Liberalism in the Bedroom: Quarreling Spouses in Nineteenth-Century Lima (review)

This important book delivers much more than the title implies. Whereas most research on "quarreling spouses" is drawn primarily from cases of ecclesiastical divorce, Hünefeldt has mined over one thousand conjugal suits that include petitions for dispensations of impediments to marriage, cases of dissension, and annulments in addition to divorces, and has followed the disputes over alimony and marital property in the civil courts. Furthermore, she has supplemented these sources with examinations of requests for marriage licenses and wills, which lend themselves to quantitative analysis. For example, she uses wills to trace rates of fertility, illegitimacy, and re-marriage over the course of the century. Her thorough and meticulous archival research has resulted in a wealth of information about couples and families in the Archbishopric of Lima throughout the nineteenth century, a period in which Peru passed through the wars of independence, a mid-century export boom based on guano fertilizer, and the War of the Pacific.

Hünefeldt's comprehensive approach makes it impossible to cover all the book's themes in a short review; therefore, I will focus here on two findings which were particularly striking: the declining role of the extended family and changes in conjugal finances. Already from the beginning of the century, the Church was reluctant to prevent marriages based upon parental opposition, but many parents played active roles in the lives of young couples, for example protecting daughters from the physical abuse or financial neglect of their husbands. Over the nineteenth century, however, Hünefeldt found declining references in the conjugal suits to parental intervention, and fewer women filing for divorce took refuge with kin. Finally, a steady decline in the practice of dowry eroded the ability of wives' parents to justify their influence. This last change also had a significant impact upon couples' finances and the ability of women to claim alimony in the case of separation. The protection of their dowries from spendthrift husbands had been a central, and legally sound, argument in women's petitions; moreover, their chances for survival after a separation depended upon the allocation of alimony and/or property. Throughout the century, women tried to redefine other financial contributions, including their labor, as having the same legal standing as dowry. Judges, however, were not responsive to such arguments and in the interests of the free market were increasingly hesitant to protect the wives' assets from their husbands' creditors.

This in-depth analysis of conjugal property disputes is the greatest strength of the book. It is also the most convincing example of change over time, and the role of liberalism in that trend. By the turn of the twentieth century, more wives had to work; without the protection of their dotal property, women turned their legal energies to claiming control of their own income as well as a share of marital assets. Such battles in the courts preceded the demands of the feminist movement in the early twentieth century that women control their own wages. Nevertheless, women's strategies were often contradictory in relationship to liberalism, appealing both to personal liberty and the need for special protections for women.

Hünefeldt's statistics are amply illustrated by compelling testimonies from the lawsuits. Yet, as she herself acknowledges, shifts in discourse are more subtle and difficult to document. Indeed many of her examples of women assertively claiming "rights" in court date from early in the nineteenth century (including the late colonial period). Ultimately, her assertion that the book "reveals the construction of a new terminology, and especially nineteenth-century liberal ideas imported from England and France, and how this terminology found its way into domestic life . . ." (p. 9) would have benefited from a more explicit and detailed discussion of liberalism.

Although the length of the book may limit its use in undergraduate classes, it...