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 womenâs 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
womenâs 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 Lavrinâs 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 âfrom margin to centerâ 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, âThe Female in Ibero-America,â Latin American Research Review 7,no. 2 (1972): 125.
2. AsunciĂłn Lavrin, âSome Final Considerations on Trends and Issues in Latin
American Womenâs History,â in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives , ed. AsunciĂłnLavrin (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978).
Hispanic American Historical Review 81:3â4
Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press
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women.3 Although this trend is as significant as the outpouring of publications with âgenderâ 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 womenâs 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 analysisâand the works might well includeâgenderâ in the titlesâif 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, 1997â1998). 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 ânewâcultural 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 âincorporatedâ into U.S.theoretical and scholarly agendas, not vice versa. Latin Americans, for theirpart, do not generally view âLatin Americaâ 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 Statesâincluding the near universal adop-tion of the term âgenderââthis 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 mentalidadesââFamilia, Matrimonio y Sexualidad
en Nueva Españaâ (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, âCultural Approaches to Peasant Politics in the MexicanRevolution,â 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 Klubockâs discussion of gender history in Chile. While our narrativesare similar in some ways, Klubockâs 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 Nesvigâsreview 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 womenâs studies, then dominated by the social sciences. Whilethe interdisciplinarity of the early womenâs 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 womenâsstudies now seem indelibly dated to the 1970s. Yet the debatesâover the roleof U.S.-based feminists in defining a scholarly agenda; the links between Latin
American feminist militancy, working-class womenâs movements, and schol-arly production; the relevance of Latin Americaâs (dependant) position in the
world economy to womenâs status; and the relationship of scholarship on women to U.S. imperialism and Latin American political strugglesâshapedthe 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 womenâs 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, âWomen in Latin America: The State of Research, 1975,â 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 ânew social historyâ 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 âhistorical turnâ in international social sciences. As new kinds of political identifications that arose in many parts of the world, older explanatory models (or âgrand theoryâ), 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, âIn Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico: TheSeventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,â in Lavrin, Latin American Women; and Kecia Ali,âThe Historiography of Women in Modern Latin America: An Overview and Bibliography of the Recent Literature,â 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, âWomenâs History in Puerto RicanHistoriography: The Last Thirty Years,â in Puerto Rican Womenâs History: New Perspectives ,
ed. FĂ©lix V. Matos RodrĂguez and Linda C. Delgado (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998); andCarmen Ramos EscandĂłn, âLa nueva historia, el feminismo y la mujer,â 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 âgrand theoriesâ 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 âgenderâ rather than âwomen,âespecially 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 âgender.â9
454 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield
9. In Brazil, the term âgenderâ 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, âGĂȘnero,experiĂȘncia e subjetividade: A propĂłsito do desacordo Tilly-Scott,â Cadernos Pagu 3 (1994);and Maria Odila Silva Dias, âTeoria e mĂ©todo dos estudos feministas: Perspectiva histĂłricae hermenĂȘutica do cotidiano,â 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,âDe historiadoras, brasileiras e escandinavas: Loucuras, folias e relaçÔes de gĂȘneros noBrasil (sĂ©culo XIX e XX),â Tempo: Revista do Departamento de HistĂłria da Universidade Federal
Fluminense 5 (1998). Cunha complains that Brazilian womenâs historians, including some who use the term âgender,â have fallen prey to postmodern theories of power that obscuredifferences among women as well as womenâs 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,âgrand theoryâ 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 womenâs choices and experiences. Mary Del Priore, more concerned about recovering womenâs agency than emphasizingdifferences among women, argues that gender has not yet been theorized sufficiently in aBrazilian context and more work is needed to recover womenâs experiences and voices inBrazil. Her own work on colonial women falls more squarely within a âwomenâs historyâframework. See Mary Del Priore, âHistĂłria das mulheres: As vozes do silĂȘncio,â 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 Prioreâs essay.For a discussion of the use of âgenderâ and gender analysis in Mexican social history, seeRamos EscandĂłn, âLa nueva historia.â
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 Mexicoâs 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, 1780â1854 (University Park:Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1999); Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises:
Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920â1950 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North CarolinaPress, 2000); and Eileen Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto
Rico, 1870â1920 (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 âagainst the grain,â 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 Womenâs History:
Womenâs 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 womenâs 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 Chileâs El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904â1951 (Durham: Duke Univ.Press, 1998); Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men and
Women in Colombiaâs Industrial Experiment, 1905â1960 (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,
1950â1973 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, forthcoming); and Lara Putnamâs 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, âWomen in
Latin Americaâ; 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 womenâs studiesliterature and professional gatherings. Dramatic political transformationsthroughout the region either promised to open up or threatened to shut downopportunities to end womenâs 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 âpassionate partisanshipâ that inspired early
works, most of which sought to theorize the relationship between capitalismand patriarchy, identified as the roots of womenâs oppression.12 Anthropologist Florence Babb remembers, with some nostalgia, that scholars argued âwith thecertainty and conviction of the timeâ 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 womenâs 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,âResearch on Latin American Women,â Signs 5, no. 1 (1979), which reviews the literatureproduced by Latin America-based scholars; Pescatello, âThe Female in Ibero-Americaâ;and K. Lynn Stoner, âDirections in Latin American Womenâs History, 1977â1984,â
Latin American Research Review 22, no. 2 (1987). For more recent scholarship on modernLatin America, see Ali, âThe Historiography of Womenâ; 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, âSquaring the Circle: Womenâs Factory Labor,Gender Ideology, and Necessity,â 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, âGender and Sexuality in LAP,â Latin American Perspectives 25,no. 6 (1998): 28â29.
