Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America, and: Liberalism in the Bedroom: Quarreling Spouses in Nineteenth-Century Lima, and: Shaping the Discourse on Space: Charity and Its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico (review)

Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America. By Ann Twinam. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. xiii + 447 pp., introduction, maps, tables, appendix, glossary, notes, bibliography, index.)

Liberalism in the Bedroom: Quarreling Spouses in Nineteenth-Century Lima. By Christine Hunefeldt. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. xix + 388 pp., introduction, tables, maps, glossary, bibliography, index.)

Shaping the Discourse on Space: Charity and Its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico. By Teresita Martínez-Vergne. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. xv + 235 pp., preface, illustrations, tables, bibliography, index.)

Ann Twinam’s monograph Public Lives Private Secrets offers a new and important study of elite culture and attitudes from the Bourbon reforms to the eve of the wars of Independence in Spanish America. Twinam’s focus on the cultural meanings of illegitimacy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century allows her to discuss a number of themes central to the study of colonial Latin America, including honor, gender, sexuality, race, and class and to place Spanish America within the larger historical context of illegitimacy rates in the United States and Europe during the so-called Century of Illegitimacy.

Twinam uses gracias al sacar cases from across Spanish America, where illegitimates petitioned the Council of Indies in Spain to change their status to legitimate birth. This bureaucratic process of legitimation and the desire for upward mobility left a rich and nuanced record of the circumstances surrounding illegitimate births, including testimony from parents, grandparents, and other family members and friends involved, exposing the “usually hidden process through which elites ordered their social relationships and constructed their worlds” (6). Twinam found 240 legitimation cases in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville in a process of archival sleuthing—interesting on its own terms—which she describes in chapter 1 and appendix 1.

After the historical and historiographical context for the study is provided in chapters 1 and 2, Twinam’s next section, “Life Course,” uses the gracias al sacar testimonies from mothers, fathers, and their illegitimate offspring to analyze elite attitudes toward sexuality and honor. In chapter 3, Twinam addresses mothers of illegitimate children and offers a new and important picture of the “gendered double standard” for women’s sexual activity. She argues that elite attitudes toward sexual activity, the rules of courtship, and responses once a pregnancy ensued, were more complicated than previously thought. Twinam offers a more flexible picture of female honor during and after an illegitimate birth, depending on the public and private behavior of those involved, especially of the mother. Elite women, pregnant out of wedlock, attempted to minimize and avoid the public loss of honor by either marrying or keeping the pregnancy and birth secret except from select family members and friends.

In the chapter on fathers, Twinam further outlines the sexual double standard for men and women, where public knowledge of male sexual activity did not threaten their honor. Certain men in Spanish colonial society, especially community outsiders, such as military officers and bureaucrats, and those who faced some sort of restrictions on matrimony, such as priests, were more likely to father illegitimate children. The male life cycle also affected how and in what context men fathered illegitimate children. Young single men often became involved in a number of courtships and private pregnancies, and in their testimonies they often emphasized the privacy involved in such liaisons. Middle-aged men were more likely to become involved in long-term sexual relationships with fiancées and in caring for their illegitimate children but not enter into marriage. Widowers either engaged...