Abstract
Amos Megged commences his study of the lives of single women in early-to-mid colonial Mexico with an anecdote about the Amazons, those mythical females who eschewed masculine control. In this way, he signals the transhistorical significance of “women without men” in patriarchal societies. Yet single women in colonial Mexico, he asserts, were considerably more common than Amazons, their numbers rising “to unprecedented level” (4) in the colony. In this long-overdue and exhaustively researched study, Megged brings plebeian single women to the center of colonial Mexican social history, demonstrating their prevalence, their cultural and demographic influence, and their crucial, ambivalent relationships to one another and to men.
It has long been recognized that Spanish America's ideological commitment to female enclosure and supervision—often expressed as women's need for “a husband or a wall”—was just that, an ideal honored mostly in the breach. For the most part, only elite women had the ability to conform to ideas of legal marriage and subsequent enclosure. Demographic realities, economic need, and lesser recourse to legal marriage subjected plebeian women to the vagaries of fortune rather than the protection of paternalism. Illegitimacy rates, concubinage proceedings, and numerous other indicators point to the rupture between prescription and reality in the colonial marriage regime. Megged's contribution is not, therefore, that he identifies this rupture, but rather that he brings unprecedentedly rich data and description to the lives of single women.
The sources of the book are many and in multiple genres: wills, bequests, petitions, hospital and convent records, parish baptismal and marriage registers, censuses, ecclesiastical divorce and annulment suits, concubinage cases, private letters, maltreatment complaints, domestic service agreements, about 190 Inquisition records involving the prosecution of single women, and 89 criminal cases in which single women were the accused. Despite the vast number of sources assessed, Megged never loses sight of methodological and theoretical issues involved in the analysis of each genre utilized. The source and methodological basis of the work is therefore solid and substantial.
The scope of singleness in Megged's study is as expansive as the source base, and considerably more ample than the colonial descriptor “soltera” would imply. Megged rules out only the maiden or virgin (doncella), itself a fluid category far from describing the literal state of virginity and circumscribed by age, class, and ethnicity. He includes among his single women widows, spinsters, separated women, women abandoned by their husbands, women who had fled their marriages, single mothers: essentially, any woman not currently married to and domiciled with a man. This fluid and ample definition conforms to Megged's assertion that singleness was a “permeable possibility and an ever-changing reality that could be explored and taken advantage of” (10). The great strength of this definition is that it conforms to the nature and fluidity of colonial categories. Its weakness, however, is that it expands the scope of the work to an almost unmanageable level.
The geographical scope of the work is considerably more manageable, focusing on the urban centers of Mexico City and Puebla. As Megged notes, these cities generated the richest data. However, they were also the heartland of single womanhood. Megged analyzes the overrepresentation of women, particularly non-European ones, in these centers, adding considerably to our understanding of the nature of colonial urban life and the effects on it of uneven migration. Mexico City and Puebla were very female places by the eighteenth century, with this sex imbalance driving the flourishing of informal unions (often adulterous) outside of marriage and the development of largely female networks of housing, mutual aid, competition, and magic.
While plebeian women were arguably disadvantaged by the urban sex ratio, and in many cases by race, ethnicity, gender, and civil status, Megged argues for women's agency, stating that their “transmuted identities” (23) enabled them to navigate various colonial hierarchies and structures, often shape-shifting as they went—altering their civil statuses, ethnicities, and even race according to the field on which they were operating. They also deployed a relatively consistent set of discursive themes in their institutional interactions: being left alone in the world, being deceived, being neglected by those responsible for them, and being subjected to cruelty. In addition to being very often a literal description of the lives of women initiated into sexual relationships at a very young age and often violently or coercively, these themes fit well with the protective ideology of the colonial regime. However, Megged does not interpret the deployment of such cultural scripts as purely performative. Rather, he analyzes these themes as clues to the cognitive schemas of women living in a paternalistic world—women who also utilized and called upon the judicial and administrative apparatus of colonial rule to press their claims to protection. Megged's nuanced interpretation of the discursive and emotional regimes evident in the documents he studies provides some of the most interesting methodological sections of the book.
Megged's sensitive elaboration of women's networks is also one of the book's great strengths. Through detailed analysis of ecclesiastical and Inquisition records, Megged is able to demonstrate the “networks of safekeeping” that protected women—or attempted to—from the violence of men. In a fascinating section, he also scrutinizes magic cases for the relations of reciprocity, gift-giving, mutual aid, and knowledge exchange that bound single women to one another. Women exchanged goods and services, helped one another find and “bind” men, and circulated healing and magical knowledges. In so doing, single women formed a core of colonial cultural exchange and of resistance to patriarchal norms that, far from being a hidden culture, was at the core of every urban marketplace or street. Megged thus situates women's networks and actions at the heart of colonial urban history.
Arguably the strongest chapter of the work, for this reader, is the one on female-headed households, which delves into parish records to offer a quantitative analysis of the prevalence and nature of such domestic situations. Some of Megged's most interesting findings relate to the number of single women occupying such households. Far from comprising merely lone single mothers and their children, such households often hosted quite a few adult women (sometimes with multiple sets of children, sometimes without). At the same time, single motherhood was far from uncommon, with more or less half of children registered to unmarried mothers. The female-headed household, given a prevalence at about 20% of households and a relatively large average household size, was far from a marginal family form. Instead, it formed an essential support for a variety of women, from single mothers to servants to spinster lodgers and women fleeing unhappy marriages.
The figure of Isabel de Montoya provides a connecting thread through the various chapters of the work. Megged has previously written about Montoya, a seventeenth-century mixed-race healer who enjoyed a long and successful career with elite clients before being punished by the Inquisition. As an emblem of the fluidity of singleness, Montoya succeeds admirably, and her rich case study offers a reassuring touchstone among many names and cases in the book.
Weaknesses are often the obverse of strengths, in books as in people, and so in this case. The vastness of the topic and the comprehensiveness of Megged's analysis make this book less about single women than about women in general, or indeed, the colonial family in general. Megged analyzes every possible manifestation or facet of singleness from marital breakdown to childrearing to ritual. The focus of the work on single women seems to ebb and flow as a result. However, through exhaustive analysis and multiple lenses, singleness emerges less as an exception to a norm, or as a family form in opposition to another, but as a reality awaiting nearly every colonial woman, nearly every colonial family, at one time or another.
Finally, the press might have invested in a thorough copyedit. Virtually every page contains proofreading errors, which is unfortunate given the stature of this book and the staying power it is sure to have. Megged's book is profound, encyclopedic, and nuanced, and will reward repeated readings. It will be indispensable for students and specialists in Spanish American history, women's history, and the history of the early modern family.