In the colonial period recogimiento was the name broadly applied to institutions which served two different purposes: sheltering women in distress, and punishing “erring” women. Recogimientos abounded in colonial Mexico. The work under review records the existence of over thirty distributed between the capital and the provincial cities. Muriel’s study gathers a significant amount of information on recogimientos and their origins and development whenever the sources allow. There is some interesting data on divorce and prostitution, which were the raisons d’être of many recogimientos.
On reading this book it is essential to make a distinction between the strictly historical information and the value judgments of the writer, since the latter might not satisfy many readers. Recogimientos are regarded as being of positive social value because their aim was to protect the home and because they put women in a category apart from men, in their crimes as well as in their capacity for correction and conversion. This is indeed a curious interpretation of double standards of morality and punishment. In her conclusion Muriel states: “What greater understanding of women than helping them to find a husband and endowing them for a good marriage!” (p. 220). Does empathetic understanding of a period require the surrender of critical analysis? In the seventeenth century, women could be sent to recogimiento by a suspicious husband; in cases of adultery, women, more often than not, bore the burden of proof; the correction of “sins” and crimes was undertaken via Christian repentence and hard work in institutions in which the treatment of the inmates was sometimes questionable and always reflected the social class of the punished women. Somehow it is difficult to see recogimientos as institutions full of “a deep sense of human understanding” (p. 220). In conclusion, this work has the merit of having brought under scrutiny a worthwhile historical topic. It would have been desirable that it searched deeper and more critically into the social implications of recogimientos.
