Women In the Background

Expressions of the Feminine Gender in Colonial Documents from Mendoza

Abstract

The article examines the linguistic forms used in colonial public and private documents to designate the female gender represented by women living in Mendoza during the 16th and 17th centuries. It reconstructs the operative perspective of officials and residents of the city as recorded in the selected texts. The study focuses on the linguistic mechanisms that shape an image of women as integral members of the community at that time. Specifically, it seeks to answer what linguistic strategies were primarily employed in the Mendoza city council Acts (which are the only comprehensive public documents from the period when the city was part of the Captaincy General of Chile, and later, from 1776, the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata) and, complementarily, in some marriage dowry letters (also held in the General Archive of the Province of Mendoza). A corpus was compiled and analyzed in light of studies on available lexicon. The analysis of the council acts and private documents such as wills and dowry letters concludes that despite the few references to the female universe, women participated dynamically and significantly in all facets of community life. They were designated in traditional ways common to Spanish Peninsula documents. When referring to mixed masculine and feminine groups, the masculine was used as the unmarked form.