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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.

This chapter argues that many women in eighteenth-century Spain conceived of their public activities as part of a uniquely female sphere of action. This was true of many women writers who concerned themselves with issues they considered unique to the female sex and who often addressed their works to a female audience. The conception of this female sphere is clearest in the agenda that the junta de damas established for itself. The members of the women's council saw themselves as mothers to the nation, and, in line with the doctrine of Republican Motherhood that they and other writers espoused, they worked to educate women to fulfill their proper roles as citizens. As did many male intellectuals, the women of the junta de damas adopted a class-based vision of female citizenship, focusing on preparing elite women for their role as mothers and poorer women for their role as workers.

Chapter 2 addresses the question of preparedness for the Revolution. Marc-Antoine was a devoted reader of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and friend of abbé Mably. Rosalie wrote more frequently about La Fontaine and Samuel Richardson; she was also devout in her Catholic practices. Rosalie shared the common middle-class concern over the corrupting quality of wealth. She regretted her family’s subordinate social position as members of the Third Estate. This chapter argues that Rosalie and Marc-Antoine were potentially well prepared to become revolutionaries.

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.