Women In The Spanish Colonial Era

The hierarchy of gender played out in the new Spanish colonial regime where female dependency upon men was created and manipulated. The Spanish introduced ‘gender beliefs that proclaimed women’s infantility; only men could reach true adulthood and enter public life, freely sign contracts, and hold public office . Women, especially those in the newly created lower class, became dependent on men due to the new legal system put in place which made it so that they could not be full citizens. Men were able to realize full ‘citizenship’ along with the ability to leave the ayllus. This newly performed hierarchy was completely contradictory to the old gender parallelism of Andean society in which each gender had independent spheres and rights to

society’s resources . In addition, the new political economic system, which largely focused on property rights, left a majority of women disenfranchised and dependent upon men. As Silverblatt states; “in the colonial Andes, land was wealth…and it was peasant women who proved to be the most vulnerable to losing their lands.” As proven earlier, married women were regarded as legal minors so that they had to go through men in order to make a claim to private property. This perpetuated the notion of dependency in which women had no way out of the system that they were forced into, but because men were regarded as citizens, they had more legal agency.
Another example of the large burden indigenous women felt during the Spanish colonial era was the placement of women in the textile industry to ‘produce goods destined for colonial and European markets .

The biggest transformation in economic terms was the introduction of producing goods not for the local community, but for exports. Women were placed in the textile industry due to previously conceived notions of gendered labor. As a result, in order to pay the tributes that the Spanish forced men to pay, women had no other choice but to enter the workforce where the only jobs available were in the textile industry . So now, women were made to perform specific, gendered labor not for the household, but for the Spanish market economy. These examples are just a few from a plethora that demonstrate how colonialism impacted gender norms and roles through the extension of the Spanish political economy, and the ways in which women’s lives were predominantly negatively impacted, as opposed to men. While Andean men were afforded some rights, they still were forced into a new political regime that drastically affect their gendered sphere, but that were granted more autonomy due to their gender and the preexisting Spanish gendered norms that were brought in during

colonization.