Women's Lives in Colonial Quito: Gender, Law, and Economy in Spanish America (review)

What were the parameters defining women of all social classes and ethnic groups in seventeenth-century Quito? How did women fare in the judicial and criminal systems? What were their economic activities? Such are the questions that Gauderman sets out to answer in the five chapters of this study. She has succeeded in documenting these aspects of women's lives for Quito, the capital city of the Audiencia (administrative unit) and some of its environments.

Challenging generalizations about the nature and effectiveness of the patriarchal system in Spanish America, Gauderman argues that the European conception of strict patriarchy does not fit well in Spain and Spanish America. Her thesis is that the Spanish system was socially, administratively, and politically decentralized, and that the family was also legally defined by such decentralization. Women had rights, guaranteed by legislation, that broadened their ability to challenge male authority across personal and institutional lines. Although women were not "equal" to men, equality per se was not the goal or concern of the legislation and the state. Other factors—such as wealth, occupation, and race—defined social and economic relations. In fact, her thesis is that Spanish patriarchal authority, as evinced in legislation, did not aim at guaranteeing patriarchal authority. It aimed at preserving and increasing wives' property rights, and giving women opportunities to challenge men under certain circumstances. Wives overwhelmingly brought demands for legal separation to resolve conflicts with their husbands, although their objectives tended more toward correction than punishment of male trespasses. In other words, male authority did not go unchallenged legally.

The best chapters of this work are those documenting the manifold activities of women, especially the role of indigenous women in provisioning the city and local markets with edibles, such as fruits, vegetables, and eventually salt and mutton, even though the latter activity was contested by Spanish merchants. The presence of women bakers and textile entrepreneurs provides a base for the author's final question: "What kind of society made it possible for women to act independently, even when this caused conflict with the men around them?" (132) Her answer is that society and family rested on a network of decentralized positions of authority that empowered women in subtle but substantial ways.

Guaderman rests her work on local archival material and the theories of Andre Gunder Frank as used by Phelan.¹ She acknowledges that although the sources extensively document the regional activities of women, their stories are not new, since other scholars researching women in other areas of Spanish America have underlined the significance of women's roles. However, she asserts that her research comes at the discussion from a new angle. In light of this journal's interest in underscoring the interdisciplinarity of works under review, her contribution is not methodological in a strict sense. She offers no statistical economic analysis, discussion of demographic data, or anthropological nuance. However, Gauderman uses a variety of sources—legislation, civil and criminal litigation, and city-council and notarial records—to build a solid profile of women's activities. Such sources lend this work a multidimensional, if not an interdisciplinary, character that makes its reading worthwhile.