a history of gender in the historiography of latin america

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The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America Sueann Caulfield Hispanic American Historical Review, 81:3-4, August-November 2001, pp. 449-490 (Article) Published by Duke University Press For additional information about this article  Access provided by Universidad de Granada (30 May 2013 06:16 GMT) http://muse.j hu.edu/journals/hahr/s ummary/v081/81.3c aulfield.html

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8/20/2019 A History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America

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The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America

Sueann Caulfield

Hispanic American Historical Review, 81:3-4, August-November 2001,

pp. 449-490 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

  Access provided by Universidad de Granada (30 May 2013 06:16 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hahr/summary/v081/81.3caulfield.html

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The History of Gender in the

Historiography of Latin America

Sueann Caulfield

Writing in 1972, Ann Pescatello bemoaned the underdevelopment of Latin

 American women’s studies, a field so much in its infancy that it was difficult toidentify major trends and authors, much less conduct research.1 Seven yearslater, AsunciĂłn Lavrin observed that historians still lagged behind social scien-tists in filling in the gaps and pointed out directions that Latin American

 women’s history might take.2 Scholars have since followed the paths Lavrinindicated, provoking a steady flow in work that focuses on women, and sincethe mid-1980s, and a great surge of studies that use gender as a category of analysis. Twenty-odd years after Lavrin’s prophetic essay, the field that she anda small group of Latin American and Latin Americanist colleagues pioneeredis again exceedingly difficult to review. The problem now, however, is the largequantity of significant work, the variety of topics, theoretical approaches andmethodologies, and the multiple ways in which this scholarship has influencedhow we understand Latin American history.

 This essay will not attempt to cover all of these topics, approaches andmethods, much less all of the significant works in the field. It will leave to afuture historian, for instance, the task of evaluating whether gender analysishas moved “from margin to center” in the ways historians have integrated it,

or at least mentioned it, in studies that do not specifically 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 andsuggestions that have greatly enriched this essay. Eileen Findlay, Lara Putnam, and RebeccaScott 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. AsunciĂłn Lavrin, “Some Final Considerations on Trends and Issues in Latin

 American Women’s History,” in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives , ed. AsunciĂłnLavrin (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 significant 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 UnitedStates, where over the past six years there has been a torrent of monographsthat deal primarily with gender. Gender analysis has not been as central a con-cern in the different national historiographies in Latin America. This is despitethe existence of an extraordinarily rich and broad-ranging Latin Americanscholarship on the kinds of topics that are especially attractive to gender histo-rians, such as the family, sexuality, and racial or ethnic mixture, as well as a

 wealth of literature on women’s roles in labor, politics, and everyday life. Theanalytical methods that Latin American scholars bring to these topics are diverse,emerging as they do from national and local historiographies with their own tra-

 jectories and different relationships to North American and European scholarship. This is not to say that Latin American work is more provincial than that producedoutside the region. On the contrary, Latin American scholars, especially those who

 work in the larger nations (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Mexico) with well-

developed research centers, including centers dedicated to research on women orgender, are vigorous participants in international scholarly dialogues. Recent mul-tivolume collections on the history of private life in Brazil or the history of men-talities in Mexico, with obvious reference to French literature in these areas, aregood illustrations of the different placement of topics and issues that would cer-tainly undergo more explicit gender analysis—and the works might well include“gender” in the titles—if published in the United States.4

 450 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

3. Comparison by different national audiences would be especially interesting; it hasbecome 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., HistĂłria da vida privada no Brasil, 4 vols. (SĂŁo Paulo:Companhia das Letras, 1997–1998). In Mexico, several volumes of collected works havebeen edited by the Seminario de Historia de las Mentalidades at the Instituto Nacional de

 AntropologĂ­a e Historia, beginning with Solange Alberro and Serge Gruzinski, eds., IntroducciĂłn a la historia de las mentalidades: Seminario de las mentalidades y religion en el MĂ©xico

colonial (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de AntropologĂ­a e Historia, 1979). Other volumesinclude Solange Alberro et al., ed., Seis ensayos sobre el discurso colonial relativo a la comunidad 

domĂ©stica: Matrimonio, familia y sexualidad a travĂ©s de los cronistas del siglo XVI, el NuevoTestamento y el Santo Oficio de la InquisiciĂłn (Mexico City: Departamento de InvestigacionesHistĂłricas, Instituto Nacional de AntropologĂ­a e Historia, 1980); Seminario de Historia delas Mentalidades y ReligiĂłn en MĂ©xico Colonial, ed.,  Familia y sexualidad en Nueva España:

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 The best of the scholarship produced in the United States both builds onthe respective national historiography and participates in an international dia-

logue. 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 theirpart, do not generally view “Latin America” as a coherent regional field, 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 explana-tion 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 notingthat scholarship produced in the U.S. has brought a specific set of concerns togender history. While it is possible to perceive certain common theoreticalconcerns and narrative strategies among recent works on gender in Latin

 America produced in the United States—including the near universal adop-tion of the term “gender”—this is more difficult to do with the more variedrecent Latin American scholarship.

I will argue, however, that it is possible to trace in very broad strokes thedevelopment of certain scholarly trends in the international literature on

 women and gender in Latin America over the past three decades, in whichLatin American production plays a leading role. In synthesizing both politicalprocesses and scholarship on the region as a whole, I will inevitably overlook 

The History of Gender  451

 Memoria del primer simposio de historia de las mentalidades—“Familia, Matrimonio y Sexualidad 

en Nueva España” (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura EconĂłmica, 1982); idem, Familia y poder en Nueva España: Memoria del tercer simposio de historia de las mentalidades (Mexico City:Instituto Nacional de AntropologĂ­a e Historia, 1991); idem, Comunidades domĂ©sticas en la

 sociedad novohispana: Formas de uniĂłn y transmisiĂłn cultural: Memoria del IV Simposio de

 Historia de las Mentalidades (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de AntropologĂ­a e Historia,1994); idem, Vida cotidiana y cultura en el MĂ©xico virreinal: AntologĂ­a (Mexico City: InstitutoNacional de AntropologĂ­a e Historia, 2000); idem, La memoria y el olvido: Segundo simposio

de historia de las mentalidades (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de AntropologĂ­a e Historia,1985); idem, El placer de pecar & el afĂĄn de normar (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de

 AntropologĂ­a e Historia and Ed. J. Mortiz, 1988); and Antonio GuzmĂĄn VĂĄzquez and

Lourdes MartĂ­nez O., eds., Del dicho al hecho: Transgresiones y pautas culturales en la Nueva España (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de AntropologĂ­a e Historia, 1989).

5. Mary Kay Vaughan, “Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics in the MexicanRevolution,” HAHR 79, no. 2 (1999).

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or even distort debates and contributions that are crucial to distinct nationalcases. 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 Klubock’s discussion of gender history in Chile. While our narrativesare similar in some ways, Klubock’s discussion of the political context, peri-odization, and particular contributions is much more specific and detailed thanmine.

Finally, I will not discuss the development of the history of homosexuality. This area of gender historiography has emerged in different ways in the schol-arship of both Latin Americans and U.S.-based Latin Americanists, as MartinNesvig shows in his comprehensive review in this issue. It is one of the most promising new directions in Latin American gender history, but Nesvig’sreview would make a discussion here redundant.

 With these limitations in mind, this essay will examine the history of political and scholarly trends that have influenced gender analysis in the histo-riography of Latin America (excluding the French- and English-speakingCaribbean). I see this history as falling into three overlapping periods. Thefirst covers the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, when initial efforts were made tocarve out a space for historical perspectives within the burgeoning field of 

Latin American women’s studies, then dominated by the social sciences. Whilethe interdisciplinarity of the early women’s 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 women’sstudies now seem indelibly dated to the 1970s. Yet the debates—over the roleof U.S.-based feminists in defining a scholarly agenda; the links between Latin

 American feminist militancy, working-class women’s movements, and schol-arly production; the relevance of Latin America’s (dependant) position in the

 world economy to women’s status; and the relationship of scholarship on women to U.S. imperialism and Latin American political struggles—shapedthe trajectory of scholarship long after the political moment had shifted.6

 452 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

6. These debates are apparent in the questions addressed in a 1974 research seminarheld at the CIDHAL (ComunicaciĂłn, Intercambio y Desarrollo Humano en la AmĂ©ricaLatina) research center in Cuernavaca, Mexico, sponsored by the Social Science ResearchCouncil and led by Elsa Chaney, Helen Safa, and Aurelia Guadalupe SĂĄnchez Morales:How is women’s 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 andorganizing women? For whom and by whom is research to be carried out? See MeriKnaster, “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 influenced scholarly trajectories. As theself-assured combativeness of the late 1970s feminism and partisan politics

gave way to more fragmented political identifications by the end of the 1980s,in the Americas and elsewhere, new debates and topics emerged in the schol-arship on Latin American women. At the same time, institutional resources inLatin America for historical research and research on women improved dra-matically in nations recovering from years of dictatorship, which resulted in asharp rise in archival-based research produced in the region, especially inBrazil and, later, in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. Partly in response to thesepolitical and institutional changes and partly because of the shifts in nationaland international scholarly trends, an interest in women spread to different historical subfields.

 A renewed interest in colonial history, focused now on sexuality, moralorder, 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 theoverlap of three subfields that are especially dynamic in Latin America: family history; a social history influenced by European micro-history and the “new social history” in the United States;8 and a strain of cultural history that isheavily influenced by Foucault, the French history of mentalities, and other

The History of Gender  453

7. There are several reasons for renewed attention to colonial history, including therise in archival research; the retreat from the notion that research should serve immediatepolitical goals; and the so-called “historical turn” in international social sciences. As new kinds of political identifications that arose in many parts of the world, older explanatory models (or “grand theory”), including marxism and dependency theory, were attacked asstatic, homogenizing, and deterministic. In the late 1970s, Lavrin published one of the first historical studies of women in colonial Latin America. By 1995, when Kecia Ali published abibliographical 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 thecolonial period. AsunciĂłn Lavrin, “In Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico: TheSeventeenth 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 AmericanStudies Working Paper Series, no. 18 (1995).

