Discuss what Collier’s article on marianismo in Spain and González-López’s article on fathering Latina sexualities have in common with respect to social constructions of gender, sexuality, and virgini

Transformation in a Spanish Village

Author(s): Jane F. Collier

Source: American Ethnologist , Feb., 1986 , Vol. 13, No. 1 (Feb., 1986), pp. 100-107

Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/644588

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide

range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and

facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

https://about.jstor.org/terms

American Anthropological Association

and Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,

preserve and extend access to American Ethnologist

This content downloaded from

146.111.34.148 on Thu, 22 Jun 2023 22:30:41 +00:00

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

from Mary to modern woman:

the material basis of Marianismo

and its transformation in a Spanish village

JANE F. COLLIER-Stanford University

In 1963-64, the married women of Los Olivos (pseudonymyf D V P D O O Y L O O D J H L Q W K H P R X Q W D L Q s

of Huelva, southwestern Spain, seemed typical representatives of Mediterranean culture. When

housewives gathered at the public fountain to wash clothes, they wore drab, shapeless outfits,

and many wore mourning. Most were overweight. Washing clothes and attending funerals

were their most public activities. In the evenings married women stayed home or visited the

sick. Twenty years later, in the summer of 1984, the new generation of married women pre-

sented a very different picture. Instead of wearing drab, shapeless clothes, most wore outfits

that showed off their figures. And most had shapely figures. They worried about gaining weight,

although some were notably more successful at dieting than others. Married women no longer

stayed home every evening. Rather, they spent weekend evenings with their husbands in the

local bars, where they sat around tables dressed in their most fashionable outfits, with heavy

makeup and elaborate hairdos.

How do we understand such a radical shift in married women's presentation of self? The

explanation offered by many ethnographers of Spanish villages-and echoed by residents of

Los Olivos-is that rural Spain has "opened up" (see Aceves and Douglass 1976yf 0 D V V L Y e

emigration from the countryside and the spread of television into remote villages have exposed

the present generation of rural Spaniards to ideas and choices not available to their parents and

grandparents. Villagers in Los Olivos, for example, say that 20 years ago their village was atra-

sado (backwardyf 3 H R S O H I R O O R Z H G R X W P R G H G F X V W R P V W K H \ V D \ E H F D X V H W K H \ G L G Q R W N Q R w

any others. But now everyone has city relatives and a television set, and many people have

cars. Today's adults have been exposed to city ways. Now everyone below the age of 60 wants

to be "modern." Married women want to dress nicely and go out with their husbands. And

young adults think that former village customs, such as delaying marriage until age 30, or wear-

ing heavy mourning for 10 years after the death of a parent, are tonterias (stupiditiesyf 6 X F h

"backward" village customs are to be discarded.

The "opening up" explanation is not wrong. But it is not very illuminating either. To begin,

the village was not isolated in 1963-64. There may have been only two television sets in town,

but everyone had radios. Women also had excellent knowledge of how urban fashion setters

In one generation, married women in an Andalusian village appeared to have

turned from emulating the Virgin Mary to emulating the modern woman of Spanish

advertisements and TV. Drawing on the notion that gender conceptions are aspects

of cultural systems through which people negotiate relations of inequality within

complex social wholes, I suggest that a concern for female chastity gave way to a

concern for personal capacities and preferences when inequalities in income and

life-style among villagers no longer appeared to rest on inheritance, but on the

urban, salaried jobs people obtained. [Mediterranean society, gender, political

economy, honor code, ideology]

100 american ethnologist This content downloaded from

146.111.34.148 on Thu, 22 Jun 2023 22:30:41 +00:00

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

lived and dressed. Many girls worked as servants for wealthy families before returning to marry

in the village. And glossy magazines depicting royalty and movie stars circulated among village

women. Local dressmakers and hairdressers were, in fact, so successful at copying city fashions

for unmarried women that I had difficulty distinguishing dressed up village maidens from stylish

urban dwellers (see also Martinez-Alier 1971:208yf .

