| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.2

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.2 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870–1960. By Lara Putnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xii plus 303.).
In 1906, in Port Limon, on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, Sebastiana Veragua, then a 16 year old, black Panamania immigrant, underwent a vaginal exam at the hands of Dr. Benjamin de Cespedes. Local officials had required Dr. de Cespedes to perform this act in the context of charges by Sebastiana's lawyer, and house patron, that her boyfriend had "deflowered" "his ward." Contrary to her patron's opinion, Sebastiana defended her sexual conduct and passions. She insisted that the she "was not the victim but the author of her loss of her virginity." So begins Lara Putnam's pioneering book in Central American historiography, a major contribution to the field.	1
Between the late 1990s and 2000, Central American historiography registered a deepening of earlier trends of the former decade, including pioneering work on the past of women and relations between men and women. The period registered continuing work on women's history in general, and more nuanced contributions from a gender perspective. The book discussed here falls firmly in the camp of the history of women from the angle of gender and its role in society as a whole. However, it also engages other historiographies in fascinating ways, and does so with rich archival work and a sophisticated research design.	. . .

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