188 PART TWO
their fortunes by commerce or speculation. Their children or grandchildren took
care to camoufl age the origins of their wealth and to make it respectable by in-
vesting it in land. These nouveaux riches regarded natives and workers with the
same contempt as their aristocratic associates.
Independence did not better the status of women. Indeed, their civil status
probably worsened as a result of new bourgeois-style law codes that strengthened
husbands’ control over their wives’ property. More than ever, women were rel-
egated to the four walls of their houses and household duties. Church and parents
taught women to be submissive, sweetly clinging, and to have no wills of their
own. Typical of the patriarchal attitudes that prevailed with regard to relations
between the sexes was the advice that the Colombian Mariano Ospina Rodríguez
gave in an 1864 letter to his daughter Maria on the eve of her marriage to José
Mariano Roma y Batres: “Your happiness depends... on the sincere and constant
practice of these modest virtues: humility, patience, resignation, abnegation, and... the proper conduct of the domestic relations that depend on those same Chris-
tian virtues.” Mariano Ospina went on to caution his daughter, “One of your fi rst
cares must be to study your husband’s inclinations, habits, and tastes, so that
you never contradict them. Never seek to impose your will or make him give up
his habits or tastes, no matter how insignifi cant they may seem; on the contrary,
act in such a manner that he may continue them without disturbance.... Fre-
quently you will fi nd that you have different tastes and habits; never hesitate for a
moment to sacrifi ce your own tastes and habits in favor of his.” The double stan-
dard of sexual conduct prevailed; women were taught to deny their sexuality and
believe that procreation was the sole purpose of sexual intercourse. But women’s
actual conduct did not necessarily conform to the law and ideology. Silvia Ar-
róm has shown, for example, that the restrictions did not deter women in early-
nineteenth-century Mexico from engaging in extramarital affairs.
Few Latin American women of the elite class, however, strayed so far beyond
the bounds of propriety as did Flora Tristán (1803–1844), pioneer feminist and
socialist. Daughter of an aristocratic Peruvian landowner and a French mother,
she spent most of her life in France, but Peruvian feminists and socialists regard
her as one of their own. A woman of striking beauty, she separated early from
her husband and became active in French feminist and socialist circles. In 1835
she published a novel, Méphis, which proposed the transformation of society on
socialist and feminist principles, and in 1840, Promenades in London, a description
of the monstrous contrasts between wealth and poverty in the English metropolis.
In her last book, The Workers’ Union (1844), she called on “the working men and
women of the world” to unite, anticipating by four years Marx’s appeal in The
Communist Manifesto. Tristán clearly identifi ed the gendered layers of exploita-
tion. “The most oppressed male can oppress another human being who is his own