The Lives of Women: A New History of Inquisitional Spain

Conclusion

187 ConCLusIon P erhaps because some consider Spain slightly backward—a poor stepchild to the rest of western Europe—people often express incredulity when they discover that Spanish women wrote in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Did women in Spain actually write then? Did they use pseudonyms? Did they all live in convents? Women, in and out of convents , did write. What’s more, their words are recorded in hundreds if not thousands of texts, waiting to be recovered from their slumber. When I began this project, I did not know so many records of these women’s words existed. Nor did I expect to find so many similarities among the fictional texts, autobiographies, and legal records. To my surprise, the repetition of the themes of motherhood, friendship, sexuality, and community pointed to common priorities among women of different backgrounds . Religion emerged as an important facet of women’s lives, but not all of the texts dealt with spirituality. Still, secular and religious women alike emphasized their identities as mothers, wives, advisors, and friends. No matter what kind of text I studied, I found that women focused on the interpersonal , affective aspects of life. The textual evidence examined in this book suggests that women experienced the world differently than men in the early modern period. Gender was such a compelling factor that, in spite of great differences among women, many had similar reactions to a culture that tried to control and domesticate them. This is not to say that there was no variety among women or their experiences. Class, ethnicity, marital status, and religion functioned as key markers of difference in the 1500s and 1600s, just as they do today. From the perspective of class, the aristocracy clearly enjoyed more privilege than any other group. Aristocratic women’s superior education was matched only by that of some nuns, whose convent training included both moral and literary instruction. Like other women, noblewomen were schooled in the domestic, so-called womanly arts, but because of their enormous privilege, most also acquired the coveted skill of literacy. María de Zayas, Luisa de Padilla, and María de Guevara had in common their similar class positions, 188 The Lives of Women as well as their impressive educational backgrounds. As members of a class that advocated a sense of obligation to itself, its land, and its society, they tried to incorporate the concerns of women into these priorities. These writers added gender obligation to the framework of noblesse oblige, producing texts that blatantly challenged the status quo. Zayas, Padilla, and Guevara all directed themselves to male audiences, denouncing the general state of affairs and calling for social change. Fiction writers Mariana de Carvajal, Ana Caro, and Angela de Azevedo also belonged to this group of upper-class female authors. Often less confrontational than Zayas and her cohort, these authors nonetheless wrote texts focused on women’s love and friendship, providing a wholly distinct perspective on gender and society than we find in men’s texts from the period. The privileged status of the aristocratic women who wrote bold commentaries about Spanish society leads us to contemplate the important role played by class in the reconstruction of women’s history. Helen Nader, in her introduction to Gender and Power in Early Modern Spain, has gone so far to assert that the women of the powerful Mendoza family operated in a matriarchal culture that coexisted with the patriarchy. Analyses of aristocratic women’s writing and agency do suggest that such women exercised more power than ever before understood. Such findings also remind us that, just as reading only men’s words limits our understanding of history, considering only women of great class privilege—such as Zayas, Guevara, and the Mendozas—would likewise yield a compromised view of gender in early modern Spain. Based solely on upper-class women’s acerbic criticism or political influence, we might think that all women enjoyed unchecked freedom of speech and action. Similarly, based on the implementation of Madre Magdalena’s idea for a reform prison, we might think that female advice often was heeded at institutional levels.Yet these women were the exceptions. The voices of prostitutes, prisoners, and other women are absent from this book, as they are from other books on the period. This notable absence speaks to the ongoing challenges of recovering women’s history: We know that few women were literate, even fewer wrote, and an even smaller number saw their work in print or in...