I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T do you know what that mean?

The chapters in Gauderman’s book Women’s Lives in Colonial Quito on the work that women did in colonial society are fascinating.  Throughout the book Gauderman argues that the notions of patriarchy that many posess don’t really apply to colonial Spanish American society.  These chapters are especially convincing because she is able to demonstrate how mcuh women actively participated in the economic life of the times.  In colonial Quito, women owned and operated small textile factories, owned and operated small grocery stores (pulperias), owned land, marketed goods in the street, loaned money, and owned slaves.  Of course, race and class affected which women could do what.  For example, Spanish women often owned pulperias but would pay lower class women and men (often mestizo) to operate them.  Indigenous women, mestizas, and blacks were the ones who most often sold goods in the street.  However, Gauderman shows that both Spanish women and non-Spanish women owned land and loaned money.  In fact Gauderman says that women were often the people who kept actual money flowing through the economy.  Women with even a little money would loan it out .

Gender and property in colonial Spanish America also played out in interesting ways.  Married women had, to a large extent, complete control over their property even after marriage, unlike in colonial British America, where property automatically became the husband’s once the marriage took place.  Women, then, remained financially independent after marriage.  They could even loan their spouses money and sue if it wasn’t paid back!

Gauderman’s point in all of this is to point out how the bureaucratic decentralism practiced by the colonial government and the Spanish crown influenced colonial Spanish American society.  In an effort to stop any one group from concentrating power, the crown created and encouraged competition and overlapping jurisdiction.  In the same way, marriage became a space of competition and competing jurisdictions.  To prevent the male patriarchs from gaining to much economic power, property was left to a great extent in the hands of women.