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vibrant scholarly community committed to the collective endeavor of uncov-ering womenâs 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 womenâs 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, âwomenâ 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 âThird World,â while sex-ual inequalities could take precedence in industrialized nations.16 Althoughthere were notable exceptions, particularly in the North American politicalscience literature on womenâs political participation, class analysis influencedinterpretations of data as well as the topics favored. These included the effectsof development on women, womenâs 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, âResearch on Latin American Women,â 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, âFeminisms in Latin America: From Bogota toSan Bernadino,â Signs 17, no. 2 (1992). Their observations are summarized in Jane S.
Jaquette, âIntroduction: From Transition to ParticipationâWomenâs Movements andDemocratic Politics,â in The Womenâs Movement in Latin America: Feminism and the Transition
to Democracy, ed. Jane Jaquette (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 5â6.16. See, for example, June Nash and Helen Icken Safa, eds., Sex and Class in Latin
America: Womenâs 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, âResearch on Latin American Women.â
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Notwithstanding the historical materialist approach of some of the early womenâs 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 âcapitalist patriarchyâ for understanding the exploitation of womenâs labor,both domestic and extradomestic, or âmarianismoâ for explaining womenâs 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, âA Decade of Research on Women in Latin America,â in Nash and Safa, Women and Change, 9; MarĂaPatrĂcia FernĂĄndez-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I And My People: Women and Industry in Mexicoâs
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 âmarianismoâ 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, âMarianismo: The Other Faceof Machismo in Latin America,â 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 Jaquetteâs analysis of womenâs politicalempowerment as based on âsex differentiationâ 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 womenâs specific participation inpolitics could result in a broad variety of outcomes. See Jane S. Jaquette, âFemale PoliticalParticipation in Latin America,â in Nash and Safa, Sex and Class .
19. Silvia Marina Arrom, in The Women of Mexico City, 1790â1857 (Stanford: StanfordUniv. Press, 1985), 259â67, argues that marianismo can be useful if seen not as a timelessIberian tradition, but as a Latin American parallel to the Anglo âcult of true womanhood,âan ideological innovation of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Arrom argues that in
Mexico, marianismo did not lead to womenâs 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 Safaâs 1976 volume, Sex and Class in
Latin America, showed that womenâs political action varied by class, ethnicity,and region and that the public and private realms were intertwinedâthemeshistorians 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 Nashâs 1979ethnographic study of a Bolivian mining community, according to the editors,even anticipated the objectives of âtodayâs cohort of gender-conscious Latin
American labor historians.â21
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 womenâs 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, 1890â1940 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1995), 13, retrieves the conceptof marianismo to argue that feminists in the Southern Cone since 1910 used âan ideology of social mission based on gender functions and attributesâ to justify their participation inpolitics.
20. French and James, âSquaring the Circle,â 3. The studies they cite are the twocollections edited by Nash and Safa cited in notes 16â17; and FernĂĄndez-Kelly, For
We Are Sold .21. French and James, âSquaring the Circle,â 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; othersâmost commonly Latin American scholarsârejected altogether the concept of âdevelopment,â which they believed wasinformed by a uniform notion of progress imposed by the wealthy nations on ahomogenized âThird World.â26 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, Womenâs 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 producciĂłnâreproducciĂłn (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, âWomen in Latin America,â6â13, describes institutional collaboration between North American and Latin Americanscholars and funding agencies.