Given that villagers knew a great deal about the customs and life-styles of middle- and upper-

class urban dwellers in 1963-64, the "opening up" hypothesis cannot explain why married

women's presentation of self changed drastically in 20 years. Rather, what is needed is an ex-

planation of why city ways became attractive to today's adults when they had not been so for

their parents. In addition, the "opening up" hypothesis does not explain the content of the

"traditional" and the "modern." Why should married women in 1963-64 have worn drab

clothes, cultivated plump figures, and stayed home in the evenings? And why should today's

generation of married women wear bright clothes, try to stay thin, and join their husbands at

bars on weekends? Similarly, why should young people today think it "unnatural" to delay

marriage until age 30, and why should they call village mourning customs "stupidities"?

In this paper, I shall suggest answers to both the content and the change questions. As to

content, I will argue that cultural conceptions of gender must be interpreted as aspects of cul-

tural systems through which people manipulate, interpret, rationalize, resist, and reproduce

relations of inequality within complex social wholes (see Collier and Rosaldo 1981yf 7 R X Q -

derstand conceptions of gender, we cannot look at what men and women are or do, but rather

must ask what people want and fear, what privileges they seek to claim, rationalize, and defend.

To understand gender, we must understand social inequality. And, if gender conceptions are

idioms for interpreting and manipulating social inequality, then we should expect notions of

femininity and masculinity to change when one organization of inequality gives way to an-

other.

Twenty years ago, Los Olivos seemed indistinguishable from the Andalusian village Pitt-

Rivers described in his 1954 book, The People of the Sierra. Their gender system was a typical

example of the Mediterranean values of "honor and shame." A man's honor was a function of

his mother's, sisters', and wife's sexual chastity. A family's reputation depended on the sexual

shame of its women and on the readiness of its men to defend, with violence if need be, its

women's purity.

A cultural concern for female chastity is not unique to Mediterranean peoples. Rather, all

complex agrarian societies, including India and China, have forms of the "virginity complex"

(Ortner 1976yf 7 K H D V V R F L D W L R Q R I Y L U J L Q L W \ Z L W K D J U D U L D Q V \ V W H P V W K X V V X J J H V W V D I L U V W O H Y H O H [ -

planation for its occurrence: in stratified societies where rights and privileges are vested in sta-

tus groups, female chastity becomes a cultural concern because legitimate birth is the primary

idiom people use to claim, rationalize, and defend status privileges.' Legitimate birth is, of

course, not the basis of status inequalities. Such inequalities result from unequal access to the

means of production as maintained by coercive force. But individuals living within such soci-

eties rarely have occasion to contemplate the wider structure of inequality. Rather, people en-

gaged in everyday, practical action are concerned with asserting their own rights and privileges

against the challenges of particular others. As a result, people talk and act as if inheritance were

the basis of status inequalities.

In a world where people claim, defend, and justify privileges on the basis of legitimate birth,

illegitimacy is the idiom people use to challenge or deny others' claims to precedence.2 To

question the chastity of a man's mother is to question his right to the status he claims as his. In

such a world, women's bodies appear as gateways to all privileges. But women's bodies are

gateways any man may enter. Women's penetrability is their most significant feature. The status

and reputation of a family thus rest on the degree to which its women are protected from pen-

etration-by women's own sense of sexual shame, by being locked away, and/or by the cour-

age of family men in repelling seducers.

from Mary to modern woman 101 This content downloaded from

146.111.34.148 on Thu, 22 Jun 2023 22:30:41 +00:00

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

While an understanding of stratified agrarian societies may provide a first-level explanation

for "virginity complexes," any particular instance of the complex must be understood within

its specific historical context. Women's chastity may be a primary idiom used by people in

stratified agrarian societies for negotiating claims to unequal privileges, but it is not the only

idiom. Such societies are complex. They contain many status and ethnic groups. Women's

chastity may not matter to some. And, as Mediterraneanists realize, the "values of honor and

shame" are not uniform throughout the area (Peristiany 1966; Herzfeld 1980yf , Q R U G H U W R X Q -

derstand how "honor and shame" are lived in any particular time and place, therefore, we need

to examine the specific privileges people seek to claim, rationalize, and defend.

