Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas

Abstract

This is an ambitious edited volume that attempts to discuss the interaction of gender, race, and religion across Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French colonial America. In her introduction, Nora Jaffary takes pains to discuss these three variables within the context of Atlantic World colonialism. Unfortunately there is no attempt to weigh the role of each variable within a theoretical framework. Furthermore, Jaffary is somewhat vague about the issue of resistance as it applied to gender and race. Jaffary sees the articles as adding to our “understanding [of ] how gender dynamics played a constitutive role in the establishment and maintenance of European colonial ventures” (p. 9). Although all the articles deal with gender, not all engage questions of race or religion.Under the rubric of “frontiers,” Alida Metcalf examines indigenous and white women in sixteenth-century Brazil and finds that, in general, Portuguese women did not function as cultural go-betweens, in part because of their limited numbers. While some indigenous women probably served as physical, transactional, or representational brokers, Metcalf finds sources to be scarce and indeed almost silent on their participation and roles. Bruce A. Erickson emphasizes that women were victims of sexual and other violence along the northern frontier of New Spain. His discussion is sometimes rather vague on the question of race; the reader is never sure if the victimized women were Spanish, mestizo, or Indian. Ben Marsh examines women in Georgia, the southern British-American frontier. He finds that at least some white and mixed-race women were powerful figures who played seminal roles in the survival of these colonies and the transmission of culture.At least three contributions to this volume address issues related to female religious. Some of these essays suffer from thin to nonexistent sources. Susan Broomhall examines the case of Antoinette de Saint-Estienne, an indigenous Mi’kmaq woman who entered a Benedictine convent in Tours. Unfortunately the extant sources are too thin to allow Broomhall to do more than make suppositions as to any lasting effect of Antoinette’s stay in the French convent. Joan C. Bristol, writing about Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, a black poblana (inhabitant of the city of Puebla) who entered the Carmelite convent as a servant and eventually became a nun, has a much richer source, a vida or spiritual autobiography. The vida enables her to examine closely the relationship between race and virtuous conduct. She concludes that Juana’s position was unique and ultimately reflected the Spanish view that black piety was impossible. Kathryn Burns’s essay examines several beaterios (houses of pious women) in Cuzco, concentrating on the goals of their founders and possible links to ideas of feminine indigenous honor.In a section on “Race Mixing,” Nora Jaffary analyzes mid-eighteenth-century dispensation requests for both affinal and consanguineous marriages. She suggests that the cases involving premarital sexual relations show the persistence of pre-Hispanic indigenous custom. Unfortunately she fails to mention that premarital sexual relations were common both in the Iberian Peninsula and in regions of the colonial world where few pre-Hispanic peoples survived. Yvonne Fabella’s piece on the mulâtresse in colonial Saint Domingue analyzes a depiction of the free woman of the French colony written by Michel René Hilliard, an eighteenth-century observer. Bethany Fleming’s article on Mackinaw Island, an important trading zone inhabited by French, British, and Americans as well as indigenous peoples and mixed-bloods, finds that a group of métis women were important fur traders who preserved their mixed-race culture while marrying prosperous Euro-American men.The section titled “Networks” begins with Nancy E. van Deusen’s article on the transmission of spiritual ideas among nuns, beatas, mystics, and other religious women in seventeenth-century Lima. Perhaps the most interesting article, and the only one that addresses gender, religion, and ethnicity, is Linda M. Rupert’s discussion of the physical movement of women of all races between Dutch Curaçao and mainland Venezuela. She finds a network of women owning ships, migrating between Dutch and Spanish colonial possessions, and escaping slavery. Lastly, in a brief “Afterword,” Patricia Seed points out some general differences between women in each colonial power within the Atlantic world.Taken as a totality, these articles eventually reject the dichotomous choice between arguing that colonialism either hindered or helped women, and instead show both how women of different races and religious backgrounds adapted to their colonial status in a variety of ways, and how colonialism shaped their lives.