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

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

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

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its &“free market&” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country&’s poor, including women&’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women&’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women&’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and &“unfinished&” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women&’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist &“issue networks&” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

In the seventeenth century, Catalina de Erauso, at age sixteen a renegade Basque nun, escaped from her convent and traveled to the New World, eventually reaching Peru. She became an outlaw and a crossdresser with a price on her head. Yet she ended her days absolved by both the King of Spain and the Pope, the latter of whom granted her permission to dress as a man for the remainder of her life. The Nun Ensign passed her final years guarding silver shipments on the Mexico City-Veracruz highway. The life of the Nun Ensign highlights not just her extraordinary life but also the opportunities seized by women in colonial Latin America. This book profiles the Nun Ensign and nine other women of colonial Latin America, offering an alternate method for understanding the region and its history. The ten figures span different ethnic, geographic, occupational, and class backgrounds. Through their stories, the reader comes away with an enriched understanding of colonial Latin American history.

A highly readable survey of women's experiences in Latin America from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

Indispensable for the student or researcher studying women's history, this book draws upon a wide array of cultural settings and time periods in which women displayed agency by carrying out their daily economic, familial, artistic, and religious obligations. Since record keeping began, history has been written by a relatively few elite men. Insights into women's history are left to be gleaned by scholars who undertake careful readings of ancient literature, examine archaeological artifacts, and study popular culture, such as folktales, musical traditions, and art. For some historical periods and geographic regions, this is the only way to develop some sense of what daily life might have been like for women in a particular time and place. This reference explores the daily life of women across civilizations. The work is organized in sections on different civilizations from around the world, arranged chronologically. Within each society, the encyclopedia highlights the roles of women within five broad thematic categories: the arts, economics and work, family and community life, recreation and social customs, and religious life. Included are numerous sidebars containing additional information, document excerpts, images, and suggestions for further reading.