Women’s voices in eighteenth-century Spanish American newspapers

Eighteenth-century newspapers in colonial Spanish America represented vital cultural artifacts that informed local and international readers about current events, scientific debates, financial matters pertaining to commerce, natural history, matters of religion and cultural practices, and many other issues related to the main ideas and tenets of the Enlightenment, including the ideas of progress, education, utility, and the well-being or pursuit of happiness of citizens. Newspapers functioned as a type of ‘archive’ in which ‘the emergence of forms of knowledge’ aimed ‘to achieve a level of authority in the intellectual sphere’. To inform and to educate the country constituted two of the main objects of many of these newspapers.1 Although their contributors were mainly male Creole, Spanish, and some mestizo intellectuals, we find for example, in newspapers such as the Mercurio peruano (1790-95), Papel periódico de Santa Fe de Bogotá (1791-1797), and Primicias de la cultura de Quito (1791-1792) that some women also participated as subscribers, readers, and contributors. In this essay, I explore how eighteenth-century women perceived the newspaper

as an instrumental tool to educate the local population about women’s role in society. One aspect to be examined is the manner in which these women engaged in some of the main debates taking place at the time with regard to women’s condition, including their biological nature, their presence in public and domestic spaces, and their supposed lack of intellectual faculties. At a time when European Enlightenment thinkers such as Benito Jerónimo Feijóo (1676-1764), Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1689-1755), François-Marie Arouet better known as Voltaire (1694-1778), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), and Denis Diderot (1713-1784) among others,2 were debating the subordinate role of women and their duties as wives and mothers, we find that men and women intellectuals in colonial Spanish America were also engaging in such debates. In the following pages, I discuss how local women in Lima and Quito responded critically to such discussions by proposing their own views about the role of women as active participants in society and simultaneously claiming that the time had come to critically engage in a debate about men’s own social and intellectual limitations. For the purpose of this discussion, I will focus on the newspapers Mercurio peruano and Primicias de la cultura de Quito.3