26. See, for example, Lourdes BenerĂa and Gita Sen, âAccumulation, Reproduction,and Womenâs Role in Economic Development: Boserup Revisited,â in Leacock and Safa,Womenâs Work; and Marta Zabaleta, âResearch on Latin American Women: In Search of Our Political Independence,â 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 womenâs 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 âdevelopment,â 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, âResearch on Latin American Women.â 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, âHistĂłria das mulheres,â for adiscussion of this program and its importance to the development of womenâs 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, âWomen in Latin America,â 6â12.
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,
Womenâs 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 womenâs status was generally âno.â Womenâs 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 womenâsfull participation in decision-making tempered the gains.30
One social science research project that started out in this general veinâa study of rural family structure after the Cuban Revolutionâmerits specialmention because of its later importance to historians. Anthropologist Verena
MartĂnez-Alierâs Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (1974)is based on church and state regulations regarding marriage, interracial cou-plesâ 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. Ătica, 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, âResearch on Latin American Women.â
30. The best examples are Carmen Diana Deere, âRural Women and AgrarianReform in Peru, Chile, and Cuba,â 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,âModernizing Women for a Modern Society: The Cuban Case,â in Female and Male in
Latin America: Essays , ed. Ann Pescatello (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1973); Muriel Nazzari, âThe Woman Question in Cuba: An Analysis of Material Constaints on ItsSolution,â Signs 9 (1983); Maxine Molyneaux, âMobilization Without Emancipation:
Womenâs Interests and the State in Nicaragua,â Feminist Studies 11 (1985); and idem, âThePolitics of Abortion in Nicaragua: Revolutionary Pragmatism or Feminism in the Realm of Necessity?â 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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Womenâs History
In 1978, AsunciĂłn Lavrin cited similar documentsâlegal records of divorce,
adultery, concubinage, bigamy, incest, parent-child conflicts over marriagechoice, and dispensation of consanguinityâto 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 womenâs studies liter-ature produced by social scientists, and even suggested that historical researchmight âgive supportâor disproofâto some of their theories.â33 Yet, there
were factors that distinguished womenâs history from the more general womenâsstudies literature. First, the bulk of the early (pre-1980s) womenâs history research was done by U.S.-based scholars. Like the early womenâs history inthe U.S., and unlike previous Latin American womenâs studies literature, thehistorical research up until the mid-1980s included a number of studies of elite
women, religious women and convents, womenâs legal rights, dowry and otherproperty, and prescriptive literature on gender roles and morals.34 Historians
464 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield
32. AsunciĂłn Lavrin, âIn Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico: The Seventeenthand Eighteenth Centuries,â in Lavrin, Latin American Women.
33. Ibid., 302.34. For elite women, see Lavrin, âIn Search of the Colonial Woman; A. J. R.
Russell-Wood, âFemale and Family in the Economy and Society of Colonial Brazil,â inLavrin, Latin American Women; Edith Couturier, âWomen in a Noble Family: The MexicanCounts of Regla, 1750â1830,â in Latin American Women; Josefina Muriel, Cultura femenina
novahispana (Mexico City: Univ. Nacional AutĂłnoma de MĂ©xico, 1982); John Tutino,âPower, Class and Family: Men and Women in the Mexican Elite, 1750â1810,â The
Americas 39, no. 3 (1983); Sandra F. McGee, âThe Visible and Invisible Liga PatriĂłtica Argentina, 1919â1928: Gender Roles and the Right Wing,â HAHR 64, no. 2 (1984); Arrom,Women of Mexico City; Carmen Ramos-EscandĂłn, âSeñoritas porfirianas: Mujer e ideologiaen el MĂ©xico progresista,â 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, âEcclesiastical Reform of Nunneries in New Spainin the Eighteenth Century,â The Americas 22 (1965); and idem, âThe Role of Nunneries
in the Economy of New Spain in the Eighteenth Century,â HAHR 46, no. 4 (1966); Ann Miriam Gallagher, âThe Indian Nuns of Mexico Cityâs Monasterio of CorpusChristi, 1724â1821,â in Lavrin, Latin American Women; Susan A. Soeiro, âThe 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 womenâs 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
1677â1800,â in Lavrin, Latin American Women; on law and property, see AsunciĂłn Lavrinand Edith Couturier, âDowries and Wills: A View of Womenâs Socio-Economic Role inColonial Guadalajara and Puebla, 1640â1790,â HAHR 59, no. 2 (1979); Maria BeatrizNizza da Silva, Sistema do casamento no Brasil colonial (SĂŁo Paulo: Univ. de SĂŁo Paulo, 1984);
