Women's History Commons^™

‘A Mob Of Women’ Confront Post-Colonial Republican Politics: How Class, Race, And Partisan Ideology Affected Gendered Political Space In Nineteenth-Century Southwestern Colombia, James Sanders

History Faculty Publications

This essay explores why some groups of women in nineteenth–century Colombia were able to engage in public, political action but others were not. Elite conservative women (mostly white) and popular liberal women (mostly black and mulatta) found ways to participate publicly in republican politics, but elite liberal women (mostly white) and some popular conservative women (mostly Indian) were largely absent from the public sphere. I argue that colonial gender roles, elite and popular visions of citizenship, the contest between the Liberal and Conservative Parties, the structure of indigenous communities, and popular liberal women's access to independent economic resources all helped …