Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781503603684
- eISBN:
- 9781503604391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503603684.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
Chapter 6 analyzes how non-elite women outside of marriage navigated the shifting religious and political landscape in the decades after Independence. Laboring women undeniably faced new challenges, ...
More
Chapter 6 analyzes how non-elite women outside of marriage navigated the shifting religious and political landscape in the decades after Independence. Laboring women undeniably faced new challenges, including their exclusion from republican citizenship, pastoral instability, and the decline of confraternities, which undermined traditional forms of spiritual and social support, and the renewed emphasis upon female sexual purity by both Church and State. While laboring women could not live up to the elite ideal of “Republican Motherhood,” they found new ways of establishing their moral status as public defenders of the faith. Their actions shaped the development of popular conservatism in Guatemala, which successfully reigned from 1838 to 1871. Non-elite women also forged alliances with Jesuit missionaries and took advantage of new devotional opportunities as nineteenth-century Church officials, more dependent than ever upon laywomen, mostly abandoned early modern restrictions on active lay female religiosity.Less
Chapter 6 analyzes how non-elite women outside of marriage navigated the shifting religious and political landscape in the decades after Independence. Laboring women undeniably faced new challenges, including their exclusion from republican citizenship, pastoral instability, and the decline of confraternities, which undermined traditional forms of spiritual and social support, and the renewed emphasis upon female sexual purity by both Church and State. While laboring women could not live up to the elite ideal of “Republican Motherhood,” they found new ways of establishing their moral status as public defenders of the faith. Their actions shaped the development of popular conservatism in Guatemala, which successfully reigned from 1838 to 1871. Non-elite women also forged alliances with Jesuit missionaries and took advantage of new devotional opportunities as nineteenth-century Church officials, more dependent than ever upon laywomen, mostly abandoned early modern restrictions on active lay female religiosity.
Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781503603684
- eISBN:
- 9781503604391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503603684.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
The Epilogue considers how the Liberal Reform Era of the 1870s, dramatically undermined both laboring single women and the Catholic Church. Liberals directly undermined laboring women’s economic ...
More
The Epilogue considers how the Liberal Reform Era of the 1870s, dramatically undermined both laboring single women and the Catholic Church. Liberals directly undermined laboring women’s economic opportunities, enhanced male privileges, and promoted an exclusive nuclear family ideal, and at the same time targeted laywomen’s longtime devotional allies, expelling male religious orders, closing female convents, and abolishing lay brotherhoods, Third Orders, and most public displays of religiosity. But by the 1920s, a lay-led religious revival, supported by the Vatican, was underway and dozens of new Catholic associations emerged specifically for women. Today, laboring women are at the forefront of a new spiritual revival in Guatemala City, the rise of Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, and charismatic Catholicism. This study’s long historical perspective suggests that the success of these movements derives from their ability to build upon Guatemala’s local religion, particularly forms of devotional expression and networking historically favored by laboring women.Less
The Epilogue considers how the Liberal Reform Era of the 1870s, dramatically undermined both laboring single women and the Catholic Church. Liberals directly undermined laboring women’s economic opportunities, enhanced male privileges, and promoted an exclusive nuclear family ideal, and at the same time targeted laywomen’s longtime devotional allies, expelling male religious orders, closing female convents, and abolishing lay brotherhoods, Third Orders, and most public displays of religiosity. But by the 1920s, a lay-led religious revival, supported by the Vatican, was underway and dozens of new Catholic associations emerged specifically for women. Today, laboring women are at the forefront of a new spiritual revival in Guatemala City, the rise of Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, and charismatic Catholicism. This study’s long historical perspective suggests that the success of these movements derives from their ability to build upon Guatemala’s local religion, particularly forms of devotional expression and networking historically favored by laboring women.
