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The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America
Sueann Cauleld
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 Ocio 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 Historiograa 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-T wentieth-Century Brazil (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000); Heidi Tinsman, Partners in Conict: 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 Conict. 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).
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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 T wentieth-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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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
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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, Unnished 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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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
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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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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).
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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 or: 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 or, 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 signicados 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.
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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., Perles 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).
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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, Perles 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:
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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 trco 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 or.
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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 Ocio; 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).
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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 T odos 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, T o Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conicts 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.
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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 Conict. 77. Burns, Colonial Habits; Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets.
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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 Conict. 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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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.
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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.
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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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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
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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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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 Conict; Putnam, Public Women and One-Pant Men. See also Tinsmans article in this issue. 103. Tinsman, Partners in Conict.
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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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HAHR 81.

The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America

Writing in 1972, Ann Pescatello bemoaned the underdevelopment of Latin

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