Rituals and Sisterhoods

Single Women's Households in Mexico, 1560–1750

Amos Megged

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781607329626, 9781607329619
• eBook ISBN: 9781607329633
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

Rituals and Sisterhoods reveals the previously under-studied world of plebeian single women and single-female-headed households in colonial Mexican urban centers. Focusing on the lower echelons of society, Amos Megged considers why some commoner women remained single and established their own female-headed households, examining their unique discourses and self-representations from various angles.
 
Megged analyzes these women's life stories recorded during the Spanish Inquisition, as well as wills and bequests, petitions, parish records, and private letters that describe—in their own words—how they exercised agency in male-dominated and religious spaces. Translations of select documents and accompanying analysis illustrate the conditions in which women dissolved their marriages, remained in long-lasting extramarital cohabitations, and formed female-led households and "sisterhoods" of their own. Megged provides evidence that single women in colonial Mexico played a far more active and central role in economic systems, social organizations, cults, and political activism than has been previously thought, creating spaces for themselves in which they could initiate and maintain autonomy and values distinct from those of elite society.
 
The institutionalization of female-headed households in mid-colonial Mexico had wide-ranging repercussions and effects on general societal values. Rituals and Sisterhoods details the particular relevance of these changes to the history of emotions, sexuality, gender concepts, perceptions of marriage, life choices, and views of honor and shame in colonial society. This book will be of significant interest to students and scholars of colonial Latin American history, the history of Early Modern Spain and Europe, and gender and women's studies.
 

1

Mise-en-Scène

DOI: 10.5876/9781607329633.c001

Herodotus was the first to write of the A-Mazons, placing them in Pontus near the shore of the Euxine Sea, and describing their raids against scythes, Thrace, and the coasts of Asia Minor. No men were permitted to dwell in their country, though once a year the warrior women visited a neighboring nation for purposes of procreation, slaying all male children or returning them to their fathers, and recruiting the baby girls. Their name allegedly came from the Greek a-mazos (without breast), from their custom of amputating the right breast to make the drawing of the bow more convenient, but a variety of other derivations have been put forward. The explorer Francisco de Orellana, at Amazonas Forest, 1541, said that women at Maranhão River threw arrows against his expedition. This myth dissipated that because of these actions the women received the name of the Greek warriors.1 Who were those “single-breasted” maidens, and what was their role in society? And how did their sexuality defy gender relations?

Embarking on Isabel de Montoya’s individual life history, and thereafter parting onto the vast landscape of singleness in early and mid-colonial Mexico, the goal of this book is to provide a fresh approach to lingering views on single, plebeian women in Latin American historiography in general, and in Mexico in particular. This book is dedicated entirely to single women of the lower echelons of society, whether they were Spanish, creoles, mulatas, or blacks. Indigenous single women during the period discussed amounted to as high as 39% of all mothers in rural areas such as San Martin Huequechula (state of Puebla); however, they are usually unattended to by the sources. The issue of why plebeian women remained single and established their own, female-headed households is approached here from many different angles and according to key themes that are gleaned from these women’s discourses. The proportion of women in mid-colonial New Spain who never married probably rose to unprecedented level. In this present study of New Spain’s single plebeian women’s households, single, plebeian women either chose to dissolve their marriages, remain in alternative, long-lasting cohabitations, outside of marriage, with various male partners throughout their lives, or create alternative, women-led households and “sisterhoods” of their own. As is argued here, the institutionalization of female-headed households in mid-colonial Mexico reveals wide-ranging repercussions and effects on mid-colonial values and has particular relevance to the history of emotions, sexuality, gender concepts, perceptions of marriage, life choices, and how honor and shame were construed by the lower echelons of colonial society. Linda A. Curcio-Nagy, for example, writes about “emotional communities,” within the frameworks of which “social norms, fundamental assumptions, rules of behavior, cultural scripts, modes of expression, and religious values” were formulated and articulated (2014, 60; see also Rosenwein 2015). We may take this a step further and hypothesize that ethnic groups, as well as particular castas (generic term for racial mixtures), operated as cultural enclaves within Spanish colonial society, which would definitely impact their attitudes toward honor, promiscuity, and gender relationships.