8. The literature is often called nueva histĂłria in Puerto Rico, nueva histĂłria social in Mexico, and histĂłria social da cultura in Brazil. For the relationship between these subfieldsand gender history, see FĂ©lix V. Matos RodrĂ­guez, “Women’s History in Puerto RicanHistoriography: The Last Thirty Years,” in Puerto Rican Women’s History: New Perspectives ,

ed. FĂ©lix V. Matos RodrĂ­guez and Linda C. Delgado (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998); andCarmen Ramos EscandĂłn, “La nueva historia, el feminismo y la mujer,” in GĂ©nero e historia:

 La historiografĂ­a sobre la mujer , ed. Carmen Ramos EscandĂłn (Mexico City: Univ. AutĂłnoma Metropolitana, 1992).

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theories of discourse and representation that have been grouped together underthe label post-structuralist or (usually by social historians critical of it) post-

modern. As these three subfields came together, the patriarchal family, longrecognized as a central political and economic institution in Latin Americanhistory, was reexamined by social historians, demographers and historicalanthropologists interested in women, everyday life and nonelite historicalactors. Even more prevalent, as Klubock shows for recent scholarship in Chile,

 was the combination of social histories of everyday life with cultural analysisthat emphasized the power of symbolic representation and discourses of lib-eral professionals. A good deal of research clustered around topics such asprostitution, criminality, or public health and hygiene campaigns in urban cen-ters at the turn of the last century. The shift to small units of analysis in thesestudies represented a departure from “grand theories” of the 1960s and 1970s,

 which seemed ill-suited to the political and intellectual climate of the 1980sand 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 deflect the frequent criti-cism 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 broaderanalytical category that includes consideration of how female and male sub-

 jects are socially constructed and positioned and how representations of femi-ninity and masculinity structure institutional power. This analytical shift hascharacterized histories written by both U.S. and Latin American scholars,although Latin American historians have been less enthusiastic about theoriz-ing or adopting the term “gender.”9

 454 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

9. In Brazil, the term “gender” has been debated and adopted by feminist socialscientists to a much greater extent than by historians. Interesting Brazilian contributions todebates among North American and French feminist theorists are Elena Varikas, “GĂȘnero,experiĂȘncia e subjetividade: A propĂłsito do desacordo Tilly-Scott,” Cadernos Pagu 3 (1994);and Maria Odila Silva Dias, “Teoria e mĂ©todo dos estudos feministas: Perspectiva histĂłricae hermenĂȘutica do cotidiano,” in Uma questĂŁo de gĂȘnero, ed. Albertina de Oliveira Costa andCristina 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 relaçÔes de gĂȘneros noBrasil (sĂ©culo XIX e XX),” Tempo: Revista do Departamento de HistĂłria da Universidade Federal 

 Fluminense 5 (1998). Cunha complains that Brazilian women’s historians, including some who use the term “gender,” have fallen prey to postmodern theories of power that obscuredifferences among women as well as women’s agency, with the result that Brazilian womenlook 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 andgender over the course of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s resulted in the collec-

tion of vast amounts of data, the accumulation of a rich array of closely ana-lyzed case studies of family and community life, and compelling new ways tounderstand social identities and power structures in Latin American history. A recent group of monographs has built upon this scholarship, using similarmethods and sources while attempting to resolve some of its theoretical ten-sions and interpretive limits. It is significant that these books were written by scholars based in the United States, for they display a common immersion inrecent debates in U.S. historiography, particularly regarding the relationshipbetween 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 multilevelanalyses of politics and power.10

The History of Gender  455

in her own work on mental illness and carnival that gender analysis can illuminate specificforms of domination in Brazil as well as specific women’s choices and experiences. Mary Del Priore, more concerned about recovering women’s agency than emphasizingdifferences among women, argues that gender has not yet been theorized sufficiently in aBrazilian context and more work is needed to recover women’s experiences and voices inBrazil. Her own work on colonial women falls more squarely within a “women’s history”framework. See Mary Del Priore, “HistĂłria das mulheres: As vozes do silĂȘncio,” in

 Historiografia brasileira em perspectiva, ed. Marcos Cezar de Freitas (SĂŁo Paulo: Contexto,2000). I thank Cristiana Schettini Pereira for drawing my attention to Del Priore’s essay.For a discussion of the use of “gender” and gender analysis in Mexican social history, seeRamos EscandĂłn, “La nueva historia.”

10. In the first 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 MarĂ­a Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier 

(Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1995). Others on this list, although with theoreticaldiscussions that are less ambitious and, probably for this reason, better supported in theirnarratives, are three scholars who studied under Stern (as well as Florencia Mallon andFrancisco 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 CarolinaPress, 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 trainedelsewhere include the following: Thomas Miller Klubock, Contested Communities: Class,

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 These authors have taken some new directions, including giving attentionto 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 areincreasingly attuned to contemporary terminology, especially in colonial studies.One result is that an emphasis on honor runs through new scholarship on bothcolonial and modern topics. Another is that there is a specificity lacking in ear-lier works on gendered discourses of power, which in the end could make onesite 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 citizenshipconstructed? How did socialist or capitalist states achieve hegemony? Why didlocal communities respond to the call to war? The final section of this essay willlook briefly at some of the ways in which these questions are being answered.

Antecedents of Latin American Women’s History:

Women’s Studies in the Social Sciences

 As someone who finished graduate school in the mid-1990s, I feel fortunate to

have arrived on the scene after the groundwork of women’s history in Latin America had been laid. Unlike the generation before me, I could consult bib-liographies and reviews of the field; learn from theoretical debates andmethodologies of published work; and receive support and advice from estab-lished scholars in the field.11 Moreover, in the United States, gender analysis

 456  HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904–1951 (Durham: Duke Univ.Press, 1998); Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men and

Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905–1960 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press,2000); Sueann Caulfield, In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity, and Nation in

 Early-Twentieth-Century Brazil (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000); Heidi Tinsman, Partners 

in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform,

1950–1973 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, forthcoming); and Lara Putnam’s forthcomingmonograph, tentatively titled Public Women and One-Pant Men: Gender and Labor Migration

in Caribbean Costa Rica (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, forthcoming). Otherexcellent 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 HĂŒnefeldt,

 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 professionalbarriers previous generations encountered, those of us working on gender

over the past decade found university doors and employment options wideopen.Still, one cannot help but feel somewhat envious of the sense of exhilarat-

ing political possibility that marked the early Latin American women’s studiesliterature and professional gatherings. Dramatic political transformationsthroughout the region either promised to open up or threatened to shut downopportunities to end women’s oppression; either way, a heightened sense of urgency surrounded scholarly work. Reading through reviews and introduc-tory 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 JohnFrench and Daniel James call the “passionate partisanship” that inspired early 

 works, most of which sought to theorize the relationship between capitalismand patriarchy, identified as the roots of women’s oppression.12 Anthropologist Florence Babb remembers, with some nostalgia, that scholars argued “with thecertainty and conviction of the time” for historical materialist approaches that 

 would light the path toward structural change and even socialist feminist revo-lution.13 Whether they embarked on projects with immediate practical rele-

 vance or worked to construct far-reaching theoretical models, feminist socialscientists saw the potential of scholarship to reshape the social-sexual order.

 Moreover, interdisciplinary approaches and collaborative research on womenseemed poised to transform the academic disciplines, since traditional theoriesand methods could not account for women’s experiences.

No less important than individual research projects was the creation of a

The History of Gender  457

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 literatureproduced by Latin America-based scholars; Pescatello, “The Female in Ibero-America”;and K. Lynn Stoner, “Directions in Latin American Women’s History, 1977–1984,”

 Latin American Research Review 22, no. 2 (1987). For more recent scholarship on modernLatin America, see Ali, “The Historiography of Women”; for colonial Latin America,see Susan Migden Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press, 2000).

12. John D. French and Daniel James, “Squaring the Circle: Women’s 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 uncov-ering women’s conditions and experiences. With the proliferation of confer-

ences and symposia, along with published collections, debates, reviews, bibli-ographies and, later, research centers and institutes dedicated to promoting women’s studies in Latin America, political and disciplinary fissures appeared,sometimes along class lines; often separating north and south. Latin Americanresearchers sometimes bristled at what they saw as a North American commit-ment to a bourgeois and imperialist feminist agenda, while some North Amer-icans interpreted the Latin American commitments to partisan political agen-das or structural dependency theory as misguided or backward.14

Of course, disagreement about the primacy of sex or class (with racial orethnic discrimination added as a form of class oppression) also emerged amongscholars of the same nationality.15  Yet the strong marxist position in Latin

 American social sciences, adopted by prominent U.S.-based Latin American-ists, prevailed in much of the significant research. The prevalence of depen-dency analysis, emphasis on class oppression, and early criticism of North

 American feminists meant that from the start, “women” were generally stud-ied in the context of their class and region. Class and sex were frequently seenas independent variables that might be weighted differently in different set-

tings: class inequalities were more important in the “Third World,” while sex-ual inequalities could take precedence in industrialized nations.16  Althoughthere were notable exceptions, particularly in the North American politicalscience literature on women’s political participation, class analysis influencedinterpretations of data as well as the topics favored. These included the effectsof development on women, women’s roles in social and political change, and

 women in the urban and rural labor force, including the informal sector.17

 458 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

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 toSan Bernadino,” Signs  17, no. 2 (1992). Their observations are summarized in Jane S.

 Jaquette, “Introduction: From Transition to Participation—Women’s Movements andDemocratic Politics,” in The Women’s 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: Women’s 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  women’s studies research, little of it was actually conducted by historians

before the early 1980s. Instead, political scientists, anthropologists, and sociol-ogists employed a variety of methods for collection of data, mostly on contem-porary societies, to test broad theoretical concepts or models. With the hind-sight of two decades of vigorous historical research on gender, concepts suchas “capitalist patriarchy” for understanding the exploitation of women’s labor,both domestic and extradomestic, or “marianismo” for explaining women’s polit-ical power as an extension of her venerated position in the traditional Iberianhome, seem overly rigid and ahistorical.18  Although some historians haveretained modified versions of these concepts in specific contexts, most recent scholarship has developed more complex and flexible theoretical frameworksfor analyzing how gender has intersected with class and ethnicity to structurepolitics or the social relations of production.19

The History of Gender  459

18. For the theory of capitalist patriarchy, see the classic work by Brazilian sociologist Heleieth I. B. Saffioti, Women in Class Society, trans. Michael Vale (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978). In this influential essay on women in Brazil, and under capitalism ingeneral, Saffioti argued that women constituted a reserve labor force. This position wasqualified by subsequent social science research that showed that women were the primary or even preferred labor force in specific labor markets. See June C. Nash, “A Decade of Research on Women in Latin America,” in Nash and Safa, Women and Change, 9; MarĂ­aPatrĂ­cia FernĂĄndez-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I And My People: Women and Industry in Mexico’s 

 Frontier (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1983); and June Nash and Maria PatrĂ­ciaFernĂĄndez-Kelly, eds., Women, Men and the International Division of Labor (Albany: StateUniv. 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 andguardians of morality in the home. See Evelyn Stephens, “Marianismo: The Other Faceof 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 Americanscholars, who tended to see it as exoticising. Jane Jaquette’s analysis of women’s politicalempowerment as based on “sex differentiation” is a more carefully constructed observationthat insisted on a broader interpretation of political participation than voting or state officeholding. By considering different class positions, and by arguing that men, too, playedgender-specific roles in politics, Jaquette showed that women’s specific participation inpolitics could result in a broad variety of outcomes. See Jane S. Jaquette, “Female PoliticalParticipation in Latin America,” in Nash and Safa, Sex and Class .

