Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz’s premise, that we must reconsider “the representation of women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as completely passive creatures subordinate to male authority” (p. 163), is rather basic, given the advances in Latin American gender history in the past two decades. This book purports to focus on women and gender relations in daily life but contributes mainly to the demographic and family history of Costa Rica. In the largely quantitative chapters on family size and marriage formation, for example, the particular story of women receives little consideration. The final chapter, based on marital disputes brought to the courts, offers a more satisfying look at the distinct interests and strategies of women versus men. Notably, women were much more likely to denounce their husbands to the authorities than men were. Rodríguez situates her research within the scholarship on early modern and nineteenth-century European and Mexican families. Her analysis...

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