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Latin american womens roles in society
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Women's roles in society during the colonial ways of life
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Over the past few decades, research on women has gained new momentum and a great deal of attention. Susan Socolow’s book, The Women of Colonial Latin America, is a well-organized and clear introduction to the roles and experiences of women in colonial Latin America. Socolow explicitly states that her aim is to examine the roles and social regulations of masculinity and femininity, and study the confines, and variability, of the feminine experience, while maintaining that sex was the determining factor in status. She traces womanly experience from indigenous society up to the enlightenment reforms of the 18th century. Socolow concentrates on the diverse culture created by the Europeans coming into Latin America, the native women, and African slaves that were imported into the area. Her book does not argue that women were victimized or empowered in the culture and time they lived in. Socolow specifies that she does her best to avoid judgment of women’s circumstances using a modern viewpoint, but rather attempts to study and understand colonial Latin American women in their own time. Socolow starts the book off with a look at the women who would play significant roles in colonial Latin America. She talks about Iberian women and their combined Islamic and Catholic heritage that resulted in contradictory ideals. Women were to be protected, virgins, and cloistered, but were given many rights over property and inheritance their other European contemporaries were not. Before the conquest native women did not hold any authority and were relegated to gender specified tasks and work. Men were seen as more important than women. Native women were used as sexual objects but Spanish soldiers and officials, who did not often marry them. This is ... ... middle of paper ... ...ments about broken engagements. While these are excellent resources for discussion in undergraduate courses, her research could be more strongly supported by drawing less from these primary source documents and similar ones, rather than the extensive secondary sources she often references. Socolow is successful in remaining nonjudgmental as she set out to be and examines the roles of men and women in patriarchal colonial Latin America well. This text is a good source for undergraduate introductory courses that do not require previous knowledge, but would not interest specialists, who are more detail oriented. Socolow undertakes a broad topic, expanding a large time period, but does fairly well. With a few maps to help geographic orientation, this book is an interesting, go-to text for undergraduates interested in gender roles of women in colonial Latin America.
Juliana Barr’s book, Peace Came in the Form of a Women: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Dr. Barr, professor of history at Duke University-specializes in women’s role in American history. Peace Came in the Form of A Women, is an examination on the role of gender and kinship in the Texas territory during the colonial period. An important part of her book is Spanish settlers and slavery in their relationship with Natives in the region. Even though her book clearly places political, economic, and military power in the hands of Natives in the Texas borderland, her book details Spanish attempts to wrestle that power away from indigenous people through forced captivity of native women. For example, Dr, Barr wrote, “In varying diplomatic strategies, women were sometimes pawns, sometimes agents.” To put it another way, women were an important part of Apache, Wichita, and Comanche culture and Spanish settlers attempted to exploit
Figueredo, Maria L. "The Legend of La Llorona: Excavating and (Re) Interpreting the Archetype of the Creative/Fertile Feminine Force", Latin American Narratives and Cultural Identity, 2004 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York. pp232-243.
However, what words are being told in the Codex Mensoza 1964, Lám (Brumfiel 1991: 224) and more importantly what influential role did the Spanish heritage have in the artifacts? These credentials were offered as a form of recognition of Aztec women’s productive activities in Mexico. Nevertheless, Bromfiel paints a different picture of the Aztec women. In these sketches, Brumfiel draws our attention to the background in which the women are performing their “productive activities.” At first glance, these images portray Aztec women.
The Women of Colonial Latin America serves as a highly digestible and useful synthesis of the diverse life experiences of women in colonial Latin America while situating those experiences in a global context. Throughout, Socolow mediates the issue between the incoherence of independent facts and the ambiguity of over-generalization by illustrating both the restrictions to female behavior and the wide array of behavior within those restrictions. Readers of varied backgrounds will come away with a much deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities that defined the lives of the diverse women of the New World ruled by Portugal and
Since the revolution, men and women in Nicaragua had digressed from their traditional expectations and behaviors of gender roles. Moving away from machismo, men started focusing on bettering their country, helping themselves by getting an education are generous with his friends and even contributes towards the household chores which would have never been acceptable before the war; men did not believe in women’s work at all it. The traditional woman ended up changing more drastically. First, they began to voice their opinions and started becoming more aggressive as Dona Flora proved to us. They were forced into fitting men’s shoes by becoming the breadwinner of the family, while trying to be mother still.