19. Silvia Marina Arrom, in The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford: StanfordUniv. Press, 1985), 259–67, argues that marianismo can be useful if seen not as a timelessIberian 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 women’s empowerment in the public sphere; on the

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 As easy as it is to criticize theories developed before much empirical his-torical research was amassed, however, it is difficult to deny the lasting impact 

that the early social science research on Latin American women has had on thehistoriography on gender, especially but not exclusively in Latin America.Studies collected in June Nash and Helen Safa’s 1976 volume, Sex and Class in

 Latin America, showed that women’s political action varied by class, ethnicity,and region and that the public and private realms were intertwined—themeshistorians continue to develop. That volume, and the body of work on womenand work that it represents, is also relevant to new research in labor history. Inthe introduction to a 1997 collection of some of the most innovative labor his-tory of Latin America published in English in the past decade, coeditors JohnFrench and Daniel James identify Nash and Safa as precursors.20 Nash’s 1979ethnographic study of a Bolivian mining community, according to the editors,even anticipated the objectives of “today’s cohort of gender-conscious Latin

 American labor historians.”21

Historian Heidi Tinsman, whose research on gender and agrarian reformin Chile is featured in this special issue of the HAHR as well as in the Frenchand James collection, also recognizes the importance for subsequent genderhistorians of the early social science scholarship on women’s labor, especially 

the international literature on women in development and women in revolu-tionary societies.22 Much of this literature dealt with Latin America, includingsignificant contributions by U.S.-based scholars (for example, Nash, Safa, and

 Maria PatrĂ­cia Fernandez-Kelly) and scholars of rural households, production,and labor (for example, Eleanor Leacock, Carmen Diana Deere, and Mag-dalena LeĂłn).23 In addition to their own field research, these scholars pub-

 460 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

contrary, it accompanied their increasing confinement to motherhood and the home. More

recently, AsunciĂłn Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1995), 13, retrieves the conceptof 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 inpolitics.

20. French and James, “Squaring the Circle,” 3. The studies they cite are the twocollections edited by Nash and Safa cited in notes 16–17; and FernĂĄndez-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 Conflict. 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 thedivide between North and Latin American research.25

Some researchers demonstrated the need to reform public policies in orderto benefit women equally; others—most commonly Latin American scholars—rejected altogether the concept of “development,” which they believed wasinformed by a uniform notion of progress imposed by the wealthy nations on ahomogenized “Third World.”26 Although, as Marysa Navarro demonstrated in

The History of Gender  461

FernĂĄndez-Kelly, Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor ; Eleanor Leacock andHelen Icken Safa, Women’s Work: Development and the Division of Labor by Gender  (SouthHadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey, 1986); Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena LeĂłn, eds.,

 Rural Women and State Policy: Feminist Perspectives on Latin American Agricultural Development 

(Boulder: Westview Press, 1987); idem, La mujer y la polĂ­tica agraria en AmĂ©rica Latina

(Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1986); and Lourdes BenerĂ­a and Martha RoldĂĄn, 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 LeĂłn de Leal, ed.,  La

mujer y el desarrollo en Colombia (Bogota: AsociaciĂłn Colombiana para el Estudio de laPoblaciĂłn, 1977); Magdalena LeĂłn de Leal and Carmen Diana Deere, eds.,  Mujer y

capitalismo agrario: Estudio de cuatro regiones colombianas (Bogota: AsociaciĂłn Colombianapara el Estudio de la PoblaciĂłn, 1980); Magdalena LeĂłn de Leal et al., Debate sobre la mujer 

en AmĂ©rica Latina y el Caribe: DiscusiĂłn acerca de la unidad producciĂłn–reproducciĂłn (BogotĂĄ: AsociaciĂłn Colombiana para el Estudio de la PoblaciĂłn, 1982); Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena LeĂłn del Leal, Women in Andean Agriculture: Peasant Production and Rural Wage

 Employment in Colombia and Peru (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1982); MagdalenaLeĂłn de Leal, ed., Las trabajadoras del agro (BogotĂĄ: AsociaciĂłn Colombiana para el Estudiode la PoblaciĂłn, 1982); Carmen Diana Deere, Household and Class Relations: Peasants and 

 Landlords in Northern Peru (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990); Magdalena LeĂłn deLeal, MarĂ­a del Carmen FeijoĂł, and Programa Latinoamericano de InvestigaciĂłn y FormaciĂłn sobre la Mujer (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales), Tiempo y espacio:

 Las luchas sociales de las mujeres latinoamericanas (Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano deCiencias Sociales, 1993); Magdalena LeĂłn de Leal et al., eds., Mujeres y participaciĂłn polĂ­tica:

 Avances y desafĂ­os en AmĂ©rica 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 Americanscholars and funding agencies.

26. See, for example, Lourdes BenerĂ­a and Gita Sen, “Accumulation, Reproduction,and Women’s Role in Economic Development: Boserup Revisited,” in Leacock and Safa,Women’s 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 conferencesof the 1970s that first led Latin American social scientists to study women,

Latin Americans were generally more concerned with national policy andissues than with comparative or international research.27 This, together withobvious international inequalities in resources for publishing and distribution,often contributed to making their work less visible among the internationalscholarship as a whole. Yet, the bulk of data on women’s labor, poverty, house-hold composition, family roles, and education were produced locally, often

 with sponsorship of new research centers and in some cases internationalfunding.28

 Working within or against “development,” scholars amassed a wealth of dataon the sexual division of labor and inequities in salary, education, and access tostate benefits, as well as analyses of the complex relationships between local cul-tural norms, national and international political goals and ideologies, and theinterests of local and international employers. The data showed conclusivelythe differential impact on women and men of economic and technologicalchange brought by development projects, industrialization, and shifting strate-gies of multinational corporations.29 They also demonstrated that these changes

 462 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

27. Navarro, “Research on Latin American Women.” Navarro provides acomprehensive list of studies on women written by Latin America-based researchers inthe 1970s.

28. Probably the best example is the Fundação Carlos Chagas in SĂŁo Paulo, Brazil, where the Ford Foundation has sponsored annual fellowships and publication programs forstudies of women since the late 1970s. Cristina Bruschini, Fulvia Rosemberg, and AlbertinaCosta have conducted and supervised original research and edited numerous collectionsthat have resulted from these programs. See Del Priore, “HistĂłria das mulheres,” for adiscussion of this program and its importance to the development of women’s history in

Brazil. Another internationally funded organization is the United Nations Center of Latin American Demography (CELADE) in Santiago, Chile. Navarro also mentions CentroBrasileiro de AnĂĄlisis e Planejamiento (CEBRAP), the Centro de Estudios de PoblaciĂłn(CENEP), the Centro de Estudios del Estado y Sociedad (CEDES) in Buenos Aires, andthe AsociaciĂłn Colombiana para el Estudio de la PoblaciĂłn in BogotĂĄ, Colombia. For a list of organizations and conferences that promoted research on women in the late 1970s, seeKnaster, “Women in Latin America,” 6–12.

29. Studies on women and development were often published as articles rather thanbooks; see the articles in Nash and Safa, Sex and Class ; idem, Women and Change; Nash andFernĂĄndez-Kelly, Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor; Leacock and Safa,

Women’s Work; Deere and Magdalena LeĂłn, Rural Women and State Policy. See alsoFernĂĄndez-Kelly, For We are Sold ; Querubina HenrĂ­quez de Paredes, Maritza Izaguirre P.,and InĂ©s Vargas Delaunoy, ParticipaciĂłn de la mujer en el desarrollo de AmĂ©rica 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 ques-

tion of whether development, as conceived by national and international capital-ist policymakers, improved women’s status was generally “no.” Women’s wagesmight have increased with new factory work, but their status relative to men fell.Development policies in socialist Cuba or Chile were generally more favorableto women than those of capitalist countries, but even there, limits to women’sfull 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 specialmention because of its later importance to historians. Anthropologist Verena

 MartĂ­nez-Alier’s Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (1974)is based on church and state regulations regarding marriage, interracial cou-ples’ petitions for permission to marry, and judicial cases of seduction andelopement, discovered by the author while awaiting authorization in Havanato return to the countryside.31 The resulting book was a pathbreaking histori-cal study of the intersection of race, gender, and class in the maintenance of social hierarchy, and of the importance of sexuality and marriage to religiousand secular authorities.

The History of Gender  463

Puerto Rico: A Study in Development and Inequality (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1974); Eva Alterman Blay, Trabalho domesticado: A mulher na indĂșstria paulista (SĂŁo Paulo:Ed. Ática, 1978); Xulma Rechini de Lattes, Ruth A. Sautu, and Catalina H. Wainerman,ParticipaciĂłn de las mujeres en la actividad econĂłmica de la Argentina, Bolivia y Paraguay (Buenos

 Aires: CENEP, 1977); LeĂłn de Leal, La mujer y el desarrollo. For the article-length studiespublished before 1980, see Navarro, “Research on Latin American Women.”

30. The best examples are Carmen Diana Deere, “Rural Women and AgrarianReform in Peru, Chile, and Cuba,” in Nash and Safa, Women and Change; Deere and LeĂłn,

 Rural Women and State Policy; idem, La mujer y la polĂ­tica 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 ItsSolution,” Signs  9 (1983); Maxine Molyneaux, “Mobilization Without Emancipation:

 Women’s Interests and the State in Nicaragua,” Feminist Studies  11 (1985); and idem, “ThePolitics 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 Twentieth-Century Revolutions to Develop a Feminist 

 Agenda (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992).31. Verena MartĂ­nez-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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Women’s History

In 1978, Asunción Lavrin cited similar documents—legal records of divorce,

adultery, concubinage, bigamy, incest, parent-child conflicts over marriagechoice, and dispensation of consanguinity—to show how everyday practicesdiverged 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 beganto work more closely and systematically with these kinds of documents touncover everyday practices and moral values and to examine the intersectionof social categories of race, ethnicity, class, and gender.

