The Limits of Gender Domination

Set Against The Backdrop Of The tumultuous late colonial and early republican periods in Quito, Ecuador (1765-1830), this study views the relationship between the increasingly centralized power of Bourbon governance and the local operation of social authority through the lens of women's legal, economic, and social status. Black uses judicial documents, legal literatures, and institutional materials to examine women's changing legal, social, and economic status during the Bourbon reforms. By documenting the progressive removal of limits to patriarchal power in the waning years of the Spanish Empire in Quito, this study traces the genealogy of legal patriarchy in Spanish America.

Traditionally, scholars have viewed patriarchy and racism as the two pillars of stability in the tumultuous decades following independence. In the face of rampant political and economic instability, this view holds, inherited hierarchies of gender and race provided social constancy. Black challenges that thesis in the case of gender, demonstrating that strict patriarchal control was not a modernization of colonial gender domination, but rather the product of Spanish America's own particular embrace of modernity. Bourbon attempts to restrict women's access to legal resources, he shows, were largely unsuccessful. Independence and republican government, however, helped to suborn women's social, economic, and legal interests to those of their male spouses and/or relatives.