Historia y Sociedad (Jul 2018)
Silk Industry and Women’s Labor at the End of the 18th Century in New Spain: María Gertrudis Gutiérrez Estrada
Abstract
The aim of this work is to delve into the history of Mexico’s colonial silk industry and of its workers in order to demonstrate, from a microsocial analysis, the existence of long-standing gender-exclusion processes and of integration mechanisms, displayed in the framework of institutional modernization, that were implied by the Bourbon Reforms on both sides of the Atlantic. To this end, an analysis of the bibliography on the subject has been made. The viceroyalty policies created to revive the industry have been briefly reconstructed and it has been possible, within this contextualization, to understand the circumstances in which the process was carried out. Multiple sources from the General Archives of the Nation of Mexico have been used to look into an episode of the social history of New Spain. In the course of the research, it has been found that women in the silk industry were not limited to spinning mills, and that they could have greater aspirations. Gertrudis Gutiérrez Estrada’s opposition to the silk spinning guild of Mexico City in 1795, and her triumph in the dispute, showed a circumvention of the restrictions imposed within the silk industry to a particular sex and the implementation of resistance mechanisms that were institutionally —by the Bourbon legislation— and socially —by her family— constructed. It was a paradigmatic case that served to modify, in 1806, all the guild ordinances of the time and it is, at the same time, one of many examples that must be traced in the archives in order to rethink the role of women in the colonial industry.
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