ABSTRACT
According to Spanish and Portuguese law, women held clearly defined rights to family property as heirs and as wives. Latin American scholars have successfully restored women to history by illustrating the many roles of women in Latin American societies. This chapter reconstructs the lives of women in colonial Brazil. Its goal is to see if women exercised their rights to property in their families, if they held power within their families, and if and how their decisions affected the communities in which they lived. The chapter focuses on the “women of means” or the women of the propertied class of the colonial town of Santana de Parnaiba. These women came from families that owned land and slaves, dominated the local community institutions, and bequeathed their property through careful inheritance strategies to their heirs. These women had legal rights to the family property.
