THE STRUCTURE OF CLASS AND CASTE 119
regarded a wealthy mulatto family as the equal of
a wealthy Spanish family. “A mulatto or a descen-
dant of mulattoes,” writes Patricia Seed, “was un-
equal to a Spaniard only if he was poor. The trend
in decision making was that economic differences
tied to racial differences, rather than racial dispar-
ity alone, constituted substantial social disparity.”
This issue of “inequality,” of course, rarely arose on
the top elite level, where marriage partners were
almost invariably selected with an eye to conserv-
ing or strengthening the fortunes of the aristocratic
families involved.
The concept of sexual honor also underwent
some change in the same period. Previously, when
a young woman lost her “honor” as a result of pre-
marital sexual activity and sued for restitution of
that honor through marriage or other compensa-
tion, the church tended to hold the man respon-
sible and require him to marry her or compensate
her for her loss. In the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury, however, aristocratic parents often argued
that the girl’s sexual activity made her—but not
him—“unequal,” thereby creating a bar to mar-
riage. “This new concept of gender-related honor,”
says Patricia Seed, “framed an elaborate double
standard that allowed young men to take the
honor of young women without damage to their
reputations or matrimonial consequences, but at
the same time condemned women for the identical
action.”
Despite the emphasis placed by the Hispanic
code of honor on virginity and marital fi delity, many
colonial women, including members of the elite, dis-
regarded conventional morality and church laws
by engaging in premarital and extramarital sex.
Sexual relations between betrothed couples were
common. Elite women who bore children out of
wedlock had available a number of strategies to
cover up their indiscretions and legitimate their
offspring. The many lower-class women who trans-
gressed in this way lacked the means and perhaps
the will to recover their lost “honor.” Illegitimacy
appears to have been pervasive in colonial cities
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ille-
gitimacy, signifying the lack of honor, could be a
bar to holding public offi ce and obstruct access to
higher positions in the church, the military, and
the civil service. The protection of wealthy relatives
and access to education, however, could mitigate
or remove the taint of illegitimacy. The chronicler
Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616) took pride in
being the natural son of a noble conquistador, and
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695) found her
out-of-wedlock birth no obstacle to achieving a
brilliant literary career.
The contrast between the formal code of sex-
ual honor and the actual sexual conduct of colo-
nial men and women was especially striking in a
plantation area like Venezuela, where the large-
scale existence of slavery and the enormous power
of the great landowners tended to loosen the re-
straints of law and convention on such conduct.
In 1770 Bishop Martí of Venezuela made a visita
of his diocese. To evaluate the moral health of his
subjects, he invited the people of each town he vis-
ited to speak to him in confi dence about their own
sins and those of their neighbors. Martí’s detailed
record of these reports and his own investigations
and judgments give an impression of sexuality run
rampant. “Over fi fteen hundred individuals stood
accused, primarily of sexual misdeeds,” writes
Kathy Waldron; “nearly ten percent of the clerics in
the province came under attack; and even the gov-
ernor of Maracaibo was denounced. The accusa-
tions included adultery, fornication, concubinage,
incest, rape, bigamy, prostitution, lust, homosexu-
ality, bestiality, abortion, and infanticide.”
The economic, social, and physical subordi na-
tion of colonial women to men (prevailing church
doctrine accepted a husband’s right to beat disobe-
dient or erring wives, only in moderation) is an
undisputed fact. But male domination was to some
extent limited by the Hispanic property law, which
required equal division of estates among heirs and
gave women the right to control their dowries and
inheritances during and beyond marriage. Some
colonial women operated as entrepreneurs inde-
pendently of their husbands; women were often
appointed executors of their husbands’ wills and
frequently managed a husband’s business after his
death. Two specialists in the fi eld, Asunción Lavrín
and Edith Couturier, concluded that colonial
women enjoyed more economic independence than
had been supposed, “that there was repression;