Why should we be concerned with rituals when discussing the social history of single women in early to mid-colonial Mexico? This book responds to this question by highlighting that embedded in the rituals crafted by single women (discussed at length in chapters 6 and 8) is the idea that the rituals reversed, as well as transgressed, the dominant relationships of power between the genders and relegated women the position of controlling the chaotic male arena. Active participation in religious frameworks within the church, such as lay confraternities, and outside it—formulating their own unique ritualistic practices and networks—allowed single, nonelite women to reaffirm and consolidate mutual interests and common grounds. They also accomplished this community outside the realm of religion. In a direct conversation with what is elaborated in this present book, Catherine Komisaruk in her book Labor and Love in Guatemala (2013) and Brianna Leavitt-Alcantará in her book Alone at the Altar (2018) have shown, in parallel, how through their own spiritual biography and spiritual networks, as well as through life of singleness, Anna Guerra de Jesús and Isabel de Pinzón, very poor single mothers and spiritual personas in eighteenth-century El Salvador and Guatemala, could redeem themselves from the abuse they underwent during their life of marriage and were able to experience autonomy and a certain independence, for the first time; they also “successfully navigated gendered tensions associated with their status as non-elite women living outside both marriage and convent.” Furthermore, Komisaruk also convincingly suggests, though does not develop, that local city authorities’ persecution of women’s ritualistic “heretic” practices in Santiago de Guatemala should be linked with their growing role within the illicit market economy (2013, 20, 29, 30, 78; see also Leavitt-Alcantará 2018). Added to that are, obviously, the calidad (nature; nobility, rank) of casta women and that of their legitimate or illegitimate offspring. On the issue of how such plebeian women contested their social status (by birth), devoid of wealth, in ways that could transcend this barrier, Karen B. Graubart recently exclaimed that “but even the poorer classes found other ways to contest calidad” (2007, 105). One of the goals of this present study is to be able to identify precisely through which particular channels such a contestation operated.

Single women also assumed a far more active and central role in economic systems, social organizations, cults, and political activism than was previously thought.2 The ritualistic facet also reveals that in spite of social barriers, they were aptly able to create distinct spaces for themselves, where they could initiate, as well as maintain, their autonomy and values, distinct from those of the general societal norms of the time. Could one, then, consider these women “marginal”? Was there a real gap between the declared norm and the social praxis, which was usually far more flexible and tolerant than one tends to think? An answer to this may be found in the precise exploration of how limited what we would call “free choice” was during the early modern era, in general, and during the early to mid-colonial Mexico, in particular, and how these women’s agency was all about basic, existential choices they made on an everyday basis. Nonetheless, not a few social historians of colonial Latin America have already stressed in this very context that, by contrast with women of the elites, whether Spanish or Creole, plebeian women, predominantly castas, were somewhat more relieved of the elite economic preconditions associated with honor and shame that, otherwise, would have meant paying a heavy price for their decision to part on their own own road to independence (Lavrin and Couturier 1979, 280–304).