In 1963-64, Los Olivos was a small village of less than 800 people where inheritance ap-

peared to determine people's occupations, incomes, and life-chances. Although the commu-

nity appeared egalitarian (the wealthiest landowners lived outside in nearby, more significant

towns, and beggars rarely stayed overnightyf W K H Y L O O D J H Z D V Q H Y H U W K H O H V V G L Y L G H G L Q W R W K U H e

status groups: (1yf D V P D O O Q X P E H U R I U H V L G H Q W O D Q G R Z Q H U V Z K R K L U H G Z R U N H U V D Q G G L G Q R W G o

manual labor themselves, (2yf D O D U J H U Q X P E H U R I O D Q G R Z Q H U V Z K R Z R U N H G W K H L U R Z Q O D Q G E X t

did not have to work for others, and (3yf P D Q \ S H R S O H Z L W K O L W W O H R U Q R O D Q G Z K R Z R U N H G I R r

others as day laborers. Long before 1963-64, Los Olivos was integrated into the capitalist world

system. The larger landowners produced for the market, and half the villagers worked for

wages. But inheritance still appeared to be the major determinant of people's life-chances be-

cause, in a labor-intensive system of mixed-crop agriculture, workers knew as much or more

about the entire agricultural process as their employers.3 As a result, villagers lived in a world

where the most obvious explanation for differences in occupation, income, and life-style was

that some people had inherited capital (land or small industriesyf Z K L O H R W K H U V K D G Q R W .

Although Los Olivos appeared to be a "traditional" Spanish village, the "tranquil" com-

munity we observed in 1963-64 was, in fact, only one moment in an ongoing historical pro-

cess. As Perez Diaz (1976yf Q R W H V F K D Q J H L Q 6 S D L Q K D V E H H Q F R Q W L Q X R X V , Q $ Q G D O X V L D D S U R F H V s

of class polarization, begun during the last century and intensifying as the accumulation of land

by entrepreneurial landlords created an increasingly large and impoverished class of landless

rural laborers, was contained by various mechanisms, including naked force (see Martinez-

Alier 1971yf ) R U D E U L H I S H U L R G L Q W K H H D U O \ V F O D V V Z D U I D U H H U X S W H G L Q / R V 2 O L Y R V $ Q D F W L Y e

union of agrarian socialists wrested control of wages and working conditions from landowners

(Collier n.d.yf % X W G X U L Q J W K H 6 S D Q L V K & L Y L O : D U R I D O O Y R F D O V R F L D O L V W V Z H U H N L O O H G R r

exiled and Franco's victorious troops gave control of village government to the town's wealth-

iest landowners, who thereafter ruled with the aid of a resident contingent of Civil Guards.

Before the Civil War, working-class women married at a younger age than women of the

propertied class, and many were pregnant at marriage. But after the war, these differences in

behavior by class disappeared (Collier 1983yf 1 R W R Q O \ Z H U H P D Q \ Z R U N L Q J F O D V V Z R P H n

forced to delay their marriages by the war and subsequent famine, but the town's elites, who

enjoyed uncontested control of economic resources, focused on a woman's virtue when con-

sidering her, or her family's, requests for aid.4 It was also true that, even for working-class fam-

ilies whose estate consisted of labor power rather than capital, the wealth parents accumulated

determined children's dowries and the spouses they could attract (see Price and Price 1966byf .

In 1963-64, landowners' uncontested control of village affairs ensured that all people, whether

from propertied families or not, lived in a world where the resources and reputations of parents

appeared to determine the status of their children.

