Women playing the system: Social, economic, and legal aspects of women's lives in seventeenth-century Quito

This study deals in a very broad way with women, in both custom and law, in the Quito region during the seventeenth century. Based on two years of research in many sections of the National Archive of Ecuador, the dissertation deals with women of indigenous and Spanish descent of all social ranks. It examines women's use of legal and extra-legal means to achieve personal and economic goals their often successful attempts to confront men's physical violence, adultery, lack of financial support, and broken promises of marriage women's control over property and their participation in the local, interregional and international economies. A substantial chapter deals with the nearly unstudied indigenous market women, gateras, who flourished and expanded their trade during the time studied. The dissertation also provides an analysis of changing Spanish gender legislation, as well as a brief comparison between the situation of women in the Spanish system and their status in the British legal tradition. Also included is an examination of marianismo, suggesting that the Virgin Mary was not a symbol used to represent ideal female comportment at this time.The work takes advantage of the well established body of historical scholarship on social relations and state structure in early Latin America demonstrating that Spanish cultural logic consistently mitigated against attempts to consolidate absolute positions of power, relying instead on multiple hierarchies with competing jurisdictions. Subordinates could impede the directives of superiors. Power relations were contingent. Social stability required that individuals, including women, manipulate the inherent conflicts in the norms and laws governing social existence by, in essence, "playing the system." It is argued that the fluidity of colonial categories regulating relations of all kinds and defining gender roles and racial difference should cause us to rethink our use of traditional models that rely on hierarchical and patriarchal mechanisms of authority to understand the role of women in society.