Week 4 Post

Dr. Gauderman’s “The Authority of Gender: Marital Discord and Social Order in Colonial Quito” delves into the various methods that women used in the colonial city of Quito to challenge the abuses they experienced at the hands of their husbands. In highlighting the differences between ecclesiastical or criminal courts, Dr. Gauderman stresses the decentralized organziation of the Spanish colonial state, as opposed to the widely disseminated models of patriarchies which explained family and state organizations as dominated by the singular familial patriarch. The legal status of women as having material property interests associated with that of her family’s larger material interests is a significant contrast to the legal status of women in the colonial United States, where husbands were legally recognized as the sole authority over the family’s resources. Despite these two avenues being available to women in colonial Quito, the church appears to be largely in effective when in pursuit of a divorce, with not very many women utilizing this avenue and with few attempts resulting in actual divorces. The mandates that women be secured with a “trusted person” throughout litigation processes which can take up to two years in the example of doña Rafaela limits the use of these legal avenues to women of significant financial means. It is interesting to see the effectiveness by which women were able to get the state to punish men for for being unfaithful or even the legal recourse available for mistresses of married men. I don’t believe the ineffectiveness of the church to grant women’s requests for divorce and the state’s willingness to respond to women’s requests to punish husbands for various reasons is due to the church or the state disliking or favoring women, but rather once the church agreed to a divorce it lost significant authority over the lives of those individuals while the state only had authority to gain over society by accepting the requests of women. That result is not surprising in the context of the competing bodies if authority within the Spanish colonial state.