Given the apparent role of inheritance in determining people's occupations, incomes, and

life-chances, people's actions, whatever their ostensible purpose, were always open to being

interpreted as statements about a man's courage or a woman's sexual modesty. Whatever prac-

tical reasons, for example, a couple may have had to delay marriage until the bride's 29th or

30th year, such a delay offered visible proof of the bride's ability to deny and control her sexual

impulses. Similarly, the woman who dutifully observed 10 years of mourning after the death of

102 american ethnologist This content downloaded from

146.111.34.148 on Thu, 22 Jun 2023 22:30:41 +00:00

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

a parent demonstrated-by wearing heavy black wool summer and winter-her ability to mor-

tify the flesh. And the married woman who never spent a perra on herself demonstrated both

her capacity for self-sacrifice and her lack of interest in being sexually attractive to men. On

the other side, of course, the pregnant bride, the mourning woman who laid aside her shawl

while working in the sun, and the wife who bought herself a new dress were all appropriate

targets of gossip.

Although a woman's sexual modesty was never without significance, maidens enjoyed a

freedom apparently denied to married women.5 Marriage marked a major turning point in peo-

ple's lives. Due to the system of equal, partible inheritance, family estates were not maintained

through time, but rather constituted anew each generation with the birth of children who united

the separate inheritances of their parents. As a result, marriage, with its possibility for producing

legitimate heirs, marked the point at which a man and woman passed from dependence on

parental estates to responsibility for the future estate their children would divide. Unmarried

young adults, as people without responsibilities, were expected to divertirse (enjoy them-

selvesyf 0 D L G H Q V Z H U H W K X V H Q F R X U D J H G W R V H H N D P X V H P H Q W D Q G W R I R O O R Z W K H O D W H V W I D V K L R Q V -

as long as they did not violate community norms of modesty. Married people, in contrast, had

obligaciones (obligationsyf $ P D U U L H G Z R P D Q Z D V H [ S H F W H G W R V D F U L I L F H K H U V H O I W R E X L O G W K H H V -

tate her children would inherit. Divertirse and obligaciones stood in stark contrast. For a mar-

ried woman to "enjoy herself" was, by definition, to squander her children's inheritance.

By 1984, Los Olivos was a different world. Heavy outmigration has reduced the permanent

population to under 300 and overturned the class structure. The migration of landless workers

to city jobs left landowners with the choice of farming their own land or migrating too. The

poorest and most overworked people in the village are now the landowners who stayed, while

poor workers who migrated first, and so participated in the industrial boom of the 1 960s, enjoy

month-long vacations in village houses they have renovated with cash from city jobs.6

The decisive break occurred in the mid-1 960s. 1963-64 was, in fact, the end of an era. Dur-

ing the 1960s, ongoing developments in Spain became "so acute that the point [was] reached

where the traditional framework, maintained for about a century, [lost] its fundamental char-

acteristics and [disappeared]" (Perez Diaz 1976:123yf , Q / R V 2 O L Y R V W K H O D E R U L Q W H Q V L Y H D J U L -

cultural system finally collapsed, due to rising wages and competition from capital-intensive

agricultural enterprises elsewhere in Spain. Records beginning at the turn of the century indi-

cate a steady rate of emigration from Los Olivos before 1963-64, but the people who left were

either members of the wealthiest class-who were regionally, rather than locally, based any-

way-or landless laborers, many of whom had, in one way or another, lost their "honor."

Given high rates of unemployment throughout Andalusia, and the general suspicion of

strangers, most people who could make a living in Los Olivos stayed there. In the mid-1 960s,

however, when the agricultural system collapsed, children of landed and honorable families

began migrating to city jobs. The generation of people who came of age in the 1960s, whether

they emigrated or remained in Los Olivos, thus entered a different world.

For members of this generation and their children, inheritance no longer appears to be the

major determinant of occupation, income, and life-style. Rather, people experience their oc-

cupations and incomes as determined by their personal choices and abilities. Schoolteachers,

nurses, postmen, policemen, and banktellers talk about how hard they studied and how well

they did on national or firm exams. Bus and truck drivers talk of learning to drive and acquiring

licenses. And villagers who inherited small enterprises talk of the skills they acquired and the

capital improvements they made. On the other side, people blame the poor and unemployed

for their failure. Everyone recognizes that Spain has a very high rate of unemployment, espe-

cially among young people, but when explaining why a particular youth has been unable to

find a job, people talk of his poor school record or his lack of initiative.

