I cannot believe I am advocating for Adam Smith...

In To Love, honor and Obey In Colonial Mexico, Patricia Seed does an excellent job of using church, and secular laws as well as literature produced during the time period to argue about the cultural change in the ways engagements and marriages happened in from the early sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Seed further informs us that the change of society, especially with regards to the younger generation is what drives the church to take its position against both the parents and secular law; even though it was not known for its advocacy with regards to freedom of choice within the church’s own tenants. Unfortunately, I would have to argue with Seed at this point. I found her book to leave the unanswered question as to the real motives behind the Catholic Church. Seed argues that Capitalism is what ultimately changed the cultural context of marriage; with regards to the economic reasoning behind the cycle of parentally arranged marriage to choice by the couple and ultimately back to parental influence. However, Seed fails to apply and investigate the church’s influence by the raise in a capitalist market. In my opinion, the Catholic Church changed its position on free will for marriage purposes only, in order to retain its financial dependency and political control of these newly made couples, which thereby gave the church a new monetary basis for its own benefit and reinforcement of the church’s tenets of marriage that restricted the wives rights under both the secular and moral laws.
What exactly do I mean? It’s very simple. With the boom of Adam Smith type Capitalism, citizens looked to the government authority to regulate their lives and began ignoring the inflexible nature of the church; in other words, the church was not making anyone money, therefore, financial influence began pouring into the pockets of politicians rather than the church’s. Families were worried about the implications that came along with the intermarriage of their children, which began overshadowing the former tenets of ideology with regards to social beliefs such as “honor”. Honor became a commodity, which one could purchase for the right amount and social status quickly followed. Families began to arrange marriages for their children based on how their marriages could bring an economic addition to said families. For example, when my husband told his parents that he had asked me to marry him, his parents went nuts, worrying over what his “family” assets were, how I would affect the will of his grandparents, and that since my father was a mere painter, there was no financial incentive for his father, etc. Prenuptials were threatened by my father-in-law. They even went so far as to try and set up my husband with one of his third (or fourth) cousin who would sign anything the family told her too (incidentally, his parents either did not know or cared less that this same female was gay). Why? To protect their “family interests” (further explains my in-laws interest in my divorce, does it not?).
It is obvious to see that children, no matter what time period they live in, will rebel against their parent’s authority. The church, however, saw this period as an opportunity. Seed implies that it changed because of the romantic influence of the Renaissance, but I again disagree. I think they saw it as a way to reassert itself into the political sphere and to gain a new basis to collect tithes from. After all, this younger generation would obviously be having sex (since they choose their mate) and they would produce offspring (so long as they went by the church’s prescribed tenets), and therefore the church would gain two probably generations to pilfer its existence off of. Pretty sweet deal if you were the church, pretty rotten if you were the female or the female offspring. Why? Because the church began to infiltrate everyday life; regulating sexual practices, even within the bounds of marriage, fortifying its patriarchal gender roles, which reinforced inheritance laws that took away a woman ability to govern herself.
For the freedom of being able to choose their spouse, women traded their former economic freedom with regards to inheritance and financial compensation for broken engagements, and handed down to their daughters and granddaughters the legacy of prescribed gender roles and assignments, enforced and regulated by the Catholic church, with less economic and legal rights then previously given prior to the idea of “free choice to marry any fool you want to with the blessing of the Catholic Church”.
Less Shakespeare and Cervantes, more Adam Smith based rhetoric next time Ms. Seed…

The Wedding "gift" my in-laws wished had been returned 13 years ago...

One question that has been nagging at me these last couple of weeks is with regards to families, both Spanish and Indigenous, “gifting” their daughters hand in marriage. My first thoughts were that the daughters had been treated as though they were property with either their dowry or familial social/political status as the trade off. Even prior to the Spanish conquering, this same social gifting was prevalent. However, after reading Pedro Carrasco’s essay on Indian and Spanish intermarriage, I began to wonder something else, something that I have yet to see discussed in any of our readings. My question is simple, what if in our modern day know-it-all ethnocentric attitudes, we have misunderstood the acting of “gifting” itself?
Our focus has been on explaining and trying to understand gender roles and assignments from the late 15th century to currently the late 16th century. Yesterday while dealing with my divorce, I reflected on why I married my husband and how funny the concept would have been if my dad had “gifted” me to my husband and his family; though I am pretty sure since they have always treated me like crap, they would have rather he kept his loud mouth liberal daughter… At any rate the thought popped into my head that my father had “gifted” me so to speak. In most traditional marriages, the bride is usually “given” to the groom by the bride’s family. Then I asked myself, what if our understanding of the word “gift” in relation to marriages we are studying has been either misinterpreted or misunderstood.
Some might argue that no, they were literal gifts especially since the Indigenous have their own version prior to the conquest. Carrasco was only able to study intermarriages of the upper echelon of both ethnic realms, mainly because they would have been the only written down or recorded somewhere. However, the idea of a bride’s family giving the equivalent of some form of capital in their society, perhaps land or an actual dowry is nothing new and would have crossed both social and economic barriers; after all, do not most parents want to help their newly married children out with money, furniture or help them find achieve a home of their own? A friend of mine got married over the weekend to another friend of mine from high school. Who gave her away? You guessed it, her family. What did this mean? It meant that those two families are now linked through the marriage of their children. Is this any different from families in the past? No. My in-laws did not like me (and quite frankly there is no love lost on my side either), however, our families will forever be linked. Why? My husband and I had three children, all sons. Regardless of whether my husband and I are married or not, and regardless of my husband and his family disowning my children socially, they are still an undeniable link to his family. My children’s history and heritage comes from both sides because unlike the Holy mother of Christ, I was impregnated by a dork from West Tennessee, not the Holy Spirit, therefore my children and part of their lineage come from their biological father and well as myself. Unfortunately, unlike most of the fathers from Ourense, Spain (Allyson Poska’s essays), my husband apparently thinks he should be able to leave his wife and children, with no child support or alimony, and deny his children their legitimacy and bloodline through his family.

Side note: Do not ask how I got off on this tangent, I gave up “coca-cola” for lent and my mind needs caffeine in order to function properly. Though considering lent is a Catholic practice, I might be able to later tie it into a future discussion…