Silvia Arrom, âChanges in Mexican Family Law in the Nineteenth Century: The CivilCodes of 1870 and 1884,â Journal of Family History 10, no. 3 (1985); Edith Couturier,âWomen and the Family in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: Law and Practice,â Journal of
Family History 10, no. 3 (1985); and Donna Guy, âLower-Class Families, Women, and theLaw in Nineteenth-Century Argentina,â Journal of Family History 10, no. 3 (1985). See alsothe historiographical essay on Puerto Rico by Matos RodrĂguez, âWomenâs History.â
35. Inga Clendinnen, âYucatec Mayan Women and the Spanish Conquest: Role andRitual in Historical Reconstruction,â 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, âThe Participation of Womenin the Independence Movement in Gran Colombia, 1780â1830â in Lavrin, Latin American
Women; Ana Macias, âWomen and the Mexican Revolution: 1910â1920,â The Americas 37
(1980); Shirlene Ann Soto, The Mexican Woman: A Study of Her Participation in the Revolution,
1910â1940 (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:
1898â1919 (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Fraficor, 1979); Branca Moreira Alves, Ideologia e
feminismo: A luta da mulher pelo voto no Brasil (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1980); Maria Amélia 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, 1913â1952 (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, 1977â 89 (Madrid: Ed.RevoluciĂłn, 1990); Esperanza Tuñón Pablos, Mujeres que se organizan: El frente Ășnico pro
derechos de la mujer, 1935â1938 (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 Womanâs 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, 1910â1940 (Denver: Arden
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Womenâs 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 GilbertoFreyreâs 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 Womenâs
Rights in Brazil, 1850â1940 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1990); K. Lynn Stoner, From the
House to the Streets: The Cuban Womanâs Movement for Legal Reform, 1898â1940 (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, 1890â1940 (Lincoln: Univ. of NebraskaPress, 1995); Elisabeth J. Friedman, Unfinished Transitions: Women and The Gendered
Development of Democracy in Venezuela, 1936â1996 (University Park: Pennsylvania StateUniv. Press, 2000).
37. Studies of the history of womenâs 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 womenâs labor in Puerto Rico, see Altagracia Ortiz, âPuerto Rican
Women Workers in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Appraisal of the Literature,â inRodrĂguez and Delgado, Puerto Rican Womenâs History. Among the few works by historians,see Marysa Navarro, âHidden, Silent, and Anonymous: Women Workers in the Argentine
Trade Union Movement,â in The World of Womenâs Trade Unionism: Comparative Historical
Essays , ed. Norbert C. Soldon (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985); Marysa Navarro andCatalina Wainerman, âEl trabajo de la mujer en la Argentina: AnĂĄlisis de las ideasdominantes en las primeras dĂ©cadas del siglo XX,â Cuadernos de CENEP , no. 7 (1979);Donna Guy, âWomen, Peonage, and Industrialization: Argentina, 1810â1914,â Latin
American Research Review 16, no. 3 (1981); idem, âLower-Class Families.â There were agreat number of studies of the history of womenâs labor after the mid-1980s; see Ali, âThe
Historiography of Women.â38. Elizabeth Kuznesof and Robert Oppenheimer, âThe Family and Society in
Nineteenth-Century Latin America: An Historiographical Introduction,â Journal of Family
History 10 (1985): 220â21.
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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 Chevalierâs 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, âSexuality, Gender and the Family in Colonial Brazil,â 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 CorrĂȘaâs 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 âRepensando a famĂlia patriarcalâ in Colcha de retalhos
(São 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, âMexican Rural History SinceChevalier: The Historiography of the Colonial Hacienda,â 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, 1763â1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971); Doris M. Ladd, The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780â1826 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press,
1976); Susan Migden Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778â1810: Family and Commerce (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978); idem, The Bureaucrats Of Buenos
Aires, 1769â1810: Amor al real servicio (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1987); Lavrin andCouturier, âDowries and Willsâ; 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, 1824â1867 (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, 1567â1767 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989); Tutino, âPower, Classand Familyâ; 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, 1870â1945 (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 âfeudalâ 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 familyâs social and cultural significance. Alida C. Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de ParnaĂba, 1580â1822
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992) extends the study of the elite family to consideralso nonelite and slave families.