In short, the people of Los Olivos, both its migrants and those who are still in the village, now

live in a world where personal choice and ability is the primary idiom people use to claim,

from Mary to modern woman 103 This content downloaded from

146.111.34.148 on Thu, 22 Jun 2023 22:30:41 +00:00

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

rationalize, and defend inequalities in working conditions, income, and life-style.7 Personal

ability is, of course, not the basis of inequality. The distribution of income and jobs in Spain,

as in most of the developed world, is organized through a market shaped by the fiscal policies

of core state governments, maintained by coercive force. But, just as people living in stratified

agrarian societies talk about legitimate birth, so people facing an array of possible jobs talk

about personal desires and qualifications. And, just as in agrarian societies, a woman's penetra-

bility is her most important feature, so in industrial societies, a woman's most important feature

is the "womanliness" that differentiates her from, and makes her attractive to, men.

In a world where people's inward capacities and preferences appear to determine their oc-

cupations, a woman's biological capacity to bear children seems to determine her apparently

primary occupation of housewife and mother.8 And, in a world where a homemaker's life-style

is largely determined by her husband's income, a woman's status and life-chances appear to

depend on the kind of man she can attract. As a result, a woman's physical appearance is al-

ways open to being interpreted as a statement about her moral and social worth. A woman's

appearance also provides evidence for assessing the judgment and character of the man who

is her husband or lover, although a man's job tends to be the primary standard by which his

worth is assessed. Whatever a woman's appearance, therefore, it is never without significance.

The woman who takes care of her body and dresses attractively, particularly as she grows older,

displays her "womanliness" and testifies to the good judgment of her man. The woman of slov-

enly appearance, on the other hand, suggests both inward and outward failure. Among Los

Olivos natives under 60, for example, a fat, uncared-for body and drab clothes are the sign of

a country hick. They proclaim a family's status as unskilled laborers on the bottom of the social

hierarchy.

Today's parents are concerned-as their own parents were-to provide their children with

the resources children need for succeeding as adults. But today, education, not property, ap-

pears to be the most important determinant of a child's future income and status-at least for

this population of working-, and lower-middle-class families. Many parents thus sacrifice them-

selves to enroll their children in private schools, and/or to provide music lessons, English les-

sons, typing lessons, and so forth. "Sacrifice," however, has a very different meaning to modern

parents. Divertirse and obligaciones are no longer cultural opposites. Because investment in a

child's education, unlike investment in family property, may or may not pay off, parents who

have done all they can for children see no reason not to spend leftover money on themselves.

More importantly, today's adults are expected to spend their money and leisure time in ways

that enhance their enjoyment and enrich their experience. The consumer products people buy,

and the uses they make of leisure time, testify to their sense of taste and knowledge of modern

ways.

In this paper, I have focused on gender conceptions, arguing that notions of masculinity and

femininity must be understood with reference to the idioms people use in negotiating practical

social relations within complex social wholes. I suggested that the married women of Los Oli-

vos in 1963-64 wore drab clothes and ran to fat because they lived within a system of inequal-

ity where legitimate birth was the primary idiom people used to claim, rationalize, and defend

unequal privileges. In such a system, a married woman's drab clothes and sexual unattractive-

ness testified to the legitimacy of her children and to her concern for building their future prop-

erty. As of 1984, in contrast, the people of Los Olivos, both migrants and those still in the vil-

lage, live within a system of inequality where a person's capacities and desires appear to de-

termine the job or spouse he or she acquires. Today, the woman who keeps her figure and

dresses fashionably testifies to her own worth and to her capacity for attracting and keeping a

desirable man, even as the married woman who visits a bar with her husband demonstrates,

not a lack of interest in her children's future, but rather her sophistication. Twenty years ago,

the women of Los Olivos were judged according to how well they emulated the Virgin Mary.

