Here, Barbara Potthast offers the first German-language survey of the history of women in Latin America. This ambitious endeavor covers the whole region, from the conquest through the end of the twentieth century. The author presents the normative roles for women and men and discusses how social reality differed from these according to region and social class, ably interweaving background information, legal frameworks, and relevant economic trends, which she then brings to life with short vignettes of individual women and their families.
A text of less than four hundred pages on such a broad topic is necessarily selective in its coverage. The chapter on indigenous women during the conquest, for instance, is a mere 40 pages. She summarizes the gender system in the largest indigenous societies and then focuses on the differential impact of conquest on men and women, pointing to the fact that indigenous women were quicker to secure...