42. Kuznesof and Oppenheimer, âThe Family and Society,â 221â22. Studies of indigenous populations were initiated by Woodrow Borahâs pioneering research on the
sixteenth-century decline of the indigenous population and seventeenth-century economicdepression in Mexico. Woodrow Borah, New Spainâs Century of Depression (Berkeley: Univ.of California Press, 1951).
43. Kuznesof and Oppenheimer, âThe Family and Society,â 223â24.
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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 Nazzariâsstudy 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 menâs dependency
on the assets provided by wivesâ 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 (1600â1900) (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,âMarriage Patterns in Mexico City, 1811,â Journal of Family History 3, no. 4 (1978); TomĂĄsCalvo, âThe Warmth of the Hearth: Seventeenth-Century Guadalajara Families,â in
Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. AsunciĂłn Lavrin (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989); Donald Ramos, âMarriage and the Family in Colonial Vila Rica,â 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 colÎnia 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 1980sâ1990s. See the historiographicalreview by Sheila de Castro Faria, âHistĂłria da famĂlia e demografia histĂłrica,â 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 womenâs 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, âBlack Homes, White Homilies: Perceptions of the SlaveFamily and of Slave Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil,â 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 âclassicâ and ârevisionistâ 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), 28â43.48. 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 ,43â53, 62â65 nn. 59â62.
49. For other regions, see David Chandler, âFamily Bonds and the Bondsman: TheSlave Family in Colonial Colombia,â Latin American Research Review 16, no. 2 (1981);Christine HĂŒnefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Limaâs Slaves,
1800â1854 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994). For similar desires to formlegitimate families among slaves and the free population, see Faria, âHistĂłria da famĂliaâ;idem, A colĂŽnia em movimento, esp. 335â59; and Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro, Das cores do
silĂȘncio: Os significados da liberdade no Sudeste escravistaâBrasil, 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 womenâslabor in Latin America, which found most women working as domestics or inthe informal economy, traditional labor history was incapable of accountingfor the ways most womenâor indeed, most menâmade a living or resistedoppression.51 Women were among those previously âsilencedâ historical actors
who appeared in studies of âthe quotidian,â 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 âgenderâ 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 theâpopular sectors.â52 Many social historiansâ 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 âfemi-nistâ framework in studies of womenâs 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, âResearch on Latin American Women,â 116â17.52. See Navarro-Aranguren, Saporta Sternbacch, Chuchryk, and Alvarez, âFeminisms
in Latin Americaâ; Jaquette, âIntroduction: From Transition to Participation.â53. Historiansâ greater sympathy for militant and popular movements may also be
reflected in Latin Americansâ greater interest in womenâs labor, prostitution, criminality,and everyday life, and lesser interest in the history of feminist movements, as compared toNorth Americans. See Ali, âThe Historiography of Women.â
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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 womenâs 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, âWomenâs History,â 13, 33 nn. 13â14. The ânew historyâhas been criticized for not focusing attention on womenâs lives; instead, historians includereferences to women in studies that mostly involve men. Among the few works specifically about women are Blanca Silvestrini, âWomen as Workers: The Experience of the PuertoRican Woman in the 1930sâ 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, âLastrabajadoras del tabaco en Utuado, Puerto Rico, segĂșn el censo de 1910,â Homines 9 (1985).
See Ramos EscandĂłn, âLa nueva historia,â for a discussion of similar dynamics in Mexicanhistoriography. Ramos EscandĂłnâs Presencia y transparencia includes works inspired by thenew social history. For Argentina and Chile, where redemocratization was more recent,feminist activism, concern with womenâs history, and social histories focusing on genderhave appeared more recently. See Roxana BoixadĂłs, âUna viuda de âmala vidaâ en la coloniariojana,â in Historia de las mujeres en Argentina, ed. Fernanda Gil Lozano, Valeria SilvinaPita, and Maria Gabriela Ini (Buenos Aires: Taurus, 2000); Gabriela Braccio, âUna gavillaindisoluble: Las teresas en CĂłrdoba (siglo XVIII),â in Lozano et al., Historia de las mujeres ;Diana Veneros Ruiz-Tagle, ed., Perfiles revelados: Historias de mujeres en Chile, siglos
XVIIIâXX (Santiago: Univ. de Santiago de Chile, 1997); and Lorena Godoy, Elizabeth
Hutchison, Karin Rosemblatt, M. Soledad ZĂĄrate, eds., Disciplina y desacato: ConstrucciĂłn deidentidad en Chile, Siglos XIX y XX (Santiago: Sur/CEDEM, 1995). Essays from thesecollections are reviewed in Klubockâs essay in this issue, âWriting the History of Womenand Gender in Twentieth-Century Chile.â
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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
