Women’s Lives in Colonial Spanish America

Its funny to me how much my conceptions prior to reading the Gauderman book (and other things this semester) were that life for women in colonial Spanish America was exactly the same as what I thought life was like for women in colonial North America.  I had thought that they were downtrodden, with no rights, subject to tyrannical male authority from the husband on up.  In hindsight maybe basing my opinions solely upon what I gleaned from a rather useless high school text and The Scarlet Letter maybe wasn’t the wisest choice.  Regardless, Gauderman talks about how women (and children) were relatively independent in colonial society.  Her argument is that the Spanish governing structure, bureaucratic de-centralism, operated at the level of government but also in the structuring of “colonial social and legal norms”.  The logic was that absolute authority had to be checked at all levels, even within the family.  So woman had to be able to contest the absolute authority of their husbands.  They used the legal system, and to a lesser extent (and less successfully) the ecclesiastical courts, to contest the behavior of their husbands.  It is really striking how litigious the Spanish were, especially when people today talk about how people will sue over anything, as if its something new.  When one considers this, Spanish women weren’t as helpless as one might think they were.

Its interesting to me think about how cultures varied across Europe, and how different Spain was from, say, England.  The English developed a different form of colonial government, had different laws concerning women and children (they had no legal rights and could not own property), different inheritance customs, than the Spanish did.  Yet they’re both European, and until the mid 1500s had basically the same religion.   It makes Europe seem much less homogeneous than I had previously thought.  In prior weeks we’ve talked about how slavery varied in the Americas, depending on location and the en-slaver.  The same thing I guess.  My apparently uneducated mind is blown.