarried
women who kept their pregnancy private could maintain honor; illegitimate
offspring who achieved public respect could acquire it.
In Twinans telling of the lives of illegitimate children, their mothers, and
their fathers, we see that these paths were often excruciating. Reading requests
for royal legitimation alongside other documents where the same individuals
appear a task that required painstaking research in an astonishing number of
archives Twinam reveals the trauma of fathers who wanted to do right by
their illegitimate children, of mothers who struggled to overcome the pain of
betrayal, of children born with a mark of dishonor. The degree of discrimination and availability of royal remedy varied according to political circumstances and region. However, Twinam nds little evidence, that these individuals resisted or even stretched dominant moral values that made this secrecy
necessary, or that the basic contours of honor were transformed, even after
Bourbon reforms made it easier to purchase legitimacy or whiteness.
Twinams conclusions might change if she were to look at honor from a
plebeian perspective. Richard Boyers study of popular mentalities, based on
the trials of bigamists brought before Mexican Inquisition, addresses this ques-
89. Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, 31.

90. Ibid., 27 29.
486
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tion directly.91 He uses methods similar to Twinam, but with different kinds of
detail: Twinams elites could sometimes be traced in multiple documents, but
this is not the case with Boyers plebeian bigamists; unlike Twinams study,
which also provides ample empirical data, Boyers study cannot explain the
relationship between everyday experiences of honor and major legal, political,
and economic shifts. The richness of Inquisition documents, however, is well
known to historians, and this is reected in Boyers captivating recounting of
individual life histories. Like Twinam, he uses these individual cases to illustrate themes that emerge from collective biographies, in his case culled from
216 trials. He goes even further than Twinam to avoid a priori theorizing,
claiming that his work is largely a report drawn from archival materials.92
Boyer concludes that the church indeed transmitted its ideology to ordinary
people, noting that this is a major conclusion of the collective historical work
of the Seminario de Historia de las Mentalidades y Religin en Mxico Colonial at the Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia in Mexico City.93
Much was lost, however, in the transmission. It is with a sense of irony,
Boyer argues, that we should stress that bigamists complied with the norms
of their church and society about as much as they avoided them.94 Neither
compliance nor avoidance, in Boyers view, were forms of resistance in the
heroic sense, but rather the consequences of ordinary people making choices
and carrying on day by day.95
Works on gender in the national period including Burnss account of
the decline of the convents in nineteenth-century Cuzco nd that longstanding moral values such as honor retained a central place in politics and
social relations, but their meaning was altered, sometimes over the course of
only a few decades. For several authors, insights gleaned from contemporary
social theory provide new ways to perceive and analyze these changes.
Thomas Klubock, for example, uses the concept of hegemony to explain
how Chilean copper workers in the early twentieth centurywho were among
Latin Americas most militant and class-conscious proletarians reproduced
some of the moral norms that the U.S. company energetically sought to
impose through hiring, housing, and welfare programs. Values including masculine work ethic, feminine domesticity and motherhood, and middle-class
91. Richard Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial
Mexico (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1995).
92. Ibid., 8.
93. Ibid., 220, 308 n. 4.
94. Ibid., 232.
95. Ibid.
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487
public respectability and private responsibility framed both a hegemonic language and practice of domination/consent and a counterhegemonic language
of resistance. Miners demanded fair treatment based on their sense of honor
earned through hard work and support of families; their wives transformed
their domestic and maternal responsibilities into moral justication for salary
increases and expanded social services. This common language, however, did
not frame all forms of counterhegemony. Miners, he shows, also cultivated a
masculine sense of honor and solidarity through drinking, gambling, and
dominating women, sometimes violently.96
In her study of the construction of republican citizenship in nineteenthcentury Arequipa, Peru, Sarah Chambers demonstrates how plebeian resistance resulted not in counterhegemonic militancy, but in changes in liberal
discourses and strategies of social control. She uses the concept of hegemony
to explain how the myth of the White City, which casts Arequipa as a racially
and economically democratic bastion of liberal republicanism, gained credibility among plebeian Arequipeos despite the citys history of violent conict
and inequality. Gendered concepts of honor provided a common framework
for social order in both colonial and republican Arequipa, but the meaning of
honor was transformed after independence. In public rituals and institutions as
well as everyday social interactions, plebeian Arequipeos began applying liberal discourses regarding civil liberties and the respect due to republican citizens to themselves. When nervous rulers created new forms of social control
that stressed patriarchal family values, the recipe was complete. Through a
close reading of a variety of judicial records over more than half a century,
Chambers charts changes in the language and practice of honor among plebeian deponents and judicial ofcials. Honor came to be dened as an equalizing component of Republican virtue rather than a mark of colonial status. In
exchange for support of republican social and even military campaigns, plebeian men gained public respect, a degree of political participation, and patriarchal authority over women and wards in the home. Hegemony, now rooted
in the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, was not simply imposed from
above, but cultivated through a process of negotiation that incorporated hardworking male heads of household and excluded others, including all women.97
96. Klubock, Contested Communities.
97. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens. This conclusion is supported in part by
Christine Hnefeldts interesting and well-documented study of study of trials involving
marital separation and sexual crimes in nineteenth-century Lima. Hnefeldt does not use
the notion of hegemony, but argues that plebeian women and men continually redened
their positions in relation to each other and to the state as political circumstance
488
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Page 488
As Klubocks and Chamberss studies make clear, hegemony can be a useful tool to analyze how broad cultural values come to be shared through different processes of conict and unequal negotiation, with different outcomes.
These works also illustrate the potential of gender analysis to radically recast
our view of class identication and political conicts when gender is understood as the construction of both masculinity and femininity.
This point is highlighted in Karin Rosemblatts study of leftist political
culture under popular front governments in Chile (1920 50) and in Eileen
Findlays research on the ways that sexuality and race emerged in Puerto Rican
politics under Spanish and U.S. colonial rule. Like Klubock and Chambers,
Rosemblatt uses the concept of hegemony to show how party militants and
professional reformists (especially social workers) sought to convert working
families into bastions of proletarian virtue by teaching the values of feminine
domesticity and masculine responsibility. Although the content of moral
reform was altered by their contacts with actual working families, their refusal
to attack the basis of masculine privilege and recognize working-class mens
subjugation of women made it impossible for progressive feminists to push
forward their more democratic vision for Chilean women.98
Findlay comes to similar conclusions in her analysis of early-twentiethcentury political struggles and discourses in Puerto Rico.99 Masculinity, in
dominant codes of nineteenth-century honor, was displayed by controlling
and protecting a mans own women and sexually conquering others. This
aspect of the honor code developed in slave society proved difcult to
break, for it offered all free men, including former slaves, a modicum of
demanded. Like Chambers, Hnefeldt sees womens positions decline, but identies the
cause as the loss of protections such as the dowry and inheritance laws. Unlike Chambers,
however, Hnefeldt argues that womens legal pleas, increasingly couched in a secular
language of their rights as wives, mothers, and workers, eventually led to new legal
protections. Chamberss reading of legal documents is different. Comparing cases of rape
or seduction to cases of domestic abuse, Chambers nds that the courts favored women
and punished men in the former but not the latter, unless the men were vagabonds or
otherwise failed to fulll their obligations as heads of households. The punishment of men
who abused women outside of the family, but not within it, was compatible with the states
recognition of male patriarchal privilege.
98. Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises.
99. Rather than the concept of hegemony, Findlay develops a discourse analysis,
inspired partly by Foucault and Ann Stoler, to analyze the ways sexuality and race emerged
as crucial issues in a variety of nationalist political movements, ranging from bourgeois
feminist to labor. Findlay diverges from Foucault in her insistence that multiple, discrete
discourses emerged from different social groups and that these discourses grew out of
their creators particular lived experiences; see Findlay, Imposing Decency, 5.
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489
honor.100 Even anarchists who tied sexual subjugation to class oppression