It is also suggested in this present study that a number of specific circumstances directly related to unique cultural patterns in early to mid-colonial Mexico should be taken together as substantially “contributing factors” to choosing a life outside matrimony. These factors have already been mentioned in many previous studies cited here. Nevertheless, what I aim to do here, in contrast to previous studies, is to try and salvage these women’s words and deliberations out of the very often highly fragmented testimonies that we, as early modern historians, usually find in the archives (Davis 1987). Nonetheless, one needs to get a sense of intimacy with these women’s mental gamut. In choosing to doing so, I deliberately present before the reader large, original chunks of these women’s own utterances as they are, and only later do I analyze them. Through such testimonies one is, hopefully, able to obtain at least some shreds of the mental world of these women, even when such fragmented testimonies are heavily filtered through social and cultural biases and norms. Let us take, for example, the practice of elopement, as early as the age of fourteen, namely, paying the girl’s parents for their consent to “kidnap” their daughter and live with her with only the intention of getting married. This practice was not uncommon in colonial Mexico. In direct conversation with this theme I highlight in chapter 4 that in many of the post-factum testimonies of single women one finds that they expressed no real aspirations when they were girls toward a long-lived marriage, full-fledged motherhood in general, or giving birth in particular. The consequences of these actions, besides obviously turning them into adolescent women who could not easily trust men in their lives, were many and diverse, and they ought to be considered by us in depth. Culpable men could easily plead “not guilty” when they stood up in court, blaming the plaintiff for trying to defame their honor, or leading licentious lives. Laura Gowing, in parallel, compares use of language in allegations filed by men against women’s immoral behavior, and in parallel, women’s allegations against men’s sexual roles (cited in Boyer 1995, 15–33). Lawrence Stone has commented that “depositions in the ensuing litigation reveal, as no other data can, changing ideas among different layers of society about such matters as marital fidelity, marital cruelty, sexuality, patriarchal authority, individual autonomy, the expected roles of the two genders, and the rival responsibilities and claims of husband and wife.” (1993; see also Phillips 1980).

Why did plebeian women increasingly resort to the channel of “ecclesiastical divorce” during the period under review? Relying upon the women’s discourses, I respond to this in chapter 2 from a number of angles. Primarily, these women were no longer willing to be relegated to the “sacrificial” position of the wife, vis-à-vis her violent and negligent husband, willing instead to sacrifice her marriage. The data suggest that spousal cruelty was indeed a trigger for separations to be permitted after repeated court denouncements, if at all. In this context, Jessica Delgado writes that “Only severe abuse, or in some cases infidelity, justified a request for permanent separation, and options were limited for wives living apart from their husbands” (2009, 1:113). While judges showed sympathy for the plight of women, they also reminded women to fulfill their roles as wives; hence judges acted in favor of adhering to the institution of marriage, much more than in favor of other considerations such as curbing family violence.

Mexican colonial women, castas in particular, were indeed apt to enter into independent forms of living with spouses. As this present study aims to highlight, as informal marital arrangements, especially among the subaltern, racially mixed castas, and the practice of elopement of young girls were far more common in Mexico at that time, such commonplace forms subverted a “neat” patriarchal model in many ways. As the caste system was in effect a colonial fictive reality, the patriarchal model of subordination was also very much a fiction, and I cite in this respect Kimberly Gauderman in her study of colonial Quito in saying that “the apparent stability of patriarchal gender norms across this period is a fictive tradition reinforced by later legislation” (2003, 24). It was in fact acknowledged that sexual encounters prior to conjugal benediction were illicit and did not carry the value of a pledge between the involved parties if one of them declined to continue into formal matrimony (Covarubias y Leiva 1734, 154). The general public often reported such couples to the authorities, but also “tolerated a good deal of it” (Boyer 1995, 31, 65, 96–97). The cohabitants themselves were not always happy with this confining arrangement. Steve Stern has described how “even when a woman questioned a man’s sincerity and intentions or when marriage clearly lay outside the prospective horizons of a relationship, a poor woman could not easily afford to rule out a sexual liaison” (1995, 270–71). Those among them who were more ambitious and wished to upgrade their social standing, in order to transcend the existing social and legal constraints, chose to remain single and become cohabitants of men from the upper echelons of local society.3

Listening attentively to the women’s claims, in their own words, one is able to identify distinct milestones of a life in flux—of giving up marital life for the sake of claiming their freedom, of becoming voluntarily single. How precisely did such a decision-making process function among single, plebeian women in early to mid-colonial Mexico? And, also, what were the precise circumstances under which such women entered lifestyles other than marriage, namely, long- or short-lived cohabitations? No, doubt, such an individual process of trying to gather up forces and set out on a new road, in itself, required stamina and a strong will to challenge the diverse and extremely difficult consequences. As discussed at length in chapter 3, women-headed households in colonial Mexico, “sisterhoods” in particular, created a solid alternative to the paterfamilias and the patriarchal family model. Female-headed households functioned as pseudoconsaguinal “families” that included either biological, fostered, or adopted children, as well as functioned as alternative frameworks for the attainment of inheritance and self-sustenance. As shown, the perseverance and strength of women-headed households, as a new model for a social convention, especially in urban areas, stood up in sheer contrast to Spanish code of law represented in the Spanish matrimonial model.

