Kimberly Gauderman’s new book raises important questions about a generation of scholarship on gender and colonial Latin American society. Finally, readers have an English-language monograph devoted to the subject of women as active property owners and economic actors in the seventeenth-century Andes. Gauderman’s work consistently and skillfully challenges the model of patriarchy as appropriate for considering gendered relations in colonial Latin America. She contends that previous scholars’ inspirations in fields such as European gender history or the history of the family have ignored Iberia’s unique legal codes and power structures. By focusing on Iberian distinctiveness, the author finds patriarchy holds little explanatory power for women’s lives in colonial Quito.
The book moves from this provocative opening to a detailed analysis of legal codes and judicial cases. For each of her related arguments, Gauderman engages with existing gender scholarship. For instance, Gauderman contends that husbands in colonial Quito did not have...