in the 1900s1910s resorted to familiar images of sexual abuse of working
women by capitalists, drawing on workingmens sense of proprietorship of
women. Although mens discourses silenced the voices of the few radical
women who called for sexual and economic liberty, the net result of the
discourses of racial and sexual inclusion that emerged from radical mobilization was to alter the political landscape. Growing anti-imperialism and
solidarity among male and female workers fed unprecedented popular
opposition to U.S.-designed regulation of prostitutes, most of whom were
poor and black during the World War I period.
Taken together, the work on masculinity in the national period has
changed the tone of the scholarship that that came out of the new social history of the 1970s and 1980s.101 Historians are still committed to understanding
the historical agency of subordinated groups. They are equally committed,
however, not to romanticize this agency by seeing resistance to everywhere or
by covering up the less admirable aspects of popular norms or mentalities.
Heidi Tinsman and Lara Putnam, studying domestic violence during Chiles
agrarian reform and gender and migration on Costa Ricas Atlantic coast,
respectively, use different theoretical approaches to analyze relationships
between working-class masculinity and femininity and larger political and
community networks.102 Tinsman draws from psychoanalytical and marxistfeminist theories developed in the 1970s and 1980s to place the relationships
between sexuality, patriarchy, and class at the center of her analysis. She shows
that the Christian Democrat and Popular Unity agrarian reform policies bolstered patriarchy while political militancy pulled men and women away from
domestic responsibilities. The mobilization of husbands and daughters resulted
in a sense of heightened instability for wives and mothers. Men, meanwhile,
felt more and more insecure about their ability to control womens sexuality as
they lost control over their companions comings and goings. The simultaneous increase in womens freedom of movement and instability led to new kinds
of conicts over sexual relationships and gender roles, along with womens
ambiguous memories about the Popular Front period.103
Putnams study of the early years of Costa Ricas banana boom shows that
100. Ibid., 27.
101. An important new work on masculinity is Peter Beattie, Tribute of Blood: Army,
Honor, Race and Nation in Brazil, 1864 1945 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2001); I was not
able to review this book in time to include it in this essay.
102. Tinsman, Partners in Conflict; Putnam, Public Women and One-Pant Men. See also
Tinsmans article in this issue.
103. Tinsman, Partners in Conflict.
490
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masculine notions of patriarchal honor clashed with womens economic and

