In the Shadow» of Absent Men: Unhappily Married Women in the Hispanic World of the Seventeenth Century

• Published in: Studia historica. Ha. moderna 2016-12, Vol.38 (2), p.237-285
• Main Author: María José DE LA PASCUA SÁNCHEZ
• Format: Article
• Language: eng ; spa
• Subjects: historia moderna; mujeres malcasadas; mujeres solas; mujeres, familia y trabajo; mundo hispánico; requisitorias a indias; siglo xviii; testamentos y relatos de vida
• ISSN: 0213-2079; 2386-3889
• DOI: 10.14201/shhmo2016382237285

The households with feminine heads have been revealed in recent research as an important social reality in Early Modern Europe. These households, often under direction of a widow, and to a lesser extent, of a spinster or an unhappily married woman, are providing historians with the possibility to observe women’s lives from the margins of structures of patriarchal power. The economic, social and affective reality of unhappily married women needs a profound analysis, that goes beyond a quantitative magnitude, facing the challenge of imagining these women in conditions that, at first glance, didn’t go beyond exceptional and accidental, but in reality they could have formed an environment of autonomy and power for themselves. In this study, judicial records and testaments which come from Cadiz in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries are utilised to show the different paths of the lifes of women with absent husbands. These testimonials confirm that the experiences of women and their own perception of themselves differ not only as a function of their own circumstances but also according to the sources that we could choose. If from the allegations of abandonment from the «Warrants to Indies» it can be deduced that for this collective, overall they experienced poverty and difficult conditions, their wills offer a visión of full lives where work and affection are basic structures.