104 american ethnologist This content downloaded from

146.111.34.148 on Thu, 22 Jun 2023 22:30:41 +00:00

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Today they are judged according to how well they emulate the Modern Woman of advertise-

ments and TV.

Although I have used implicit models of "agrarian" and "industrial" societies to analyze the

content of gender conceptions in Los Olivos, I have also argued that the gender conceptions of

particular peoples can be understood only in relation to their specific historical experiences.

The Modern Woman of Spanish advertisements and TV may look a great deal like her North

American counterpart, but the lived experiences of Los Olivos women are not those of their

North American age mates. As Southern Europeans, the modern women of Los Olivos draw on

a different cultural heritage. They seem more concerned with dressing and decorating their

bodies than with their bodies themselves. They also seem-to me, at least-more self-confident

and less dependent on men than American women. Spanish mothers of young children, who

have difficulty finding and keeping jobs, are, like their American counterparts, only one man

away from destitution, but divorces among Los Olivos couples are still infrequent, and the few

women whose husbands left them are not blamed for having failed to keep their men. Even the

enemies of a woman whose husband left her with four small children blame the husband rather

than the wife. Similarly, mothers are pitied, not blamed, when their children turn out badly.

More importantly, the women of Los Olivos have lived, and are living, through a different

history. Today's adults have, in their lifetimes, experienced a radical cultural break. The women

who came of age in the early 1960s grew up, courted, and perhaps married within the value

system of "honor and shame" (see Price and Price 1966ayf 7 K H \ O L Y H G R X W W K H F X O W X U D O U H T X L U H -

ment to enjoy themselves, expecting to assume later the obligaciones of marriage and parent-

hood. But their lives turned out differently. As the labor-intensive agricultural system collapsed,

many migrated to cities as workers and/or wives of migrating men, while those who remained

in the village found that farming shifted from a way of life to a way of making a living (see

Harding 1984yf 7 K H J H Q H U D W L R Q R I S H R S O H Z K R F D P H R I D J H L Q W K H H D U O \ V Z K R J U H Z X p

within a cultural system of "honor and shame," have thus been living their adult lives within a

cultural system that emphasizes personal initiative and abilities.

Not only have today's adults lived through a cultural break, they continue to live it each day.

Given that Los Olivos was never isolated from outside ideas, I expected to find evidence of a

gradual shift from one cultural system to the other. I thought that people who lived through the

1960s would embrace aspects of both systems, or at least understand them both. But I was

mistaken. Instead, individuals seem to live within one system, and to misunderstand the other.

The cultural break appears gradual because members of both generations act in ways they

hope will please the other. Elderly widows, for example, often exchange their mourning cos-

tumes for dark print dresses in order to please their children, even as younger women whose

parents have died will don black dresses to please elderly relatives, particularly when visiting

the village. But even as young and old act to please others they care about, they seem to lack

a deep understanding of why those others care.

When elderly widows explain why younger women have abandoned mourning costume,

they say that young women fear adverse gossip from urban dwellers who look down on those

who wear black. Young women, however, never mention gossip. Instead, they talk of grief as

an inward feeling. They see no reason to display personal grief publicly by wearing black. And

they actively condemn the "hypocrisy" of those who continue to wear mourning long after

grief could be deeply felt. I have often heard younger women explain their reasons to elderly

mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, but I have never heard an older woman who advanced the

"gossip" explanation either suggest she understood the younger woman or spontaneously pro-

duce the "feeling" explanation herself.

Similarly, young women seem to misunderstand their elders. Even those who came of age in

the 1960s, and so grew up within a cultural system of "honor and shame," seem to misunder-

stand that system today. When explaining why elders adhere to traditional mourning customs,

young people say elders have otra mentalidad (another mentalityyf ( O G H U V K R Z H Y H U Q H Y H U P H Q -

from Mary to modern woman 105 This content downloaded from

146.111.34.148 on Thu, 22 Jun 2023 22:30:41 +00:00

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

tion "mentality." They say that people must show "respect" for the dead. Following mourning

customs has nothing to do with an individual's desires, feelings, or intentions. Instead, wearing

mourning testifies to a person's or family's reputation. Given elders' statements, young people

are not wrong when they attribute elders' actions to their mentalidad. Elders do have a different

