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C H A P T E R 4 F E M I N I N E F R I E N D S H I P The benefitS Women deRived from the companionship and support of other women cannot be underestimated. If the patriarchal norm prevailed, then the only like-minded people who shared and understood women’s plight were other women. The intellectual and emotional benefits of friendship can be glimpsed through the poetry and other writings of those women whose works survive, providing a small but significant archive of seventeenth-century female thought both religious and secular. Unlike male-authored drama, women’s plays in the period incorporate female friendship as an integral part of the plot, as can be seen, for example, in the roles of the women protagonists in Ana Caro’s Valor, Agravio, Mujer, the mutual support shown between the aristocratic Armesinda and her criada (servant and companion) Leonor, in Leonor de la Cueva y Silva’s La firmeza en la ausencia, or María de Zayas’s exploration of a female betrayal of friendship in La traición en la amistad (Friendship betrayed). Also, both studied and still to be discovered is the plethora of works that lie in convent records and which also show evidence of women’s control and management of convent affairs and their assets, as well as the shared intellectual and leisure activities of study and literary composition.1 Furthermore, María de Zayas not only argued for 141 E 1. For more of women’s activities in the convent, see Elizabeth Lehfeldt, Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister. women’s education in her writings, but critiqued the victimization to which women could be subjected by their menfolk, calling them to join in friendship for mutual support, as Theresa Ann Smith points out, noting that through her works Zayas directs women toward each other for mutual support, or to the convent, as in the ending of the Desengaños amorosos (Disenchantment of love), where they might escape “the brutality of a misogynistic society” (27). Poems to fellow nuns by Marcia Belisarda indicate a warm familial relationship in which nuns were drawn into the convent community, but the titles suggest that they are written for women of quality who are joining their aristocratic equals. Both hierarchy and patriarchy were the norms across seventeenth-century Europe, and obtained in all aspects of state, society, and the Church, extending even to the convents. where a sisterhood of joint service, mutual support, and affection might be expected , social and financial stratification meant that the monjas de velo negro (nuns of the black veil) sang in the choir and engaged with spiritual matters, while the nuns of the white veil undertook the menial tasks.2 Sor Ana de San Bartolomé, who was sent by St. Teresa to found convents outside Spain, criticizes the social stratifications of Church and state in her autobiography, where she negatively compares the Spanish methods of enforcing obedience with those of the French.3 In writing of her work in Paris with another Spanish nun, Isabel de los Ángeles, Sor Ana expresses this difference: “[y]a ella lo hacía bien, que iba tomando más el estilo de la Francia y dulzura....... y cierto, yo lo hallo mejor y más conforme a la condición de nuestro Señor Jesucristo, que, si lo miramos, andaba con sus discípulos como hermano y compañero” (qtd. in Arenal 2. Concha Torres Sánchez defines this cultural stratification more exactly: the legas were sisters of charity, excluded from devotional work; the freilas were nuns who served as adjuncts to the military orders; the monjas de medio hábito were domestic servants; and the monjas del coro were aristocratic women whose duties were limited to the devotional. See Concha Torres Sánchez, La clausura femenina en la Salamanca del siglo XVII: Dominicas y Carmelitas Descalzas. Acta Salmanticensia. Estudios históricos y geográficos 73 (Salamana : Universidad de Salamanca, 1991), 68. Vollendorf also defines the class stratification to be seen in convents in The Lives of Women (93–94). 3. Ana de San Bartolomé’s antipathy to the class question probably had much to do with her own humble beginnings. Arenal and Schlau define her rustic, Castilian vernacular writing as invaluable for students of language of that period, which was undergoing rapid change; see Untold Sisters (30). 142 f e m i n i n e f R i e...

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