Early Modern Women and Race: State of the Study

Abstract

Many of us have long pondered what the histories of our field would look like if more women had been encouraged to pursue even moderate literacy across the early modern world. In Latin America, the percentage of people who could read and write remained generally low for the broader population, but Black and Indigenous women had even fewer opportunities to have documented (and archived) their experiences, their challenges, and their hopes for the future. Nearly all that remains are highly mediated sources produced by the two colonial pillars of Crown and Church. It is the tragedy of the archive that we must offer their incomplete histories often from shards found in marriage records, last wills and testaments, Inquisition files, or notarized sales of slaves. The conventions we examine feel blanketed under a hidden transcript of a time and place that we have not yet fully deciphered for women but perhaps especially for women marginalized by race. Notwithstanding such challenges, many of us endure because we continue to grow through new communities that encourage us to redefine the canon and to experiment with new methodologies for exploring women’s lives. In particular, those of us who focus on early modern women and race owe a great debt to slavery studies. Foundational monographs and edited volumes by brilliant Black women scholars such as Stephanie Camp, Kimberly Hanger, Jennifer Morgan, Deborah Gray White, Daina Ramey Barry, Darlene Clark Hine, and Thavolia Glymph established a lens throughwhich to consider Black women on their own terms, to take