"mentality." But in interpreting elders' actions as testifying to their inward desires and inten-

tions (their mentalityyf L Q V W H D G R I W R W K H U H S X W D W L R Q V R I W K H L U I D P L O L H V \ R X Q J S H R S O H U H Y H D O K R w

thoroughly they live within the cultural system of personal initiative and abilities, and how

thoroughly they fail to comprehend the cultural system of honor and shame.

notes

Acknowledgments. George Collier's and my 1963-64 research in Los Olivos was supported by a Ful- bright fellowship, and our research 20 years later was supported by grant HD 17351 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, titled "Late Marriage, Family Constellation, Kinship Change." This paper, written while I was a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, is one piece of a larger project to examine changing conceptions of the family in Los Olivos. It has benefitted from the com- ments of George Collier, Louise Lamphere, Roger Rouse, Ann Swidler and Sylvia Yanagisako.

' n this paper I suggest that female chastity is an idiom people use to talk about (and fight overyf V R F L D l inequality in complex agrarian societies with private property where status appears inherited-whether such societies have effective central governments or appear anarchic. Others have, of course, advanced different explanations for the "honor and shame" complex in Mediterranean societies (for example, Schneider 1971; Schneider and Schneider 1976; Pitt-Rivers 1977yf D Q G I R U Y L U J L Q L W \ F R P S O H [ H V H O V H - where (for example, Ortner 1976yf 7 K L V S D S H U L V W R R V K R U W K R Z H Y H U W R F R P S D U H H [ S O D Q D W L R Q V .

2Female chastity is not a single, coherent idiom with a single cause. Rather, it is a complex, multiply- determined symbol. In a world where legitimate heirs are distinguished from illegitimate non-heirs, a moth- er's chastity guarantees her children's right to inherit. Where only virgins are eligible to become mothers of legitimate children, a daughter's virginity may represent her family's hopes of upward mobility and po- litical patronage (see Ortner 1976yf 0 H Q D V P D Q D J H U V R I L Q K H U L W H G H V W D W H V Z K R V H O L I H Z R U N L V W R J X D U G V X F h estates for their children, experience the begetting of bastards on their wives as rendering their lives mean- ingless. In areas of southern Europe where daughters inherit property, the man who seduces a maiden is, in a real sense, "stealing" some of her family's estate. In societies where the presence of a "state" or "civil society" creates "the family" as a symbolic category, women, as representatives of the "family," may come to stand for the family's status. Their inviolability may then represent the inviolability of the family estate, in a world where net downward mobility-caused by the fact that rich people produce more living off- spring than the poor-ensures that most people spend their lives trying to "hang on" to what they have.

And so forth...

3Martinez-Alier, for example, attributes Andalusian laborers' persisting belief in reparto (agrarian re- formyf D Q G K H Q F H W K H L U Y L H Z R I W K H H [ L V W L Q J V \ V W H P R I O D Q G G L V W U L E X W L R Q D V L O O H J L W L P D W H W R W K H L U E H O L H I W K D t they are technically competent to manage the estates on which they work, due to their good understanding of the productive process and the ease with which they become tenants (1971:117yf .

4Maddox (n.d.:Ch. 7yf Z U L W H V W K D W U H J L R Q D O H O L W H V E H I R U H W K H & L Y L O : D U J O R U L I L H G W K H Y L U W X H V R I Z R U N L Q J F O D V s women even as they denigrated the honor and moral capacities of working-class males. Elite authors, in the regional newspaper, represented poor women as guardians of family virtue and piety, whose natural verguenza (sense of shameyf L Q F O L Q H G W K H P W R Z D U G U D L V L Q J S D W L H Q W K X P E O H F K L O G U H Q Z K R Z R X O G X S K R O G W K e existing order instead of seeking to overthrow it out of "selfish" motives.