womenâs 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 São Paulo no século 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 âBelle Epoqueâ (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1989); Rachel Soihet,Condição feminina e formas de violĂȘncia: Mulheres pobres e ordem urbana, 1890â1920 (Rio de Janeiro: Forense UniversitĂĄria, 1990). See also, Sueann Caulfield and Martha de AbreuEsteves, âFifty Years of Virginity in Rio de Janeiro: Sexual Politics and Gender Roles in
Juridical and Popular Discourse, 1890â1940,â Luso-Brazilian Review 30, no. 1 (1993). Margareth Ragoâs Do cabarĂ© ao lar: A utopia da cidade disciplinar: Brasil, 1890â1930 (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 Cunhaâs O espelho do mundo: Juquery, a
histĂłria de um asilo (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1986) also fits within this list. Cunhaâs
study is a fascinating social history of a modern sanitarium in the first half of thetwentieth-century SĂŁo Paulo; see Cunha, âLoucura, genero feminino.â56. 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 (1840â1890) (SĂŁoPaulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1989); and Margareth Rago, Os prazeres da noite: Prostituição e cĂłdigos
da sexualidade feminina em SĂŁo Paulo (1890â1930) (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, âInfanticĂdios: ConstrucciĂłn de la verdad
y control de gĂ©nero en el discurso judicial,â Maria Gabriela Ini, âCuerpos femeninos y cuerpos abyectos: La construcciĂłn anatĂłmica de la feminidad en la medicina argentina,âand Pablo Ben, âDamas, locas y mĂ©dicos: La locura expropriada,â in Lozano, Pita, and Ini,
Historia de las mujeres ; William French, âProstitutes and Guardian Angels: Women, Work,and the Family in Porfirian Mexico,â HAHR 72, no. 4 (1992); Rafael Sagredo, La Chiquita,
no. 4002 (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1996); Juan JosĂ© MarĂn HernĂĄndez, âLas causas de laprostituciĂłn Josefina: 1939â1949: Entre lo imaginario y el estigma,â Revista de Historia (San
JosĂ©, Costa Rica) 27 (1993); and idem, âProstituciĂłn y pecado en la bella y prĂłspera ciudadde San JosĂ© (1850â1930),â 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, âProstitution, Revolution and Social Reform in Mexico City, 1918â1940â (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, â En el nombre del pueblo, del estado y de la ciencia
(. . .)â: Historia social de la salud pĂșblica, Chile, 1880â1973 (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, âVicious Women, Virtuous Women: The Female Delinquent and the Santiago de Chile Correctional House,
1860â1900,â in The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Esays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 1830â1940, ed. Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre (Austin:Univ. of Texas Press, 1996); Robert Buffington and Pablo Piccato, âTales of Two Women:
The Narrative Construal of Porfirian Reality,â 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 âeliteâ or âofficialâ discourse was juxtaposed with analysis of âpopularâ or âalternativeâ 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, womenâs 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 âmodernizeâ and âcivilizeâ 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. âMarginalâ womenâ particularly prostitutesâseem to have beenfavored objects, but state officials and professionals also worked to inculcate
women in moral and civic values they hoped would âmodernizeâ 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
Vaughanâs words, to âsubordinate the household to the interests of nationaldevelopment.â The family and its gender relations were to be ârationalizedâ inthe interests of nation-building and development.59
The History of Gender 475
âVida de mujeres de la vida: ProstituciĂłn feminina en Antofogasta (1920â1930),â inRuiz-Tagle, Perfiles revelado. For references to additional Chilean works, see Klubockâsessay in this issue, âWriting the History of Women and Gender.â
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, 1920â1964 (Chapel Hill:Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996). Mary Kay Vaughan, âModernizing Patriarchy: StatePolicies, Rural Households, and Women in Mexico, 1930â1940,â 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 slavesâsocial 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, womenâs 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, 1930â1940 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1997); and Susan K. Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914â1940 (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. 1790âc. 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 womenâs 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 womenâs 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 Alberroâs 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 practicesâsodomy,concubinage, marriage, bigamyâbased 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, 1500â1650 (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, âLa sexualidad manipulada en Nueva
España: Modalidades de recuperaciĂłn y de adaptaciĂłn frente a los Tribunales EclesiĂĄsticos,âSeminario de Historia de las Mentalidades (1982); idem, InquisiciĂłn y sociedad en MĂ©xico,
1571â1700 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura EconĂłmica, 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 porquĂ© no se cumplĂa 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 âgayâ 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 childrenâs 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, Escravidão, 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 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras,1987); Vainfas, Trópicos dos pecados ; Ligia Bellini, A coisa obscura: Mulher, sodomia e inquisição
