LITERATURE

Role of Women in Potosi

Role of Women in Potosi

Question 1: Did women play any significant roles in Potosi? Were they dominant in any way?

It is easy to observe the influence of humanist thought in the eighteenth century Latin America when chronicles of the period are dominated by women at two extremes: the dutiful and obedient wife, nun, or daughter and the stubbornly wicked adulteress, sorceress, or prostitute. According to the prescriptive literature of the time, as well as legal and medical discourse, women without adequate moral and behavioral guidance were constructed as threatening to the social order (Bartolomé 1653).

On the other side, of the Atlantic, repression of African, indigenous and mixed race populations in colonial Spanish America produced a drastic increase in the control of women and their sexuality; not surprisingly at the end of the seventeenth century, female residents in institutions reached its peak. In Lima, for example, 20% of women lived in church-sponsored sex-segregated institutions.

Broadly, New World chronicles can be characterized as offering popular and spectacular representations of both ideal and uncommon women as well as models for their rehabilitation into society; in other words “good” women, “bad” women, “bad” women who become “good” and “good” women who become “bad”. As a point of contrast, the manuals authored by custodial institutions offer an ostensibly more rigid representation of women and their rehabilitation, primarily featuring “bad” women who become “good” and the “good” women who act as models. What is important about the institutional manuals is the way in which the limits of the genre are so apparent, explicitly aiming to contain the broadly defined “deviant” woman while at the same time exposing the difficulty inherent in both this definition and its implementation. Putting these literary and structured texts into dialogue with each other allows us ...