Lavrin recognized the relevance to historians of the women’s studies liter-ature produced by social scientists, and even suggested that historical researchmight “give support—or disproof—to some of their theories.”33  Yet, there

 were factors that distinguished women’s history from the more general women’sstudies literature. First, the bulk of the early (pre-1980s) women’s history research was done by U.S.-based scholars. Like the early women’s history inthe U.S., and unlike previous Latin American women’s studies literature, thehistorical research up until the mid-1980s included a number of studies of elite

 women, religious women and convents, women’s legal rights, dowry and otherproperty, and prescriptive literature on gender roles and morals.34 Historians

 464 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

32. AsunciĂłn Lavrin, “In Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico: The Seventeenthand 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,” inLavrin, Latin American Women; Edith Couturier, “Women in a Noble Family: The MexicanCounts of Regla, 1750–1830,” in Latin American Women; Josefina Muriel, Cultura femenina

novahispana (Mexico City: Univ. Nacional AutĂłnoma de MĂ©xico, 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 PatriĂłtica Argentina, 1919–1928: Gender Roles and the Right Wing,” HAHR 64, no. 2 (1984); Arrom,Women of Mexico City; Carmen Ramos-EscandĂłn, “Señoritas porfirianas: Mujer e ideologiaen el MĂ©xico progresista,” in Presencia y transparencia: La mujer en la historia de MĂ©xico, ed.Carmen Ramos EscandĂłn et al. (Mexico City: El Colegio de MĂ©xico, 1987), 189; and Julia

 Tuñon Pablos, Mujeres en MĂ©xico: Una historia olvidada (Mexico City: Planeta, 1987). Forstudies of religious women, see Lavrin, “Ecclesiastical Reform of Nunneries in New Spainin 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 City’s Monasterio of CorpusChristi, 1724–1821,” in Lavrin, Latin American Women; Susan A. Soeiro, “The FeminineOrders 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 orindependence and of women’s participation in these and other political events

and movements.35

 Although several important works on the history of femi-nism were written by politically engaged Latin American social scientists look-ing for antecedents, for the most part, the history of national feminist move-ments was of greater interest to U.S.-based researchers than to locals.36

The History of Gender  465

1677–1800,” in Lavrin, Latin American Women; on law and property, see AsunciĂłn Lavrinand Edith Couturier, “Dowries and Wills: A View of Women’s Socio-Economic Role inColonial Guadalajara and Puebla, 1640–1790,” HAHR 59, no. 2 (1979); Maria BeatrizNizza da Silva, Sistema do casamento no Brasil colonial (SĂŁo Paulo: Univ. de SĂŁo Paulo, 1984);

Silvia Arrom, “Changes in Mexican Family Law in the Nineteenth Century: The CivilCodes 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 theLaw in Nineteenth-Century Argentina,” Journal of Family History 10, no. 3 (1985). See alsothe historiographical essay on Puerto Rico by Matos RodrĂ­guez, “Women’s History.”

35. Inga Clendinnen, “Yucatec Mayan Women and the Spanish Conquest: Role andRitual in Historical Reconstruction,” Journal of Social History (1982); Irene MarshaSilverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru

(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987); Evelyn Cherpak, “The Participation of Womenin 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: Fraficor, 1979); Branca Moreira Alves, Ideologia e

 feminismo: A luta da mulher pelo voto no Brasil (PetrĂłpolis: Vozes, 1980); Maria AmĂ©lia da

 Almeida Teles, Breve histĂłria do feminismo no Brasil (SĂŁo Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1993); Edda A. Gaviola et al., Queremos votar en las prĂłximas elecciones: Historia del movimiento femenino

chileno, 1913–1952 (Santiago: Centro de AnĂĄlisis y DivusiĂłn de la CondiciĂłn de la Mujer,1986); Alba G. Cassina de Nogara, Las feministas (Montevideo: Instituto Nacional delLibro, 1989); Clara Murguialday, Nicaragua, revoluciĂłn y feminismo, 1977– 89 (Madrid: Ed.RevoluciĂłn, 1990); Esperanza Tuñón Pablos, Mujeres que se organizan: El frente Ășnico pro

derechos de la mujer, 1935–1938 (MĂ©xico City: Univ. Nacional AutĂłnoma de MĂ©xico, 1992); Maritza Villavicencio F., Del silencio a la palabra: Mujeres peruanas en los siglos XIX y XX 

(Lima: Centro de la Mujer Peruana Flora TristĂĄn, 1992). Historical monographs publishedin English by North America-based scholars include Anna MacĂ­as,  Against All Odds: The

 Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982); MarifranCarlson, Feminismo! The Woman’s Movement in Argentina from Its Beginnings to Eva PerĂłn

(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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 Women’s 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 1970sin ways analogous to their appearance in the social science development litera-ture, that is, in works that were not specifically about women and that werenot necessarily feminist. This was true of studies produced both in and outsideof Latin America. As Elizabeth Kuznesof and Robert Oppenheimer point out,the significance of the family, especially the elite extended family, to political

and economic structures has always been a major theme in Latin Americanhistoriography.38 Scholarly studies of the family, beginning with GilbertoFreyre’s portrait of family life on the colonial Brazilian sugar plantation in

 466  HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

Press, 1990); June Edith Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Women’s 

 Rights in Brazil, 1850–1940 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1990); K. Lynn Stoner, From the

 House to the Streets: The Cuban Woman’s 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); AsunciĂłn Lavrin, Women, Feminism,

and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln: Univ. of NebraskaPress, 1995); Elisabeth J. Friedman, Unfinished Transitions: Women and The Gendered 

Development of Democracy in Venezuela, 1936–1996 (University Park: Pennsylvania StateUniv. Press, 2000).

37. Studies of the history of women’s labor were generally written by social scientists;see, for example, Maria ValĂ©ria Junho Pena, Mulheres e trabalhadores: Presença feminina na

constituição do sistema fabril (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1981); and Jessita MartinsRodrigues, A mulher operĂĄria: Um estudo sobre tecelĂŁs (SĂŁo Paulo: Hucitec, 1979); for areview of scholarship on women’s labor in Puerto Rico, see Altagracia Ortiz, “Puerto Rican

 Women Workers in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Appraisal of the Literature,” inRodrĂ­guez and Delgado, Puerto Rican Women’s 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 Women’s Trade Unionism: Comparative Historical 

 Essays , ed. Norbert C. Soldon (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985); Marysa Navarro andCatalina Wainerman, “El trabajo de la mujer en la Argentina: AnĂĄlisis de las ideasdominantes en las primeras dĂ©cadas 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 agreat number of studies of the history of women’s 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 configuration of ethnic or racial relations. Up until the1960s, Brazilian historians saw families of all races and classes as integratedinto this patriarchal, elite family.39 François Chevalier’s influential 1954 study of the self-contained Mexican hacienda depicted a similar dynamic, althoughthe structure and labor system of the Mexican hacienda and its relationship tooutlaying peasant communities was very different.40 Later studies of landedelites as well as urban and rural merchants, bureaucrats, and politicians foundthat family and kinship networks, which hinged on careful planning of mar-riages, were the crucial means of accumulating wealth and power in colonialsociety.41 Strategies changed in different ways with new political and economic

The History of Gender  467

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 whoemphasized the dominance of the patriarchal family in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s areOliveira Vianna and SĂ©rgio Buarque de Holanda. Mariza CorrĂȘa’s 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 inBrazil throughout its history; see her “Repensando a famĂ­lia patriarcal” in Colcha de retalhos 

(SĂŁo Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1982).40. François 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 SinceChevalier: 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 andCouturier, “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 MartĂ­nez

del Rio Family in Mexico, 1824–1867 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1986); Linda Lewin,Politics and Parentela in ParaĂ­ba: 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, Classand Family”; for a view of social relations and gender roles within mostly middle- andupper-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 indepen-dence wars displaced the traditional families in some regions, but kinship

remained a fundamental way of extending and maintaining power. Populationstudies and ethnographies since the 1950s have focused on lower-class family and kinship systems as well, particularly those of indigenous groups, as pri-mary social institutions and centers of reproduction.42

 The family might seem an obvious place to look for female historicalagents, but most historians did not find them there until the 1970s. They wereblinded by the figure of the omnipotent colonial patriarch and his nineteenth-century parallel, the caudillo (coronel in Brazil). Elite white women appeared asinstruments 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, whichresulted in the creation of subordinate mixed-race populations. The nonelitepopulation that was not a part of the grand estates or closed communities wereassumed to form a disorganized, promiscuous mass in which stable family ties

 were an exception. With the adoption of new methods of quantitative demography and qual-

itative 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 predom-inated throughout the region. On the contrary, researchers consistently foundthat the average household size in rural and urban areas was small (betweenfour and six free members), and that it grew in the nineteenth century toaccommodate production for new capitalist markets. Second, these studiesoverturned the idea that households and production were invariably patriar-chal, 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 urban-

 468 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

that there was a great deal of continuity in the family’s social and cultural significance. Alida C. Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de ParnaĂ­ba, 1580–1822

(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992) extends the study of the elite family to consideralso nonelite and slave families.

42. Kuznesof and Oppenheimer, “The Family and Society,” 221–22. Studies of indigenous populations were initiated by Woodrow Borah’s pioneering research on the

sixteenth-century decline of the indigenous population and seventeenth-century economicdepression in Mexico. Woodrow Borah, New Spain’s 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 con-

sensual unions by ethnic or class group in local studies, finding both prevalent principally among the non-white and non-elite populations. Some concludefrom this that lower-class groups disregarded the moral values disseminated by the church, a finding rejected by more recent cultural historians.45 Even froma purely demographical standpoint, generalizations about the region remaintentative. Beyond the finding that female-headed households and illegitimacy have been unusually high in much of the region from the colonial period tothe present, historians continue to find tremendous variation in degree andpatterns by region and over time.46

Particularly in Brazil, slave families have been a major focus of demo-graphic studies over the past two decades. Earlier sociological and historical

The History of Gender  469

44. Ibid., 224; and Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, Household Economy and Urban

Development: SĂŁo Paulo, 1765 to 1836 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986). Muriel Nazzari’sstudy of the decline of the dowry in over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in SĂŁoPaulo concludes that elite family strategies were also changing in response to thedevelopment of capitalism and finance markets, which lessened young men’s dependency 

on the assets provided by wives’ dowries and led to the declining economic and socialimportance of the extended family. In contrast, Lewin finds that Northeastern familiesadapted kinship strategies in ways that maintained the political dominance of elite extendedfamilies. Muriel Nazzari, Disappearance of the Dowry: Women, Families, and Social Change in

SĂŁo 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 moralteachings of the church regarding concubinage and illegitimacy, see Silvia Arrom,“Marriage Patterns in Mexico City, 1811,” Journal of Family History 3, no. 4 (1978); TomĂĄsCalvo, “The Warmth of the Hearth: Seventeenth-Century Guadalajara Families,” in

Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. AsunciĂłn 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: Condição feminina, maternidades e

mentalidades no Brasil colÎnia (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1993). For the opposingargument, see, for example, Ronaldo Vainfas, Trópicos dos pecados: Moral, sexualidade e

 Inquisição no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Campus, 1989); Sheila de Casto Faria, A colĂŽnia em

movimento: Fortuna e famĂ­lia no cotidiano colonial: Coleção historia do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Ed.Nova Fronteira, 1998); Seminario de Historia de las Mentalidades y ReligiĂłn en MĂ©xicoColonial, Familia y sexualidad.

