Hijas, novias y esposas: Familia, matrimonio y violencia domestica en el Valle Central de Costa Rica (1750-1850) (review)

Hijas, novias y esposas: Familia, matrimonio y violencia doméstica en el Valle Central de Costa Rica (1750-1850). By Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz.Heredia: Editorial de la Nacional, 2000. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. 178 pp. Paper.

Eugenia Rodríguez's book is a fine addition to gender, demographic, and family studies straddling the end of the colonial period and the first half of the nineteenth century. The book is a study of changing definitions of marriage, gender, and family in Costa Rica's Central Valley at a period of increasing demographic growth, agricultural expansion (coffee), the early stages of Costa Rica's agrarian capitalism, and the rise of a centralizing, secular state. The end result of this process, the author argues, was continuity with a Spanish patriarchal family model rather than change in gender relations. In contrast to what scholars have found in New Spain and Brazil, considerations such as emotion and individual choice would become important but only for the upper classes. However, in the name of social harmony and under the aegis of reason, the republican state would attenuate the harshness of the old model by expanding its presence throughout society and thus providing women the necessary means to effectively sue their husbands in courts.

Traditionally in the literature, the disappearance of the dowry and prearranged marriages have been held to signal the arrival of bourgeois society where choice and individual counted as much as family name and social standing. The issue of how such values spread throughout nineteenth-century society has not been satisfactorily explained and Rodríguez offers a tantalizing perspective indeed. The evidence she employs consists of what is becoming the "usual" type of records when studying gender and household relations: ecclesiastical and civil marriage dispensations, probate court records, parish records, "divorce" petitions, and church and state law governing marriage and family. Each chapter in the book makes use of a different type of evidence. The time period covered by the study is the century from 1750 to 1850; the geographical area of the Valle Central is some 3,200 square kilometers, with much of the evidence coming from the towns of Alajuela, San José, Heredia, and Cartago.

The book consists of five chapters. In chapter 1, the author traces the adoption of marriage by all social groups in this rural society from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. Once the process of mestizaje had slowed or perhaps ceased, I can only assume since she is not very clear about this point, a more homogenous society would be able to look at itself and turn to the institution of marriage as a means to colonize new lands and pass on that inheritance. Chapter 2 looks at family composition and size. The average family in this area of Costa Rica, for example, was usually of the nuclear type and made up of seven members. Chapter 3 looks at the "marriage market." People tended to marry within the communities they came from and if they belonged to the more affluent, also within their own social group. After examining demographic patterns, Rodríguez turns to the social, economic, and cultural implication of these findings in chapters 4 and 5. It is in these two chapters that Rodríguez addresses the larger field of colonial demography, popular culture, family history, gender studies, and nineteenth-century politics. She concludes that the onset of agrarian capitalism in central Costa Rica did not radically reconfigure gender relations but would instead build on a preexisting ones and then mesh with those patterns to enshrine the ideal of the bourgeois home with its "separate spheres." It would, in fact, be the independent state that would do far more to alter gender relations than the arrival of coffee cultivation. On the one hand, by trying to maintain...