From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: The Conquest and patriarchy
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 09:15:10 GMT

/** wri.news: 530.0 **/
** Topic: The Conquest and patriarchy **
** Written 11:24 pm  Oct 26, 1992 by gn:peacenews in cdp:wri.news **
*** The invasion of the western hemisphere by Europe had terrible
consequences for what we know today as Latin America. But women
lost even more and they have been unfairly ignored in the telling
of history.

In this excerpt from the magazine _Mujeres Libertarias_, PILAR
YUSTE studies the situation of Spanish and indigenous women at the
time of contact. In spite of the great differences which existed
between these two cultures, did the women of pre-Columbian America
live under better or worse conditions than women of the Iberian
peninsula?

*** Although it is very risky to compare different cultures, we can
sense something from contemporary statements -- for example, Alvaro
Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's references to the women of the river Plate
basin whom he met during his 1540 explorations. "It is true that
women have more freedom than that given by Queen Isabella, our
_senora_, to women in Spain."

However, we have always been told that colonisers had always
believed indigenous women less moral than Castilian women because
they were naked, practised polygamy, and enjoyed a less tabooed
sexuality (though what we know as "free love" was not a common
practice).

We should not draw quick conclusions or idealise the issue. The
fact that polyandry existed, in some instances in some cultures,
can only debatably be seen as a positive situation for women (more
than one woman would say that they have their hands full caring for
just one man). Does the fact that monogamy is more common in
European societies in itself indicate repression?

The elements of sexual repression usually arise from economic and
social trends: what is the division of labour between the sexes?
What is undeniable is that pre-Columbian societies lived according
to their own lifestyles, not according to those imposed by the
Conquest. We don't have to convince ourselves that they lived in
Paradise to state that the imposition of another culture is
illegitimate.

This view is not at all anachronistic or counterfactual -- the
Conquest was seriously questioned at the time. It is also true
that, if we compare lifestyles, we can sense that the Spanish
conquistadores had no right to affirm that theirs was more advanced
or more morally just. Pre-Columbian social organisation had many
positive aspects; this, too, was recognised at the time by the
Spaniards.

>>>  The women of Castile

How did the few Spanish women who arrived in the "New World"
behave? Let's quote Gines de Sep#lveda: "the indigenous are as
inferior to the Spaniards as children to adults or women to men."
This was the ideology we took to them (see also St Thomas More's
_Utopia_ -- his, not ours!).

We are not at all surprised to learn that many of the Castilian
women who found themselves living among indigenous people in the
early years of colonisation chose not to return to Spain with their
men when they had the chance to do so.

There was a great diversity among the few women who crossed the
Atlantic in those first years. Some, rich or poor, behaved like any
Spanish man in their attitude to the "conquered" races, but their
adventurous character was often remarkable for the time -- for
example, the famous lieutenant-nun Catalina de Erausto who dressed
as a soldier and gave us some of the first lesbian writings from
the New World. Or Ines Ju rez, the "adventuress" of Valdivia, who
chopped off the heads of seven captured chieftains.

Other women had a different role and took sides, to different
degrees, with the indigenous population. Some single women came to
the Americas to become teachers. Other cases were more unusual,
such as the wife of the planter Albeniz, who chose the love of the
young Indian Arechuna -- when he was captured for sedition and
sentenced to death by fire, she asked to be burned with him but was
instead returned to Spain on a slave galleon.

Although marginalised in Spain, these women represented a dominant
race and class in Latin America but were in no position to alter
the established order.

>>>  We mixed our blood ... 

We mixed our blood with that of the Indians! Better that we had
behaved like the English and shunned them! The issue of _mestizaje_
(miscegenation) is a hot potato in any analysis of the Conquest.

The British emigrated to the Americas, as a rule, in family units
(which did not mean that Indian and black women were spared rape by
the colonisers). The Spanish conquest, meanwhile, was conducted
almost entirely by men -- the women mentioned earlier were rare
exceptions, and their function did not, as a rule, include the
breeding of a European settler population.

Not even the llamas were exempted from the sexual violence of the
Spanish conquistadores. These men, who were supposed to incarnate
the noblest moral values, were horrified by the polygamy of some
_caciques_ or chiefs but seldom took the trouble to marry any of
their many sexual slaves.

The starting point of the conquest was the systematic and
officially approved rape of indigenous women. Hernando de Soto kept
a floating brothel, capturing young women in Florida; virgins were
raped at the Inca temple of the sun; prisoners were raped, forcibly
converted to Christianity, and then made to repent their "bad
thoughts" ... 

Here is where the process of objectification begins, the
dehumanising of human beings who were considered chattels, sexual
objects, and free labour. Even the fruit of the Spaniards' rapes,
the _mestizo_ or mixed-blood, was denied the dignity that we claim
to have in Europe; this is reflected in the discrimination against
Latin Americans who have settled in Europe in recent years.

>>>  Not quite matriarchy

On the situation of women in pre-Columbian America, we cannot talk
of a universal matriarchy, but it is certain that patriarchy did
not have the strength and influence it acquired later. While some
romanticise the societies the Spanish overthrew, we have to take a
harder view. The Incas were feudalists; women were equal in terms
of economic and labour distribution, but were far from equal
politically. There were royal courts with concubines; and with the
coming of the conquest many chiefs gave away their wives or
daughters as gifts to the conquistadores.

However, there were other societies which were matrilineal, and in
many others -- even where men had more or less complete control --
women had a great deal of political power.

The new culture of forced synthesis showed little respect for the
economic, social, political, family, religious, and ecological
systems of the conquered peoples. People were alienated from their
relationships with one another and their environment; The core of
many social customs was lost and never recovered; take for instance
the "mita" -- the Inca system of voluntary labour --  which came to
be employed as a form of taxation by the Spanish, ending up as
little more than slavery.

Still more women were forced into domestic or sexual slavery. This
was something new, a twofold and critical discrimination in terms
of race _and_ sex.

source = translation: michelle

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* Reprinted from _Peace News_ 2360 (November 1992).      Please  *
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