46. Demographers have been especially prolific in Brazil, spurred by a boom in local

history and an interest in slave families in the 1980s–1990s. See the historiographicalreview by Sheila de Castro Faria, “HistĂłria da famĂ­lia e demografia histĂłrica,” in DomĂ­nios 

da histĂłria: 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 slav-ery and the dehumanizing treatment slaves suffered resulted in the pathologi-

cal instability of black families that outlasted slavery by nearly a century. AsRobert Slenes has pointed out, this literature identified black women’s promis-cuity 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, con-sensual unions, the appearance of mothers and fathers on birth registries,godparenting, and multigenerational family structures through painstakingresearch in local notarial archives and plantation records. Local and regionalstudies 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 bothbiological and fictive kin relationships. Family units were much more commonon medium- to large-scale plantations and in prosperous regions, where largeslave populations could be maintained over time. Smaller productive units anddepressed regions showed the kind of inconsistency and disruption of slavefamily life that was previously assumed to characterize all of Latin Americanslavery.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 thefree population, even if maintaining these bonds was often difficult.49

 470 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

47. Robert W. Slenes, “Black Homes, White Homilies: Perceptions of the SlaveFamily 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 thedevelopment 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 flor: Esperanças e recordaçÔes na formação da famĂ­lia escrava: Brasil sudeste, sĂ©culo

 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. Seethe bibliographical discussion and extensive citations in in Slenes,  Na senzala, uma flor ,43–53, 62–65 nn. 59–62.

49. For other regions, see David Chandler, “Family Bonds and the Bondsman: TheSlave Family in Colonial Colombia,” Latin American Research Review 16, no. 2 (1981);Christine HĂŒnefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima’s Slaves,

1800–1854 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994). For similar desires to formlegitimate families among slaves and the free population, see Faria, “HistĂłria da famĂ­lia”;idem, A colĂŽnia em movimento, esp. 335–59; and Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro, Das cores do

 silĂȘncio: Os significados da liberdade no Sudeste escravista–Brasil, sĂ©culo XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1995).

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Demographic patterns that family historians were uncovering in the late1970s and 1980s fed the growing fields of social history and a new linguistically 

inflected cultural history, and vice versa. Inspired, in part, by regional politicalprocesses, especially the replacement of older-style marxist oppositional poli-tics by new, community-based social movements (many of which led by 

 women), Latin American social historians combined some of the goals of thenew social history from the United States and England with the microhistory popularized by Carlo Ginsburg.50 As was clear from earlier studies of women’slabor in Latin America, which found most women working as domestics or inthe informal economy, traditional labor history was incapable of accountingfor the ways most women—or indeed, most men—made a living or resistedoppression.51 Women were among those previously “silenced” historical actors

 who appeared in studies of “the quotidian,” or everyday life of urban or (lesscommonly) rural lower classes. Many such studies clustered around the latenineteenth to early twentieth centuries and tapped new sources, including crim-inal or civil trial testimony, police records, popular literature, and memoirs.

By the mid- to late 1980s, most North American social historians com-monly used the term “gender” and many engaged feminist theory in their dis-cussion of differences in the everyday lives of women and men. This was not 

necessarily true of Latin American social historians. The stronger emphasis ongender by North Americans reflects, of course, their insertion in a scholarly discourse in which feminists have had a strong voice since the early 1980s. InLatin America, rifts between autonomous feminists, party militants and popu-lar 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-identified “femi-nist” framework in studies of women’s historical agency.53 Instead, as was trueof the first generation of Latin American social science research on women,innovative class analysis guided social historians to revise previous views of 

 women as passively confined to the domestic sphere.

The History of Gender  471

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

reflected in Latin Americans’ greater interest in women’s labor, prostitution, criminality,and everyday life, and lesser interest in the history of feminist movements, as compared toNorth 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, andpractices of working-class subjects resisted the disciplinary mechanisms of eliteprofessionals and state officials, who worked to create conditions propitiousfor modern capitalism. If the argument was similar to that made by social his-torians for other times and places, in the best studies, the specificity of theempirical evidence demonstrated how Latin American cases were unique.Looking up close at some of the practices discovered by historians of the fam-ily, such as the prevalence of female-headed households and the high incidenceof illegitimacy among the lower classes, social historians described the signifi-cance of these practices for poor women and men and for professional elitesand public officials in specific contexts. In Puerto Rico, prominent social his-torians such as Blanca Silvestrini, Fernando PicĂł, and A. G. Quintero Riveramade reference to women within larger works on nineteenth-century slavery or industrialization and wrote essays on women’s experience in the factories.54

Brazilian scholarship was especially pathbreaking. Historians such as MariaOdila Leite da Silva Dias, Sidney Chalhoub, Martha de Abreu Esteves, Mar-gareth Rago, and Rachel Soihet produced studies that led scores of others to

 472 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

54. See Matos RodrĂ­guez, “Women’s History,” 13, 33 nn. 13–14. The “new history”has been criticized for not focusing attention on women’s lives; instead, historians includereferences to women in studies that mostly involve men. Among the few works specifically about women are Blanca Silvestrini, “Women as Workers: The Experience of the PuertoRican Woman in the 1930s” in The Puerto Rican Woman: Perspectives on Culture, History, and 

Society, ed. Edna Acosta-BelĂ©n, 2d ed. (New York: Praeger, 1986); and Fernando PicĂł, “Lastrabajadoras del tabaco en Utuado, Puerto Rico, segĂșn el censo de 1910,” Homines  9 (1985).

See Ramos EscandĂłn, “La nueva historia,” for a discussion of similar dynamics in Mexicanhistoriography. Ramos EscandĂłn’s Presencia y transparencia includes works inspired by thenew social history. For Argentina and Chile, where redemocratization was more recent,feminist activism, concern with women’s history, and social histories focusing on genderhave appeared more recently. See Roxana BoixadĂłs, “Una viuda de ‘mala vida’ en la coloniariojana,” in Historia de las mujeres en Argentina, ed. Fernanda Gil Lozano, Valeria SilvinaPita, and Maria Gabriela Ini (Buenos Aires: Taurus, 2000); Gabriela Braccio, “Una gavillaindisoluble: Las teresas en CĂłrdoba (siglo XVIII),” in Lozano et al., Historia de las mujeres ;Diana Veneros Ruiz-Tagle, ed., Perfiles revelados: Historias de mujeres en Chile, siglos 

 XVIII–XX (Santiago: Univ. de Santiago de Chile, 1997); and Lorena Godoy, Elizabeth

Hutchison, Karin Rosemblatt, M. Soledad Zárate, eds., Disciplina y desacato: Construcción deidentidad en Chile, Siglos XIX y XX (Santiago: Sur/CEDEM, 1995). Essays from thesecollections are reviewed in Klubock’s essay in this issue, “Writing the History of Womenand Gender in Twentieth-Century Chile.”

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new kinds of documentation, especially trial and police records, and to inter-pretative framework that borrowed from both national and international

scholarly traditions.55

Collectively, they described the creation of a more orless (depending on the author) autonomous urban popular culture of resis-tance. Popular culture, in these works, established less rigorous moral stric-tures and greater autonomy for women than elite prescription. Again, the degreeof relative moral freedom and autonomy vary by author, with Chalhoub andEsteves arguing for more and Dias and Soihet, less. All agree, however, that poor women were not confined in patriarchal homes, but rather headed fami-lies, worked in and outside of the home, constructed communities and solidar-ity networks, and sometimes battled with husbands, neighbors, or urbanauthorities 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 mar-riage or even stable consensual unions. As Sandra Lauderdale Graham demon-strates in her history of domestic service in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro,the lives of poor women blurred or even reversed the moral divisions betweenprivate and public space, or the house and the street, that had justified elite

 women’s seclusion in the colonial period and were reinforced by nineteenth-

century legal and medical professionals.56

In Brazil, at about the same time that social historians focused on thematerial lives and experiences of lower-class historical agents, many historians

The History of Gender  473

55. Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias, Quotidiano e poder em SĂŁo Paulo no sĂ©culo XIX: Ana

Gertrudes de Jesus (SĂŁo Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1984); Sidney Chalhoub, Trabalho, lar e

botequim: O cotidiano dos trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro da Belle Epoque (SĂŁo 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,Condição feminina e formas de violĂȘncia: Mulheres pobres e ordem urbana, 1890–1920 (Rio de Janeiro: Forense UniversitĂĄria, 1990). See also, Sueann Caulfield and Martha de AbreuEsteves, “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 Rago’s Do cabarĂ© 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 andnewspapers to write a social history of women workers. While not focusing exclusively on

 working-class women, Maria Clementina Pereira Cunha’s O espelho do mundo: Juquery, a

história de um asilo (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1986) also fits within this list. Cunha’s

study is a fascinating social history of a modern sanitarium in the first half of thetwentieth-century SĂŁo 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 Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis, to investigate the ways in which gender and sexual-

ity were construed and used to establish social and political power and to bol-ster state institutions. A few years later, similar approaches appeared inscholarship on other nations. The research that came out of this for the mod-ern period tended to focus on medical, psychiatric, and juridical discoursesbeginning around the mid-nineteenth century, as secular professionals beganto establish themselves as the moral authorities of recently consolidatedrepublican states.57 Notwithstanding the apparent polarization of this kind of 

