History 465- Week 5 Post

This week we finally got a glimpse of the gender relations that existed in Spain, who were conquering Latin America. It was interesting to see how the gender structure formed in Spain through the reconquering of the peninsula from the Muslims, which finally was accomplished with Ferdinand and Isabella. It was also interesting to note how unexpectedly different the gender roles were in Spain in contrast to the rest of Europe. The “decentralized monarchy” that came about as a result of the Reconquista directly influenced the roles and rights of men and women. The fact that both women and men had private property, legal rights, and more was a reflection of the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella, since they did not combine their property, yet maintained individual rule of specific areas of Spain. Perhaps knowledge of this social structure in Spain can be traced to the system the Spanish conquistadors implemented in their conquered regions of Latin America.

I now turn my attention to one of the articles for this past week by Allyson Poska. In it she is challenging the traditional notion that female chastity was of the utmost important in Spanish gender relations. The traditional view does seem to make some logical sense, since the Iberian Peninsula at this point was a site of intense Catholicism. Even as we discussed in class, the very idea that the Muslims (and Jews) needed to be expelled from the Peninsula came about because they were not Catholic but were heathens. However, Poska very adeptly presents several pieces of evidence that suggests anthropologists may have incorrectly cast the practices of the minority elites on the majority of Spaniards. She mentions celibacy rates, legal rights for sexually active women, and illegitimacy rates among other things as proof that in fact most Spaniards did not value chastity in women as previously they were thought to.

This is a pretty critical analysis, as it has huge repercussions on the role of women in relation to men. Whereas under the Catholic system of chastity a women might be shamed and ridiculed by having premarital relations, if it were true that chastity was not all that important, attitudes towards sex for both men and women would have been on more equal footing. Instead of a women being limited by the “Mediterranean honor code”, they could achieve honor from less sexist pursuits. Of course there were still clearly defined roles for men and women, these roles were more equivalent and absent of the sexual prejudice geared towards women under the Catholic chastity system.