no Brasil colonial (SĂŁo Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1989). Vainfas (pp. 143â86) 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, 1574â1821 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988), a study of changes inthe meaning of honor based on documents of parental opposition to childrensâ 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, 1500â1846 (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 (Seedâs argument)or decreased (GutiĂ©rrezâs argument) in the late-eighteenth century. Subsequent scholarship
favored the argument that it decreased. See Stern, The Secret History of Gender , 384â85 n.13; Lavrinâs 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 subjectsâ everyday lives, worldviews, and valuesâ
what some call âpopular cultureâ and others, âmentalitiesââas 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 childrenâs 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
womenâs 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 Socolowâs excellent synthesis in the chapter entitled âElite Women,â in
The Women of Colonial Latin America. On a motherâs role in choosing her childrenâs marriagepartners, see Ferry, The Colonial Elite, 223â35. An interesting perspective on womenâs rolein kinship networks is Richard Grahamâs discussion of womenâs 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 âpopular classes,â or âsubalternsâ have tended to interpret patterns such aslow marriage rates or illegitimacy as evidence of âalternativeâ 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 womenâs conformity or
deviance to established norms, outlined two insights that he believes previousscholarship failed to explore: that there was âinterplay between gender cultureand political culture at all levels of the body politicâ; and that âwomen andmen developed multiple codes of gender right, obligation, and honor,â 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 âwhiter.â âAmong colored people,â she writes, âa 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 aâblackâ 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 , 19â20.
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about âthe politics of gender and gendering of politicsâ (in Sternâs words) or, ina formulation akin to that of Joan Scott, the ways gender represented âboth a
set of power-laden distinctions between women and men and a way of signify-ing power as sexual difference.â74 This focus has helped a new generation of scholars to resolve the tension between âtop downâ or âbottom upâ 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 Sternâs 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 womenâs 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 thisessayâ and as several authors, including Stern, note in their introductionsâ
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), 42â50.
75. Susan Socolow, âReview of Stern, The Secret History of Gender,â 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 duringChileâs 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 Bourdieuâs concept of habitus , and even moreprominently, Gramsciâs concept of hegemony, often as read by Raymond
Williams, the latter two more prevalent in works on the national period.79
Bourdieuâs habitus, or the set of norms that define the parameters and âcom-mon senseâ of a group or class, has replaced the broader and potentially essen-tializing notion of class or ethnic âcultures.â80 Hegemony has provided a way of understanding how political and cultural framework or idioms that establishsocial order become common to all of society through negotiationsâ albeit on
unequal termsâbetween 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 , 15â16;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, 183â84.81. The notion of hegemony as a âmeaningful frameworkâ comes from WilliamRoseberry, âHegemony and the Language of Contention,â 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, 14â16; Klubock, Contested
Communities , 5â6; Farnsworth-Alvear, Dulcinea in the Factory, 163, 230; Tinsmanâsintroduction to Partners in Conflict . Alonso, Thread of Blood, argues that Gramsciâs concept of hegemony as produced in civil society does not allow for analysis of the stateâs 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 , 115â18. 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, âThe 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 Sternâs study of plebeiannotions of gender and honor in late colonial Mexico, based largely on analysisof testimony in criminal records. Sternâs 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 âpatriarchal pact,â 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 Boyerâs âpatriarchalcontract,â but draws on village-level social mores, without Boyerâs argument that these values formed part of the general logic of monarchy.83 Sternâslengthy 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 Alonsoâs 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 Mexicoâs 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,â American Historical Review 99 (1994):1491â1515; and idem, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995).82. Stern, Secret History of Gender , 97â111.
83. Boyer, âWomen, La Mala Vida, and the Politics of Marriage,â in Lavrin, Sexualityand Marriage, 252â86.
84. This is evident, for example, in his discussion of honor and shame systemsthroughout the world. Stern, Secret History of Gender , 15â16.