 474 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

57. For Brazil, the best examples are Jurandir Freire Costa, Ordem médica e norma

 familiar (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Graal, 1979); Roberto Machado et al., Danação da norma:

 Medicina social e constituição da psiquiatrĂ­a no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Graal, 1978); MagaliEngel, Meretrizes e doutores: Saber mĂ©dico e prostituição no Rio de Janeiro (1840–1890) (SĂŁoPaulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1989); and Margareth Rago, Os prazeres da noite: Prostituição e cĂłdigos 

da sexualidade feminina em SĂŁo Paulo (1890–1930) (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1991). Seealso Jorge BalĂĄn, ProfesiĂłn y identidad en una sociedad Dividida: La medicina y el origen del 

 psicoanĂĄlisis 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, “Infanticídios: Construcción de la verdad

 y control de gĂ©nero en el discurso judicial,” Maria Gabriela Ini, “Cuerpos femeninos y cuerpos abyectos: La construcciĂłn anatĂłmica de la feminidad en la medicina argentina,”and Pablo Ben, “Damas, locas y mĂ©dicos: La locura expropriada,” in Lozano, Pita, and Ini,

 Historia de las mujeres ; William French, “Prostitutes and Guardian Angels: Women, Work,and the Family in Porfirian Mexico,” HAHR 72, no. 4 (1992); Rafael Sagredo, La Chiquita,

no. 4002 (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1996); Juan JosĂ© MarĂ­n HernĂĄndez, “Las causas de laprostituciĂłn Josefina: 1939–1949: Entre lo imaginario y el estigma,” Revista de Historia (San

 JosĂ©, Costa Rica) 27 (1993); and idem, “ProstituciĂłn y pecado en la bella y prĂłspera ciudadde San JosĂ© (1850–1930),” in El Paso del Cometa: Estado, polĂ­tica social y culturas populares en

Costa Rica (1800 / 1950), ed. Ivan Molina JimĂ©nez and Steven Palmer (San JosĂ©: Ed.Porvenir, 1994); Katherine Elaine Bliss, “Prostitution, Revolution and Social Reform in Mexico City, 1918–1940” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1996); MarĂ­a Emma Mannarelli, Limpias y modernas: GĂ©nero, higiene y cultura en la Lima del novecientos (Lima: Ed. Flora TristĂĄn, 1999); MarĂ­a AngĂ©lica Illanes, “ En el nombre del pueblo, del estado y de la ciencia

(. . .)”: Historia social de la salud pĂșblica, Chile, 1880–1973 (hacia una historia social del siglo

 XX) (Santiago: Colectivo de AtenciĂłn Primaria, 1993); Teresita MartĂ­nez-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 Buffington and Pablo Piccato, “Tales of Two Women:

 The Narrative Construal of Porfirian Reality,” The Americas  55, no. 3 (1999); Leyla Flores,

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approach with social histories that emphasized historical agency, some histori-ans borrowed freely from both to write histories of elite discourses and popu-

lar resistance to them. In some works, such as that of Esteves and Soihet, thiskind of analysis of “elite” or “official” discourse was juxtaposed with analysis of â€œpopular” or “alternative” discourses, with the former establishing fixed moralstrictures 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 andgender constructed the boundaries of normal and pathological female identi-ties, which in turn shaped state regulation of public space, women’s work, andprivate morality. This regulatory function, according to these analyses, playeda key role in defining citizenship and imagining the nation.

 Taken together, this research shows a uniform desire on the part ofnineteenth- and early-twentieth-century professional elites in Latin Americanto “modernize” and “civilize” urban space and populations. It also demon-strates conclusively that gender played a primary role in defining and repre-senting modernity and civilization, and that women were primary targets forreformers. “Marginal” women— particularly prostitutes—seem to have beenfavored objects, but state officials and professionals also worked to inculcate

 women in moral and civic values they hoped would “modernize” family lifethrough education, public health campaigns, and the communications media.In recent works, Susan Besse and Mary Kay Vaughan have demonstrated forearly-twentieth-century urban Brazil and postrevolutionary rural Mexico,respectively, that these efforts were not intended to emancipate women, but, in

 Vaughan’s words, to “subordinate the household to the interests of nationaldevelopment.” The family and its gender relations were to be “rationalized” inthe interests of nation-building and development.59

The History of Gender  475

“Vida de mujeres de la vida: Prostitución feminina en Antofogasta (1920–1930),” inRuiz-Tagle, Perfiles revelado. For references to additional Chilean works, see Klubock’sessay in this issue, “Writing the History of Women and Gender.”

58. Esteves, Meninas perdidas ; and Soihet, Condição feminina. Soihet describes violenceagainst women within popular culture, but emphasizes the autonomy women possessbecause men do not support them economically.

59. Using a similar discourse, industrialists in SĂŁo Paulo made remarkable efforts toreform working class domestic life; see Barbara Weinstein, For Social Peace in Brazil:

 Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in SĂŁo Paulo, 1920–1964 (Chapel Hill:Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996). Mary Kay Vaughan, “Modernizing Patriarchy: StatePolicies, 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 devel-oped in social and cultural history were brought to family history, that field

underwent a transformation. In fact, the separation of these three subfieldsbecame increasingly artificial. For instance, demographic data has recededfurther into the footnotes in much of the recent work on slave families ineighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazil. In the text of several works on theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries, historians analyze criminal and civil trialtestimony, 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 storiesmean in the larger picture is the subject of debate: Did allowing slaves to formstable families deter slave rebellion?60 Did slaves choose mates from withinethnic groups because of intense animosity among them?61 Did slaves andfreed persons use marriage as a way to integrate into free families, eschewingsolidarity or identification with other slaves?62 Or did forming a family giveslaves the ability to construct physical spaces, community ties, and other cul-tural forms that were reminiscent of Africa?63

 Women are half of the equation in these studies, and appear as protago-nists in a variety of circumstances. The imbalance in the number of men and

 women, women’s 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 tomarriage and the different ways women and men interpreted cultural values

 476  HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

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 (ChapelHill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996). See also Borges, The Family in Bahia.

60. JosĂ© Roberto GĂłes and Manolo Florentino argue that stable families deterredslave rebellions; see their A paz das senzalas: FamĂ­lias escravas e trĂĄfico atlĂąntico, Rio de Janeiro,

c. 1790–c. 1850 (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1997).61. Ibid.62. Castro, Das cores do silĂȘncio.63. Slenes, Na senzala, uma flor.

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such as honor. Another example is the richly documented study of slave fami-lies in early-nineteenth-century Lima by Christine HĂŒnefeldt. HĂŒnefeldt argues

that attention to gender relations as well as to women’s specific forms of resis-tance illuminates family strategies for maximizing autonomy under slavery. Although resting on fragile empirical ground in quantitative terms, HĂŒnefeldt makes an intriguing argument that women’s recourse to the courts and toreligious authorities against abusive masters contributed to rising manumis-sion rates in the first half of the nineteenth century, higher for women thanmen.64

 Most of what we know of the moral values and internal dynamics of mar-riage before the twentieth century comes not from studies of slave families,but from the rich body of scholarship on marriage, sexuality, and honor in thecolonial period, especially in Brazil and New Spain, that has appeared betweenroughly the mid-1980s to the late 1990s. This literature, like that of the mod-ern period described above, has been influenced by new currents in social andcultural history. A number of scholars looking for clues to popular daily lifeand mentality tapped the records of the Inquisition and of periodic visitas toregional outposts by bishops and other church officials who hoped to bolsterChristian morality in areas it was deemed lacking.65 Solange Alberro’s monu-

mental 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 

The History of Gender  477

64. Lauderdale Graham, House and Street ; and HĂŒnefeldt, Paying the Price Of

 Freedom.

65. A similar interest in the Spanish Inquisition emerged at around the same time.See JosĂ© MarĂ­a GarcĂ­a Fuentes, InquisiciĂłn 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: JohnsHopkins 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 Oficio; idem, “La sexualidad manipulada en Nueva

España: Modalidades de recuperaciĂłn y de adaptaciĂłn frente a los Tribunales EclesiĂĄsticos,”Seminario de Historia de las Mentalidades (1982); idem, InquisiciĂłn y sociedad en MĂ©xico,

1571–1700 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988); and idem, Seis ensayos. See

also the collections of articles published on colonial marriage, sexuality, morals, and thefamily 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 perversiĂłn: O

de porqué no se cumplía 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 specifically interested in uncovering a history of “gay” life by 

analyzing sodomy trials; Laura de Mello e Souza, who analyzed the relation-ships between the persecution of witchcraft and European images of Brazil asa land of untamed sexuality and demons; Ronaldo Vainfas, who wrote a socialhistory of family, morality, and sexuality and described the institutional andreligious history of the Inquisition in Brazil. Ligia Bellini wrote one of the few historical works on same-sex relationships between women, based on Inquisi-tion trials of female sodomists.67

Other studies of colonial sexuality, marriage, and moral values used Inqui-sition documents as well as a variety of criminal and civil litigation records toanswer questions ranging from how the conquest and Spanish colonizationaffected gender relations and ideologies to why the Bourbons attempted tobolster parental control over their children’s marriages.68 Despite differences

 478 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

67. Luiz Roberto de Barros Mott, Os pecados da famĂ­lia na Bahia de Todos os Santos 

(Salvador: Centro de Estudos Baianos, 1982); idem, O sexo proibido: Virgens, gays e escravos 

nas garras da Inquisição (Campinas: Ed. Papirus, 1988); idem, EscravidĂŁo, homossexualidade e

demonologia (SĂŁo Paulo: Icone, 1988); Laura de Mello e Souza, O diabo e a Terra de Santa

Cruz: Feitiçaria e religiosidade popular no Brasil colonial (SĂŁo Paulo: Companhia das Letras,1987); Vainfas, TrĂłpicos dos pecados ; Ligia Bellini, A coisa obscura: Mulher, sodomia e inquisição

no Brasil colonial (SĂŁo Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1989). Vainfas (pp. 143–86) also provides aninteresting 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 scholarshipproduced 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 influential works to appear before the Lavrin volume were Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over 

 Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988), a study of changes inthe meaning of honor based on documents of parental opposition to childrens’ marriagechoices and Spanish literary sources; and RamĂłn A. GutiĂ©rrez, 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 frontierfrom the perspective of gender and everyday life. Seed and GutiĂ©rrez come to oppositeconclusions regarding whether parental control over marriage increased (Seed’s argument)or decreased (GutiĂ©rrez’s 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; Lavrin’s 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 commit-ment to describing colonial subjects’ everyday lives, worldviews, and values—

 what some call “popular culture” and others, “mentalities”—as well as themoral 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 womenplayed important roles in arranging children’s marriages, maintaining socialties, running complex households, and even taking over political functions andmanaging property in the absence of a husband.69 Iberian property and inher-itance law favored women much more than Northern European laws, andsome, albeit few, women could obtain legal separations without losing theirdowry and their portion of the family estate.70 Elite women were not always sochaste as prescription demanded, and their honor was not always permanently stained when they transgressed moral boundaries. Not surprisingly, the chasmbetween moral prescription and everyday practices was much more evident among nonelite families.71

Scholars of colonial marriage and sexuality agree that honor played a crit-ical role in constructing and reproducing legal and social categories and iden-tities; that church, state, and individual families increasingly competed for the

control of marriage and sexuality during the turbulent eighteenth century; andthat some of the social practices of the majority of the population clashed with

The History of Gender  479

gender roles in Andean societies became more unequal as a result of first Inca expansionand then the Spanish invasion. She also provides a fascinating description of indigenous

 women’s religiosity, particularly their roles in preserving ancestor cults by maintainingsecret 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 andsubordination. See Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett, eds., Indian

Women of Early Mexico (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1997).69. See Susan Socolow’s excellent synthesis in the chapter entitled “Elite Women,” in

The Women of Colonial Latin America. On a mother’s role in choosing her children’s marriagepartners, see Ferry, The Colonial Elite, 223–35. An interesting perspective on women’s rolein kinship networks is Richard Graham’s discussion of women’s petitions for patronage formale 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; HĂŒnefeldt, 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 significance 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 breachbetween popular practices and elite prescriptions. As is true of the nationalperiod scholarship, historians committed to recovering the agency of women,the “popular classes,” or “subalterns” have tended to interpret patterns such aslow marriage rates or illegitimacy as evidence of “alternative” cultural valuesor even resistance to morals dictated by church or state. Those who empha-sized the power of political or religious institutions or discursive representa-tion 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 wereunable 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 five years hasattempted to cast these debates in new terms. Steve Stern, arguing in 1995 forthe need to move beyond analyses that focused on women’s conformity or

deviance to established norms, outlined two insights that he believes previousscholarship failed to explore: that there was “interplay between gender cultureand political culture at all levels of the body politic”; and that “women andmen developed multiple codes of gender right, obligation, and honor,” which

 were subject to continual contestation.73 Among the major trends in scholar-ship published since then has been an attempt to explore the relevance of theseinsights to a variety of historical processes. Like Stern, these authors write

 480 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

72. Verena MartĂ­nez-Alier uses this analysis to explain why black Cubans seemed toprefer to marry someone “whiter.” “Among colored people,” she writes, “a very generalaspiration was to become as light and to get as far away from slavery as possible. Insteadof developing a consciousness of their own worth they made their own the whitediscriminating ideology imposed on them from above. MartĂ­nez-Alier, Marriage, Class and 

Colour, 96. In the 1980s, as I have argued above, social historians tended to reject thiskind of analysis and to look instead for ways that the culture of subordinated groupscontrasted with that of the elite. In 1995, however, a study by Hebe Castro marked adeparture 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 racialcategories should not matter. Castro, Das cores do silĂȘncio, 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 Stern’s words) or, ina 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 signify-ing power as sexual difference.”74 This focus has helped a new generation of scholars to resolve the tension between “top down” or “bottom up” interpreta-tions 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 Stern’s 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 withinmarriage, that women’s transgressions were common, and that women werepunished within the family.75 New work has taken, it is true, a smaller stepthan Stern seems to imply for his own. As I hope to have made clear in thisessay— 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 theinteraction between the meaning of gender in everyday life and the role it hasplayed in political formation, institution building, and power relations in gen-

eral. Rejecting the notion that gender ideology is always imposed from aboveand then either rejected or accommodated below, scholars have found various

 ways that gender has been constructed through interaction among those withand without power. This common theoretical concern brings a unity to worksthat are otherwise vastly different.

On the whole, the new scholarship is notable for its methodological eclec-ticism and empirical rigor. Colonial historians, particularly Kathryn Burns and

 Ann Twinam, have combed private and public archives in Spain and the Amer-

icas, placing stories of individual lives within the history of warfare, religion,or imperial administration.77 Both offer compelling accounts of the longue

durée, demonstrating that major watersheds such as Spanish-Incan wars, latecolonial rebellions, and the Bourbon Reforms looks different when gender is

The History of Gender  481

74. Stern, The Secret History of Gender , 21; Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises , 3; JoanScott, 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 scholarshipon women in development has paved the way for her study of domestic violence duringChile’s agrarian reform. Tinsman, Introduction to Partners in Conflict .

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 his-tory, juxtaposing sources ranging from government and company records tonotarial and judicial documents to oral history and popular literature in waysthat recast key chapters of national or transnational historical narratives.

 While several of these chapters have little in common, there is a strikingsimilarity in the theoretical approaches that guide these and other new authors.Foucault appears less in their theoretical discussions than might have been thecase ten years ago, although his perception that power is disseminated throughmultiple disciplinary discourses in modern societies remains in the back-ground.78 In the foreground is Bourdieu’s concept of habitus , and even moreprominently, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, often as read by Raymond

 Williams, the latter two more prevalent in works on the national period.79

Bourdieu’s habitus, or the set of norms that define the parameters and “com-mon sense” of a group or class, has replaced the broader and potentially essen-tializing notion of class or ethnic “cultures.”80 Hegemony has provided a way of understanding how political and cultural framework or idioms that establishsocial order become common to all of society through negotiations— albeit on

unequal terms—between those who possess authority and those who do not.81

 482 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

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 WilliamRoseberry, “Hegemony and the Language of Contention,” in Everyday forms of State

 Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, ed. Gilbert Joseph andDaniel 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; Tinsman’sintroduction to Partners in Conflict . Alonso, Thread of Blood, argues that Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as produced in civil society does not allow for analysis of the state’s role in thisproduction. 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 otherauthors cited here analyze these everyday practices, recognizing the potential for thisexpanded view of the state in Gramsci. The influence of Florencia Mallon is evident inmuch 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 promi-nence in several new works, generally in their introductions, and at times

throughout the narrative. This is certainly true of Stern’s study of plebeiannotions of gender and honor in late colonial Mexico, based largely on analysisof testimony in criminal records. Stern’s richly detailed account of patternedrelationships among nuclear family, extended kin, and village community is apowerful 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 andmen accept culturally constructed roles and responsibilities in marriage, but struggle over their content, bringing in kin and village elders to mediate whenstruggles escalate.82 The notion is reminiscent of Richard Boyer’s “patriarchalcontract,” but draws on village-level social mores, without Boyer’s argument that these values formed part of the general logic of monarchy.83 Stern’slengthy discussion of previous scholarship and his own theoretical and methodo-logical innovations, however, at times turns theorizing into an end in itself rather than a tool.84

 The same critique applies to Ana Alonso’s Thread of Blood. Alonso providesa 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 Mexico’s northern frontier in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.She presents a compelling argument that gendered notions of honor struc-tured Namiquipan resistance to new state projects of social control in thenineteenth century and help explain Namiquipan participation in the revolu-tion. Yet her discussion of theorists, and even of the meaning of honor, toooften distracts attention from her narrative rather than enhancing it. Whenthe theoretical underpinnings of analysis are disassociated from evidence, it is

difficult to evaluate the validity of each element in her argument. A tendency toward theoretical abstraction weakens even her discussion of specifically Namiquipan cultural concepts, including her intriguing account of how condi-tions on the frontier molded the contours of honor. An otherwise forceful

The History of Gender  483

Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History,” American Historical Review  99 (1994):1491–1515; 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, Sexualityand Marriage, 252–86.

84. This is evident, for example, in his discussion of honor and shame systemsthroughout 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 lieuof evidence, a footnote explains that the chapter is “based on oral histories,

archival documents, and ethnographic fieldwork.”85

In other works, theory is used more sparingly as a tool that helps to reveala specific historical process and explain how the story fits into or challengesbroader historical narratives. Kathryn Burns, for example, describes the worldof cloistered nuns and the broader “spiritual economy” in which they lived incolonial Cuzco as a habitus , where specific kinds of practices, exchanges, andrelationships were “common sense.”86 To do this, she produces an elegant text that does not rely on late-twentieth-century jargon, but rather dissects “key-

 words,” or the colonial terminology that refers to concepts of property, entitle-ment, social difference, freedom, and honor that are unfamiliar to modernsensibilities.87 Understanding these concepts allows her to make sense ofrelationships between spiritual and material investments—paying for prayersor endowing women to marry Christ, for example—as well as the nuns’ rolein securing Spanish hegemony and producing the ethnic and class hierar-chies that came to characterize colonial Cuzco by the end of the seventeenthcentury.

 As moneylenders and landowners, convents in Cuzco, like those of New 

Spain and Brazil, played a central role in the colonial economy.88 Burns opensnew ground, however, in her account of the logic of social order in and outsidethe convent. Sacred marriage to Christ reproduced the logic of patriarchy in asymbolic and material sense. The convent formed part of elite families’ strate-gies to expand kinship networks and maintain honor by arranging marriages;hence, the daughters of Cuzco’s wealthiest families took vows. Within the con-

 vent walls, nuns mothered orphaned or abandoned children and maintainedsizeable households of slaves, servants, girls receiving education, women pris-

oners, and battered wives. After the first generation, the nuns divided theirsociety by black or white veils, according to ethnicity and the size of thedowry. Originally intended to hispanicize mestiza daughters of the conquista-dors and guarantee their honor, the convent instead reproduced honor codesthat relegated non-Spanish women to lower-status positions. By indoctrinat-

 484 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

85. Alonso, Thread of Blood , 251 n. 1.86. Burns, Colonial Habits , 4.

87. Ibid., 6.88. See Asunción Lavrin’s pathbreaking work on Mexican convents: “Ecclesiastical

Reform”; and “The Role of Nunneries.” Susan Soeiro comes to similar conclusions forSalvador, Brazil; see Soeiro, “The Feminine Orders.”

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ing the first generations of Cuzco’s indigenous and mestiza elite women, theconvent played a key role in disseminating these honor codes.

 Ann Twinam’s book on elite concepts of honor as expressed in law, poli-tics, and the lives of illegitimates and their families throughout colonial Span-ish America refers to theoretical approaches even more sparingly than Burns.