social autonomy, leading to extraordinarily high rates of womens murder by
men. Patterns of male sociability among itinerant workers, which fostered
class and political solidarity, also created a heightened need to defend ones
honor and led to enduringly high levels of male on male violence. In contrast
to the books discussed above, Putnam nds that neither the United Fruit
Company nor the Costa Rican state made serious efforts to direct these social
or criminal patterns or to impose moral discipline in the banana zone. The
concept of hegemony is not useful to her, for the social relationships and
honor codes that she describes did not always arise or change as the result of a
process of elite and popular give and take. Instead, Putnam takes a microhistorical approach, using nominal record linkage to put together the pieces of
individual lives. She presents vivid qualitative evidence that moral values
(including the ubiquitous concept of honor) were afrmed and challenged
within the family life, social networks, afnities and animosities, and racial and
class categories that were built by migrants who arrived to reap the benets of
the banana boom. Analyzing the testimony and social practices of coastal residents and passers-through, Putnam argues that, by the large, social life was not
idiosyncratic but patterned, as individuals made use of existing social scripts
in their public self-presentation. With quantitative evidence from samples of a
variety of criminal and police records as well as published demographic data
and texts, Putnam explains how the social patterns and available scripts
changed with the rise and fall of the banana economy.104
In the end, of course, the content of historical scholarship, the actual
processes and events that it illuminates, and the conclusions drawn are more
important than commonalities in theoretical or analytical approaches. It is
likely that the lasting contribution of the new crop of books on gender, taken
as a whole, is the recognition of the continuing signicance of honor, past
independence and through political regimes ranging from the U.S. military to
socialist reformers. This recognition harks back to questions of the colonial
legacy explicit in works of Chambers and Findlay, as well as in the authors
study of honor as seen through legal, political, and urban reform movements
and cases of sexual crime in early-twentieth-century Brazil. These books, as
well as the colonial scholarship cited above, demonstrate that to understand
honor requires attention to the material and symbolic aspects of gender, its
intersection with categories of race, class, region, and generation, and the uidity of the individual experiences that add up to collective structures.105
104. Putnam, Public Women and One-Pant Men.
105. I owe this formulation to conversations with Lara Putnam.

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The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America

Hispanic American Historical Review, 81:3-4, August-November 2001,

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The History of Gender in the

Writing in 1972, Ann Pescatello bemoaned the underdevelopment of Latin

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women.3 Although this trend is as signicant as the outpouring of publications

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Memoria del primer simposio de historia de las mentalidadesFamilia, Matrimonio y Sexualidad

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Political shifts, of course, also inuenced scholarly trajectories. As the

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Methodological innovations in the historical scholarship on women and

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As someone who nished graduate school in the mid-1990s, I feel fortunate to

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was recognized as cutting edge in the 1990s. In contrast to the professional

Pre-Conquest to Contemporary Times (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977); Marysa Navarro,

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Notwithstanding the historical materialist approach of some of the early

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lished extensively in Spanish and English, including edited volumes that

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a 1979 review, it was the international development literature and conferences

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In 1978, Asuncin Lavrin cited similar documents legal records of divorce,

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Womens history continued to lag behind the social sciences in research on

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1933, depicted it as the dominant force in patronage systems; the circulation of

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ization and industrialization as a response to demands for domestic market

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