Hijas, novias y esposas: Familia, matrimonio y violencia domestica en el Valle Central de Costa Rica (1750-1850) (review)

Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz's premise, that we must reconsider "the representation of women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as completely passive creatures subordinate to male authority" (p. 163 ), is rather basic, given the advances in Latin American gender history in the past two decades. This book purports to focus on women and gender relations in daily life but contributes mainly to the demographic and family history of Costa Rica. In the largely quantitative chapters on family size and marriage formation, for example, the particular story of women receives little consideration. The final chapter, based on marital disputes brought to the courts, offers a more satisfying look at the distinct interests and strategies of women versus men. Notably, women were much more likely to denounce their husbands to the authorities than men were. Rodríguez situates her research within the scholarship on early modern and nineteenth-century European and Mexican families. Her analysis tends corroborate this extant scholarship rather than break new ground. For example, regarding ideals of marriage across this era, Rodríguez concludes that "continuity prevailed over change" (p. 107 ). Likewise, she states that "the patriarchal power of husbands was civilized rather than eliminated" (p. 151 ).

Rodríguez's subjects are mostly rural agriculturalists. Wherever possible, she offers statistics that differentiate between wealthier families and more common people. The book includes numerous tables and figures. It also quotes at length from church and civil records. These excerpts from archival sources are intriguing, although one wishes that she had analyzed these passages with greater attention to language and context.

Rodríguez's choice of a potentially important chronology, 1750-1850, allows her to measure changes from the colonial period into the national era, but she only partially succeeds in this comparison. Most notably, she demonstrates a move away from common-law unions toward formal marriage and, accordingly, a drop in illegitimacy. She attributes this to increased ecclesiastical presence in the postcolonial era, with an attendant diffusion of Christian morality. She claims that a "strategic alliance" developed "between the church and the state concerning the regularization of popular morality" (p. 23 ), leading to the state's assumption of authority in domestic affairs (enshrined in the 1841 Civil Code). Yet Rodríguez's chronology proves imperfect; her data draws heavily from 1820-50, and she lacks information from the colonial period at many points. Furthermore—like Lowell Gudmundson and other scholars of Costa Rica—Rodríguez hypothesizes that the socioeconomic changes that accompanied the rise of coffee production affected the families of the Valle Central. With research that examines only the first decade of that shift (the 1840 s), however, she can hardly support her supposition. Given the importance of coffee's rise in Costa Rica, a more satisfying study would reach into the late nineteenth century.

This book (based upon Rodríguez's 1995 dissertation at Indiana University) will primarily interest specialists in nineteenth-century Costa Rica and demographic historians.