Spanish Femininity

Having completed our assigner readings for the previous week I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of interest I took in the subjects covered. Namely the various topics in the first chapter of Women’s Lives in Colonial Quito. It was new and refreshing to study cases proving that a complete societal system of founded on patriarchy was not, and is not, universal throughout the globe. For the majority of my life I had studied under the assumption that this was, in fact, not the case. But I attribute this mainly to the information that I had been exposed to in detail. Hailing mostly from western European nations such as France and England, both of which share similar histories of feminist struggles that developed roughly along the same basic timelines, America has a history of patriarchal patterns in many facets of society. Obviously the first to come to mind is the distribution of domestic authority. I hold no doubt that the majority of Americans do, or at the very least historically have, in fact assume that the male/father/husband role that is filled in the nuclear family is also the source of most decision making and is therefore the authoritative figurehead.
Delving into the assigned readings with this mindset, it is easy to understand how the roles of men and women were in comparison surprising, different, and at least on some levels, more equal than those of many other western European cultures. For instance, upon the death of an elder estate owner land would be divided amongst numerous relatives, including women. This would rarely be the case in many other nations where it would seem mechanical for the eldest male to receive the estate in its entirety. Upon studying them, Spanish societies have struck me as far more progressive in many gender related aspects vis-à-vis other European nations and colonies.
I also took careful note of the text’s early mentioning of the representation of feminism and feminist women. A typical western feminist woman is usually considered a master of her own domain. By this I mean that she is in full control of her own sexuality and makes decisions that affect her on her own, being completely free to do so. Also, she is the result of generations of women gradually overcoming obstacles that have held back her gender. This portrayal ‘ideal modern woman’ seemingly holds potential for a detrimental impact on how we view women of third world nations, as well as their history. Western feminism tends to group women of developing nations into a category of repressed and disempowered individuals who share identical beginnings and struggles with western women. But is this necessarily the case? History as a whole in Spanish societies shows that its women have, basically, always been subject to differing treatment from that of typical western women.