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Book Review
| Kimberly Gauderman, Women's Lives in Colonial Quito: Gender, Law, and Economy in Spanish America, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Pp. 195. $35.00 (ISBN 0-292-70555-7).
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| Have three centuries of change in family law improved the lives of Ecuadorian women? This is the striking question that begins Kimberly Gauderman's study of women in seventeenth-century Ecuador. She presents us with two rather dire domestic situations without telling us which one is from the twentieth century and which one is from the colonial period. The natural assumption is that the woman who has most power to govern her life and receives the most support from her community and the legal system is the woman whose life most closely resembles our own. But Gauderman fools us. In fact the most vulnerable woman was the one from the twentieth century. Thus begins her exploration of the intersection of the lives of colonial women and the law through a meticulous revision of the available sources. |
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Gauderman follows her exciting introduction with the obligatory exploration of theoretical approaches, few of which appear later in the book. Subsequent chapters do not disappoint. Gauderman's examination of the lives of Quiteñas benefits greatly from the use of an enormous variety of primary sources. Her research allows her to present a picture of how Spanish colonial law was practiced and understood in the daily lives of the women of Quito. This is an important distinction because simply reading and understanding the law as it stood in the seventeenth century does not actually tell us much about what actually happened. Gauderman provides a cogent summary of the way Spanish law affected women in the ideal, but she also tells us how women used the law in reality and how people worked around legal doctrines. In its scope and its approaches, her book follows in the tradition of Silvia Arrom's path-breaking study of Mexican women. |
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Gauderman explores the various legal codes that applied to colonial women. This task is not as easy as it might appear because there were actually several legal codes that all applied in this period and lawyers tended to cull the arguments from the different codes as they supported their arguments. In addition, scholars of legal culture in colonial Latin America, such as Charles Cutter, have pointed out that it is not enough to know the "law," for the legal culture is paramount. Each region of the empire developed its own way of doing things and of understanding the law. |
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Following from this nuanced exploration of colonial law, the author also provides us with a discussion of the nature of power. Despite common assumptions about patriarchy and also Latin American machismo, power relations between men and women were not clear-cut. Power between the sexes was a negotiated process and an extremely complex web of obligations and dependence. Gauderman deftly leads us through these complexities that are vital to understand the more focused chapters on various discrete topics. |
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Women in colonial Latin America had defined property rights that were protected when they married. The woman's dowry, in theory, remained hers although her husband could control it. Yet, there were many other issues that seventeenth-century Quito women faced regarding property. Gauderman shows that husbands did not have absolute power over their wives' estate and that women acted independently as businesswomen and the holders of estates. Quiteñas participated in the economy in many areas of the economy, particularly in the textile industry, but women of all class and racial backgrounds were active in the economy running stores, lending money, and other occupations. The women of the marketplace were primarily indigenous and they merit a separate chapter. It is indeed a fascinating study of the way that these women use the ambiguities of race and their status to create economic niches for themselves. The market women manipulated the law to use tax exemptions as a result of their status as "Indians" and thus used their racial category to great effect. |
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Gauderman's evidence from the criminal justice system provides a different picture from the commonly presented acceptance of male domestic violence in many colonial marriages. In contrast to studies that rely on ecclesiastical records, she finds that the criminal justice system afforded seventeenth-century women with means to act against violent or disloyal husbands. |
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Gauderman's book is a must-read for anyone interested in gender and the law. Her meticulously researched study provides important insights into the way that we must try to understand the way that legal codes were applied in the daily lives of colonial Latin American men and women. She also contributes strongly to the on-going re-evaluation of the power relations between men and women and the conceptual framework of patriarchy. |
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| Sonya Lipsett-Rivera
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Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada |
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