The Spanish Matrimonial Model and Its Treatment of “Singleness”

During the sixteenth century, according to Spanish law, men were relegated to the heads of families and filled most of the roles within the family and outside it: the paterfamilia was responsible to educating his children, and he was in charge of managing the legal and economic affairs of the family, as well as the transfer of property. A woman who wished to file an appeal in court was bound to her husband’s authority and physical presence in court, and women were not allowed to serve as guardians of their children. Three decades ago, the most common view was that in Latin America, family and kinship have historically served as safe havens, constituting critical institutions for social stability. Latin American family historians of Latin America, through an intensive review of the literature, now question many previous assumptions about various social realities that existed during the early and mid-colonial periods. Accordingly, patterns of living, residence, adherence to patriarchal rule, and family norms were far more flexible and accommodating than was previously thought (Lavrin 1989a, 47–95). These studies have opened up new paths that demand significant modifications to our thinking about how subaltern groups lived and died, women in particular. This optimistic, state-of-the art thinking is in sheer contrast with that of only a decade ago, when Karen Vieira Powers lamented that “after careful review of all textbooks and related classroom materials (collections of essays and document readers) on colonial Latin American history published from 1980 to the present, I found that not one devotes more than 25 pages to women’s experiences, in spite of the recent production of a considerable corpus of new primary research” (2002, 9–32).

Women’s norms of living, marriage, and residential patterns, as recent research undoubtedly shows, were influenced predominantly by manifestations of economic instability that impelled frequent migrations. The stable, patriarchal household model previously assumed to have been dominant has been shown by recent research to be no longer valid—certainly not in circumstances in which both formal and informal unions were in large numbers being dissolved after a period of only two or three years, leaving the family without a paterfamilias. Within this new approach to the history of the family in this continent, the place of women, and single women, in particular, is highlighted. In her influential book The Women in Colonial Latin America (2002), Susan Migden Socolow stresses, “as local economy deteriorated, the percentage of female-headed households tended to increase. Even in the wealthier cities as one went down the social scale, there was a growing probability that the head of the family would be a woman, probably single or widowed.” Komisaruk exclaims that “Anna’s biography challenges narratives about the marginalized or subversive position of women who fell outside the confines of both marriage and convent in colonial Spanish America and in the broader early modern Church” (Komisaruk 2013, 38; see also García Peña 2004, 647–92; Socolow 2000, 76).

Besides the emotional factors were the economic considerations. Perhaps the most outstanding feature in Spanish colonial formal marriage arrangements was the prevalent family law governing colonial Mexico between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, by which dowry payments, at least for Spaniards and Creoles of the upper echelons of local society, were expected to be transferred from the bride’s side to the groom’s family, which in colonial Mexico amounted to between 1,000 and 5,000 pesos, equal to the cost of the purchase of between three and sixteen slaves (Lavrin and Couturier 1979, 280–304; see also Korth and Flusche 1987, 395–410; Philips 1988). Lavrin and Edith Couturier have described the dowry as the woman’s, and even returned to her upon the unlikely dissolution of the marriage. Although the husband administered the estate and the joint assets, the dowry was not his and he was unable by law to sell the dowry property. Therefore, uncertainty about the economic benefits of marriage, as well as the burden of dowry, could well have encouraged the development of attitudes favoring “singleness,” especially among plebeian women. Yet another demographic factor that ough...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Mise-en-Scène
• 2. The Major Themes of Concern
• 3. Female-Headed Households
• 4. Raising Children
• 5. Singleness and Sexuality
• 6. Sheltering Sisterhood
• 7. Representational Spaces
• 8. Comforting Rituals
• Conclusions
• Appendix 1: Isabel de Montoya’s Genealogy
• Appendix 2: The Partial Census of Mexico City, 1670–1695
• Notes
• References
• Index