 This is purposeful. Theorizing about honor a priori, Twinam insists, has led toanachronistic assumptions in previous scholarship on Latin America.89  Toavoid this mistake, Twinam outlines a method of emic analysis, one that looksat her documents “from the inside out” and listens “to the voices of colonialSpanish Americans.” Like Burns, Twinam is interested in understanding the“common sense” of honor for colonial elites, and she is even more attuned tothe meaning of their language or “vocabulary.” Analyzing circumlocutions,forms of address, terms that expressed intimacy, and, most importantly, theplacement of the word “honor” (“without any qualifiers”) in texts, she describesa 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; illegitimateoffspring who achieved public respect could acquire it.

In Twinan’s telling of the lives of illegitimate children, their mothers, andtheir fathers, we see that these paths were often excruciating. Reading requestsfor royal legitimation alongside other documents where the same individualsappear—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 discrimi-nation and availability of royal remedy varied according to political circum-

stances and region. However, Twinam finds little evidence, that these individ-uals resisted or even “stretched” dominant moral values that made this secrecy necessary, or that the basic contours of honor were transformed, even afterBourbon reforms made it easier to purchase legitimacy or “whiteness.”

 Twinam’s conclusions might change if she were to look at honor from aplebeian perspective. Richard Boyer’s study of popular mentalities, based onthe trials of bigamists brought before Mexican Inquisition, addresses this ques-

The History of Gender  485

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: Twinam’s elites could sometimes be traced in multiple documents, but 

this is not the case with Boyer’s plebeian bigamists; unlike Twinam’s study, which also provides ample empirical data, Boyer’s study cannot explain therelationship between everyday experiences of honor and major legal, political,and economic shifts. The richness of Inquisition documents, however, is wellknown to historians, and this is reflected in Boyer’s captivating recounting of individual life histories. Like Twinam, he uses these individual cases to illus-trate themes that emerge from collective biographies, in his case culled from216 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 ReligiĂłn en MĂ©xico Colo-nial at the Instituto Nacional de AntropologĂ­a 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 normsof their church and society about as much as they avoided them.”94 Neithercompliance nor avoidance, in Boyer’s view, were forms of resistance in the

heroic sense, but rather the consequences of “ordinary people making choicesand carrying on day by day.”95

 Works on gender in the national period—including Burns’s account of the decline of the convents in nineteenth-century Cuzco—find that long-standing moral values such as honor retained a central place in politics andsocial 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 explainhow Chilean copper workers in the early twentieth century—who were amongLatin America’s most militant and class-conscious proletarians—reproducedsome of the moral norms that the U.S. company energetically sought toimpose through hiring, housing, and welfare programs. Values including mas-culine work ethic, feminine domesticity and motherhood, and middle-class

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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 lan-guage and practice of domination/consent and a counterhegemonic language

of resistance. Miners demanded fair treatment based on their sense of honorearned through hard work and support of families; their wives transformedtheir domestic and maternal responsibilities into moral justification for salary increases and expanded social services. This common language, however, didnot frame all forms of counterhegemony. Miners, he shows, also cultivated amasculine sense of honor and solidarity through drinking, gambling, anddominating women, sometimes violently.96

In her study of the construction of republican citizenship in nineteenth-century Arequipa, Peru, Sarah Chambers demonstrates how plebeian resis-tance resulted not in counterhegemonic militancy, but in changes in liberaldiscourses 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 credibil-ity among plebeian Arequipeños despite the city’s history of violent conflict 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 Arequipeños began applying lib-eral discourses regarding civil liberties and the respect due to republican citi-zens to themselves. When nervous rulers created new forms of social controlthat stressed patriarchal family values, the recipe was complete. Through aclose reading of a variety of judicial records over more than half a century,Chambers charts changes in the language and practice of honor among ple-beian deponents and judicial officials. Honor came to be defined as an equaliz-ing component of Republican virtue rather than a mark of colonial status. In

exchange for support of republican social and even military campaigns, ple-beian men gained public respect, a degree of political participation, and patri-archal authority over women and wards in the home. Hegemony, now rootedin the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, was not simply imposed fromabove, but cultivated through a process of negotiation that incorporated hard-

 working male heads of household and excluded others, including all women.97

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96. Klubock, Contested Communities .97. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens. This conclusion is supported in part by 

Christine HĂŒnefeldt’s interesting and well-documented study of study of trials involvingmarital separation and sexual crimes in nineteenth-century Lima. HĂŒnefeldt does not usethe notion of hegemony, but argues that plebeian women and men continually redefinedtheir positions in relation to each other and to the state as political circumstance

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 As Klubock’s and Chambers’s studies make clear, hegemony can be a use-ful tool to analyze how broad cultural values come to be shared through differ-

ent processes of conflict and unequal negotiation, with different outcomes. These works also illustrate the potential of gender analysis to radically recast our view of class identification and political conflicts when gender is under-stood as the construction of both masculinity and femininity.

 This point is highlighted in Karin Rosemblatt’s study of leftist politicalculture under popular front governments in Chile (1920–50) and in EileenFindlay’s research on the ways that sexuality and race emerged in Puerto Ricanpolitics under Spanish and U.S. colonial rule. Like Klubock and Chambers,Rosemblatt uses the concept of hegemony to show how party militants andprofessional reformists (especially social workers) sought to convert workingfamilies into bastions of proletarian virtue by teaching the values of femininedomesticity and masculine responsibility. Although the content of moralreform was altered by their contacts with actual working families, their refusalto attack the basis of masculine privilege and recognize working-class men’ssubjugation of women made it impossible for progressive feminists to pushforward their more democratic vision for Chilean women.98

Findlay comes to similar conclusions in her analysis of early-twentieth-

century political struggles and discourses in Puerto Rico.99 Masculinity, indominant codes of nineteenth-century honor, was displayed by controllingand protecting a man’s “own” women and sexually conquering others. Thisaspect of the honor code developed in slave society proved difficult tobreak, for it offered all free men, including former slaves, “a modicum of 

 488 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield

demanded. Like Chambers, HĂŒnefeldt sees women’s positions decline, but identifies thecause as the loss of protections such as the dowry and inheritance laws. Unlike Chambers,

however, HĂŒnefeldt argues that women’s legal pleas, increasingly couched in a secularlanguage of their rights as wives, mothers, and workers, eventually led to new legalprotections. Chambers’s reading of legal documents is different. Comparing cases of rapeor seduction to cases of domestic abuse, Chambers finds that the courts favored womenand punished men in the former but not the latter, unless the men were vagabonds orotherwise failed to fulfill 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 state’srecognition 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 emergedas crucial issues in a variety of nationalist political movements, ranging from “bourgeoisfeminist” to labor. Findlay diverges from Foucault in her insistence that multiple, discretediscourses 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 oppressionin the 1900s–1910s resorted to familiar images of sexual abuse of working

 women by capitalists, drawing on workingmen’s sense of proprietorship of  women. Although men’s discourses silenced the voices of the few radical women who called for sexual and economic liberty, the net result of thediscourses of racial and sexual inclusion that emerged from radical mobi-lization was to alter the political landscape. Growing anti-imperialism andsolidarity among male and female workers fed unprecedented popularopposition to U.S.-designed regulation of prostitutes, most of whom werepoor and black during the World War I period.

 Taken together, the work on masculinity in the national period haschanged the tone of the scholarship that that came out of the new social his-tory of the 1970s and 1980s.101 Historians are still committed to understandingthe historical agency of subordinated groups. They are equally committed,however, not to romanticize this agency by seeing resistance to everywhere orby covering up the less admirable aspects of popular norms or mentalities.Heidi Tinsman and Lara Putnam, studying domestic violence during Chile’sagrarian reform and gender and migration on Costa Rica’s Atlantic coast,respectively, use different theoretical approaches to analyze relationships

between working-class masculinity and femininity and larger political andcommunity networks.102 Tinsman draws from psychoanalytical and marxist-feminist theories developed in the 1970s and 1980s to place the relationshipsbetween sexuality, patriarchy, and class at the center of her analysis. She showsthat the Christian Democrat and Popular Unity agrarian reform policies bol-stered patriarchy while political militancy pulled men and women away fromdomestic responsibilities. The mobilization of husbands and daughters resultedin a sense of heightened instability for wives and mothers. Men, meanwhile,

felt more and more insecure about their ability to control women’s sexuality asthey lost control over their companions’ comings and goings. The simultane-ous increase in women’s freedom of movement and instability led to new kindsof conflicts over sexual relationships and gender roles, along with women’sambiguous memories about the Popular Front period.103

Putnam’s study of the early years of Costa Rica’s banana boom shows that 

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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 Conflict ; Putnam, Public Women and One-Pant Men. See also Tinsman’s article in this issue.

103. Tinsman, Partners in Conflict .

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masculine notions of patriarchal honor clashed with women’s economic andsocial autonomy, leading to extraordinarily high rates of women’s murder by 

men. Patterns of male sociability among itinerant workers, which fosteredclass and political solidarity, also created a heightened need to defend one’shonor and led to enduringly high levels of male on male violence. In contrast to the books discussed above, Putnam finds that neither the United Fruit Company nor the Costa Rican state made serious efforts to direct these socialor criminal patterns or to impose moral discipline in the banana zone. Theconcept of hegemony is not useful to her, for the social relationships andhonor codes that she describes did not always arise or change as the result of aprocess of elite and popular give and take. Instead, Putnam takes a micro-historical 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 affirmed and challenged

 within the family life, social networks, affinities and animosities, and racial andclass categories that were built by migrants who arrived to reap the benefits of the banana boom. Analyzing the testimony and social practices of coastal resi-dents 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 dataand texts, Putnam explains how the social patterns and available scriptschanged with the rise and fall of the banana economy.104

In the end, of course, the content of historical scholarship, the actualprocesses and events that it illuminates, and the conclusions drawn are moreimportant than commonalities in theoretical or analytical approaches. It islikely that the lasting contribution of the new crop of books on gender, taken

as a whole, is the recognition of the continuing significance of honor, past independence and through political regimes ranging from the U.S. military tosocialist reformers. This recognition harks back to questions of the coloniallegacy explicit in works of Chambers and Findlay, as well as in the author’sstudy of honor as seen through legal, political, and urban reform movementsand cases of sexual crime in early-twentieth-century Brazil. These books, as

 well as the colonial scholarship cited above, demonstrate that to understandhonor requires attention to the material and symbolic aspects of gender, itsintersection with categories of race, class, region, and generation, and the flu-idity of the individual experiences that add up to collective structures.105

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