What did it mean to be a woman in colonial Spanish America? One way to answer this question is to look at how women of indigenous and Spanish descent from different social ranks were defined through custom and law. This book explores the lives of a spectrum of women from the Audiencia of Quito during the seventeenth century. It focuses on women’s use of legal and extralegal means to achieve personal and economic goals; their often successful attempts to confront men’s physical violence, adultery, lack of financial support, and broken marriage proposals; women’s control over property; and their participation in...

“From the days of the primitive church to early modern times, patriarchalism was the underlying principle of all social relationships.”¹ This sweeping statement brings us face to face with an assumption shared by almost all historians of gender in early Spanish America: patriarchy is a universal form of social organization. Under this “fundamental law of inequality,”² women were perpetual minors under the tutelage of fathers and then husbands. According to this view, men represented women in the public sphere and, within the family, controlled women’s sexuality, reproductive roles, and labor power. The patriarchal paradigm has, in many ways, expanded the...

Marriage was a sacred union eternally uniting the bodies and souls of husbands and wives. The merging of their property, however, was a different matter. If the church brought a man and woman together, civil legislation did much to keep their estates apart. The form of Spanish marriage practiced was indeed a paradox; joined in permanent unions, wives and husbands still loaned each other money from their private estates and expected their spouses to pay them back.¹ This chapter considers the organization of property within marriage as a reflection of the relations between husbands and wives. The focus on women...

In 1662 Maestro Francisco de la Vega, priest in charge of the parish of San Marcos in Quito, testified that he was well aware of the illicit relationship between the married Antonio Carrillo and María de Castillo. Antonio’s wife, Agustina de la Vega (not a family relative of the priest), frequently complained to him that her husband physically mistreated her, stole her property, and abandoned her to live with María de Castillo, a woman held in ill repute by most of the parishioners. After patiently listening to Agustina “ten or twelve times,” he gave her a recommendation that might seem...

Women contributed substantially to the prosperity of colonial Spanish America through their economic participation. The breadth of women’s commercial activities has, indeed, attracted the attention of numerous historians. The research of these scholars has not only increased our knowledge about the kinds of economic activities women participated in, but, as a collective body of scholarship, their work also shows the universal character of women’s involvement in the colonial economy. What remains less clear in the literature, however, is how and why the social structure permitted and even encouraged women to become economic actors. Women’s participation in the colonial economy has,...

The indigenous market women of the Audiencia of Quito are unique in the region’s commercial history because the combination of their profession, gender, and racial status made them identifiable as a specific group of economic actors. Authorities regulated and punished the women collectively, and the indigenous women vendors themselves challenged authorities and made alliances with other social sectors as groups organized around the specific products the women sold. This chapter explores indigenous women’s participation in marketing in the city of Quito, the smaller villa of Riobamba, and some of the outlying pueblos of these two sierran urban centers.

In 1654...

In 1469 Isabella, queen of Castile, married Ferdinand, king of Aragon. Many scholars consider the marriage of these two powerful monarchs to be the most important event in Spanish history, the event, in fact, which created for the first time a unified Spain.¹ The institution of marriage in Iberian tradition, however, though it might indeed connect the destinies of spouses, did not connect their worldly possessions. Like all other married women, Isabella retained her individual name and title, in her case queen of Castile. She also retained possession of her estate, which was the Kingdom of Castile. Castile was far...