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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 âbased on oral histories,
archival documents, and ethnographic fieldwork.â85
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 âspiritual economyâ in which they lived incolonial Cuzco as a habitus , where specific kinds of practices, exchanges, andrelationships were âcommon sense.â86 To do this, she produces an elegant text that does not rely on late-twentieth-century jargon, but rather dissects âkey-
words,â 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 investmentsâpaying for prayersor endowing women to marry Christ, for exampleâas well as the nunsâ 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 familiesâ strate-gies to expand kinship networks and maintain honor by arranging marriages;hence, the daughters of Cuzcoâs 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 AsunciĂłn Lavrinâs pathbreaking work on Mexican convents: âEcclesiastical
Reformâ; and âThe Role of Nunneries.â Susan Soeiro comes to similar conclusions forSalvador, Brazil; see Soeiro, âThe Feminine Orders.â
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ing the first generations of Cuzcoâs indigenous and mestiza elite women, theconvent played a key role in disseminating these honor codes.
Ann Twinamâs 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 âfrom the inside outâ and listens âto the voices of colonialSpanish Americans.â Like Burns, Twinam is interested in understanding theâcommon senseâ of honor for colonial elites, and she is even more attuned tothe meaning of their language or âvocabulary.â Analyzing circumlocutions,forms of address, terms that expressed intimacy, and, most importantly, theplacement of the word âhonorâ (âwithout any qualifiersâ) 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 Twinanâs 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 individualsappearâa task that required painstaking research in an astonishing number of archivesâTwinam 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 âstretchedâ 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 âwhiteness.â
Twinamâs conclusions might change if she were to look at honor from aplebeian perspective. Richard Boyerâs 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., 27â29.
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tion directly.91 He uses methods similar to Twinam, but with different kinds of detail: Twinamâs elites could sometimes be traced in multiple documents, but
this is not the case with Boyerâs plebeian bigamists; unlike Twinamâs study, which also provides ample empirical data, Boyerâs 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 Boyerâs 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 âlargely a report drawn from archival materials.â92
Boyer concludes that the church indeed âtransmitted its âideologyâ to ordinary people,â 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 âwith a sense of irony,âBoyer argues, âthat we should stress that bigamists complied with the normsof their church and society about as much as they avoided them.â94 Neithercompliance nor avoidance, in Boyerâs view, were forms of resistance in the
heroic sense, but rather the consequences of âordinary people making choicesand carrying on day by day.â95
Works on gender in the national periodâincluding Burnsâs account of the decline of the convents in nineteenth-century Cuzcoâfind 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 centuryâwho were amongLatin Americaâs most militant and class-conscious proletariansâreproducedsome 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
486 HAHR / August and November / Caulfield
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 âmyth of the White City,â which casts Arequipa as a racially and economically democratic bastion of liberal republicanism, gained credibil-ity among plebeian Arequipeños despite the cityâs 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
The History of Gender 487
96. Klubock, Contested Communities .97. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens. This conclusion is supported in part by
Christine HĂŒnefeldtâs 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 Klubockâs and Chambersâs 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 Rosemblattâs study of leftist politicalculture under popular front governments in Chile (1920â50) and in EileenFindlayâs 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 menâssubjugation 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 manâs âownâ 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, âa modicum of
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demanded. Like Chambers, HĂŒnefeldt sees womenâs positions decline, but identifies thecause as the loss of protections such as the dowry and inheritance laws. Unlike Chambers,
however, HĂŒnefeldt argues that womenâs legal pleas, increasingly couched in a secularlanguage of their rights as wives, mothers, and workers, eventually led to new legalprotections. Chambersâs 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 stateâsrecognition 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 âbourgeoisfeministâ to labor. Findlay diverges from Foucault in her insistence that multiple, discretediscourses emerged from different social groups and that these discourses âgrew out of their creatorsâ particular lived experiencesâ; see Findlay, Imposing Decency, 5.
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honor.â100 Even anarchists who tied sexual subjugation to class oppressionin the 1900sâ1910s resorted to familiar images of sexual abuse of working
women by capitalists, drawing on workingmenâs sense of proprietorship of women. Although menâs 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 Chileâsagrarian reform and gender and migration on Costa Ricaâs 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 womenâs sexuality asthey lost control over their companionsâ comings and goings. The simultane-ous increase in womenâs freedom of movement and instability led to new kindsof conflicts over sexual relationships and gender roles, along with womenâsambiguous memories about the Popular Front period.103
Putnamâs study of the early years of Costa Ricaâs 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, 1864â1945 (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 Tinsmanâs article in this issue.
103. Tinsman, Partners in Conflict .
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masculine notions of patriarchal honor clashed with womenâs economic andsocial autonomy, leading to extraordinarily high rates of womenâs murder by
men. Patterns of male sociability among itinerant workers, which fosteredclass and political solidarity, also created a heightened need to defend oneâshonor 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 âscriptsâ
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 authorâsstudy 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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