Bárbara O. Reyes . Private Women, Public Lives: Gender and the Missions of the Californias . Austin : University of Texas Press . 2009 . Pp. xi, 231. $50.00.

Abstract

This book examines how the colonizing mission system in Alta and Baja California shaped the lives of early indigenous and Spanish-speaking peoples by focusing on the experiences of three women: Bárbara Gandiaga, Eulalia Callis, and Eulalia Pérez. While scholars have explored issues of gender, conquest, and power in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century California and have examined the lives of Callis and Pérez in particular, Bárbara O. Reyes's centering of women's relationships to the mission project (as she refers to it) brings their importance in reproducing the social and racial hierarchies of power and the conquest and colonization of the region to the fore. In analyzing women's unequal relationships to the mission system, Reyes demonstrates that women's private lives were decidedly public and that private and public zones on the frontier overlapped, were dependent, and constantly changed. This study shows that women's ability to circumvent the colonial order depended upon their status. While Eulalia Callis, an elite Spanish woman, publicly challenged her Spanish spouse's honor and was reprimanded for doing so, the Native woman Bárbara Gandiaga's accusation of the murder of two Spanish priests resulted in much harsher consequences: death by gunshot. Instances such as these, Reyes argues, points to a California socio-racial order in which Native women experienced coercion and violence, mestizas (racially mixed, Spanish-Indian women) exercised some mobility, especially if they worked for the mission project, and Spanish elite women had access to comforts denied to their lesser female peers, although they still had to follow Spanish codes of virtue and honor, which were oppressive to women.