What Is The Role Of Women In Colonial Latin America

Based on their race, social status, economic status, and culture women within colonial Latin American and Brazilian society had different daily routines and lives and assisted the development of the colonies based upon their cultural, social, and economic status. For African women, slave and free, along with Native American women their daily routines were dominated by manual labor on fields and domestic labor with much of their labor fueling the economic growth and development of the colonies along with contributing to the wealth of white European plantation owners and aristocrats. For wealthy European women they would serve as pawns for families to form alliances with other aristocratic families and raise the social and economic status of
They aided in the economic development of the colonies as African slaves especially in plantation regions of colonial South America such as Bahia in Brazil they “provided not only the raw labor that cut down forests, cleared land, and planted and harvested crops, but also the skills that were key to refining, processing, and transporting rural production to market”. Not only did they provide all the labor required to plant and harvest the cash crops like sugar cane, tobacco, and cacao but also provided the labor used to develop the land to make it suitable for plantation crops and any manufacturing facilities such as sugar mills. There were also ideas that surrounded African women such as their perceived sexual promiscuity and their ideal body type, lean and athletic, by white European men that meant that
They also helped serve in the development of the colonies as aristocratic women of colonial South America served as pawns for their patriarch and family in order to form political alliances with other families, improve economic conditions through their dowries given in marriage, and elevate their social status. Aristocratic women in colonial society could afford good quality food especially wide varieties of animal protein, imported European clothing, imported European furniture, and large luxurious finely furnished homes because their families served as “mixes of ranchers, planters, miners, merchants, high-ranking churchmen, and bureaucrats” positions that offered high profits and salaries. The cultural ideals of Iberia gave women many more rights than African, Native America, Mestizo, and Mulatto women such as the right to litigation, the right to divorce if they felt they were being mistreated and abused in their marriage, and the right to own property. However, the ideas of “machismo” maintained the superiority of men over women in the patriarchal society of Iberia and colonial Latin America while women were raised on the ideas of “marianismo” which meant to act like the