The presence of women in the Caribbean was due to the fact that they provided a pool for labour. Europeans need slave women in the Caribbean mostly for field works. Slave women were either field workers, ‘house wenches’, cooks or washer. Compared to the slave men who undertook the most difficult tasks on the plantations such as, cane-cutting, holing and sugar boiling, on the other hand slave women were in charge of the less demancding tasks on the plantations. Slave women, cut canes, weeded and manured . As a result, slave women in the Caribbean either worked on the plantations or worked as domestics. They looked after the children, cleaned the house and did the laundry.
The purpose of this paper is to look at slavery in The East Indies from a female’s point of view. The Europeans came to the East Indies and took over the land and its resources. I believe that this was wrong because it was unreasonable to use the wealth of the East Indies to purchase slaves. In addition, I believe that women and children in particular should have been allowed to have their freedom.
Women in Mexico and the United States of America have played an important role structuring their society and elevating their status. Between 1846 and 1930, the stereotype and position of women within these countries differed vastly from one another. While various traditional roles of women remained the same, the manner in which they were viewed differed. In many ways, women in Mexico held a higher position than those in the United States during this time.
Craske, N. (1999). Women and Political Identity in Latin America. In Women and Politics in Latin America (First ed., pp. 9-25). N.p.: Rutgers University Press.
Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits was strongly influenced by the three waves of Feminism. Allende’s focus throughout the novel was to diminish the gender inequality between men and women. Through her female characters Clara, Blanca, and Alba, Allende showcases the gradual rise of women in Latin American society. She incorporates political and societal aspects to emphasize women’s empowerment throughout the novel. Clara, Blanca, and Alba each individually represent the three waves of Feminism that gradually gave women the power to lessen the gender hierarchy present in their society.
The Colonial era spans nearly two hundred years with each settlement in the New World containing distinctive characteristics. Location in the new world is one factor that shaped women’s lives but religion and economics also played a massive role. These roles however were constantly changing and often contradicting. Since there is numerous factors that contributed to the shaping of women’s private and public roles in the seventeenth and eighteenth century it is impossible to categories all colonial woman in one group. Some historians refer to this period as the golden age of women; however, I tend to see this period as oppressive, with only few examples of women exercising social and public powers.
The exclusionary nature of political systems of Latin America reached its height under the military governments in the 1970s, particularly in Argentina and Chile . As a consequence of this divisionary rule, women’s participation in collective actions associated with the struggle for their rights and their identity rose significantly in order to combat the prevailing ideological burden of femininity . Women in Latin America began to participate in social protests and manifestations in order to fight the patriarchal family model had established itself as an accepted form of rule - an idea regarding the subordination of women being anchored to the strongly cohesive family group that constitutes the base of the whole system of social relations and divisions of labour and areas of activity between men and women . Craske argues that women have achieved a greater voice and presence in the region’s politics and their participation in social movements has had a considerable impact on women’s empowerment and has led some to deepen their political participation . With the use of Argentina and Chile, the issues that women in these countries embraced through their movements from the 1960s to 1980s will be explored.
During the colonial times, all of the legal rights were granted to men, leaving women to be looked at as sub-sets to their husbands. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century women were portrayed as being weak and delicate, unable to fend for anyone, not even themselves. Men were looked to in handling intellectual matters and all physical work, which in turn placed the women in a so-called “inferior” ...
In Latin America, women are treated differently from men and children. They do lots of work for unexplainable reasons. Others for religious reasons and family orders and others because of the men involved. Women are like objects to men and have to obey their orders to either be rich or to live. Some have sex to get the men’s approval, others marry a rich man that they don’t even know very well, and become slaves. An important book called Chronicles of a Death Foretold is an example of how these women are treated. Purisima del Carmen, Angela Vicario's mother, has raised Angela and her sisters to be good wives. The girls do not marry until late in life, rarely socializing beyond the outsides of their own home. They spend their time sewing, weaving, washing and ironing. Other occupations include arranging flowers, cleaning up the house, and writing engagement letters to other men. They also keep the old traditions alive, such as helping the sick, comforting the dying, and covering the dead. While their mother believes they are perfect, men view them as too tied to their women's traditions. The men are afraid that the women would pay more attention to their job more than the men. Throughout the book, the women receive the respect they deserve from the men and others around them.
Women held many roles at the Spanish Missions. The woman took on many tasks that obligated them to experience hardship, suffering, and neglecting under the Spanish rule. However, they did what the Spanish empire wanted them to carry out. For example, many were converted to Catholicism in the early 1500’s in order to believe in the Spanish. Also, women were predominately care providers who were objectified, sexualized, and examined by the Spanish reign. They believed in them to be safe.