5Maidens, in fact, had far less freedom and power than married women. In Los Olivos, the woman who lacked obligaciones had no culturally valid reason for refusing to do what others requested. Maidens were thus always at others' beck and call.

6Outmigration did not completely overturn the class structure of Los Olivos. The most privileged families in 1963-64 remain the most privileged today, because elites took advantage of their wealth and personal connections to educate their children for professional positions before the labor-intensive agricultural sys- tem collapsed. Landowners just below this elite stratum, however, who stayed in the community, are now among its poorest and most overworked members.

7The idiom of personal choice and ability is, of course, as complex and multiply-determined as the idiom of inheritance. Individualism, voluntarism, rationalism, and so forth are intersecting discourses whose usages and consequences vary widely according to historical circumstances. Female chastity also figures in voluntarist idioms, but with a different significance than in the idiom of inheritance. Within the idiom of personal choice and ability, a woman's chastity testifies to her inner capacities and desires, not to her family's reputation. So, chaste women may appear "naturally" asexual, within a set of gender conceptions that casts men as active/rational and women as passive/emotional, or as rationally withholding their sex- uality in order to trap a man into marriage.

8The casting of housework and childcare as an "occupation" is, of course, also a result of an industrial

106 american ethnologist This content downloaded from

146.111.34.148 on Thu, 22 Jun 2023 22:30:41 +00:00

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

system of inequality. Caring for her casa (houseyf Z D V D Q G U H P D L Q V D P D M R U S U H R F F X S D W L R Q R I / R V 2 O L Y R s women, but the meaning of casa has changed drastically. In 1963-64 the woman who cared for her casa was co-manager of the estate her children would inherit. If her husband abandoned her, she kept the estate. Today, the woman who cares for her casa is an unpaid homemaker, as economically dependent as her children on the wage her husband brings home.

references cited

Aceves, Joseph B., and William A. Douglass, eds. 1976 The Changing Faces of Rural Spain. New York: Wiley. Collier, George A. 1983 Late Marriage and the Uncontested Reign of Property. Paper read at the 1983 meetings of the American Anthropological Association. n.d. Socialists of Rural Andalusia, 1930-1950: The Unacknowledged Revolutionaries. Unpublished ms. Collier, Jane F., and Michelle Z. Rosaldo 1981 Politics and Gender in Simple Societies. In Sexual Meanings. S. Ortner and H. Whitehead, eds. pp. 275-329. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harding, Susan F. 1984 Remaking Ibieca: Rural Life in Aragon Under Franco. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Herzfeld, Michael 1980 Honour and Shame: Problems in the Analysis of Moral Systems. Man (NSyf . Maddox, Richard n.d. Religion, Honor, Patronage: A Study of Culture and Power in an Andalusian Town. Doctoral dis- sertation in preparation, Stanford University. Martinez-Alier, Juan 1971 Labourers and Landowners in Southern Spain. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. Ortner, Sherry 1976 The Virgin and the State. Michigan Discussions in Anthropology 2:1-16; reprinted 1978 in Fem-

inist Studies 4:19-37.

Perez Diaz, Victor M. 1976 Process of Change in Rural Castilian Communities. In The Changing Faces of Rural Spain. Joseph Aceves and William Douglass, eds. pp. 123-141. New York: Wiley. Peristiany, J. G., ed. 1966 Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Pitt-Rivers, Julian 1954 The People of the Sierra. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1977 The Fate of Schechem or the Politics of Sex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Price, Richard, and Sally Price 1966a Noviazgo in an Andalusian Pueblo. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 22(3yf . 1966b Stratification and Courtship in an Andalusian Village. Man (NSyf \f:526-533. Schneider, Jane 1971 Of Vigilance and Virgins. Ethnology 10:1-24. Schneider, Jane, and Peter Schneider 1976 Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily. New York: Academic Press.

Submitted 3 September 1985 Accepted 23 September 1985

from Mary to modern woman 107 This content downloaded from

146.111.34.148 on Thu, 22 Jun 2023 22:30:41 +00:00

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms