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Herodotus was the first to write of the AMazons , placing them in Pontus near the shore of the Euxine Sea, and describing their raids against scythes, Thrace, and the coasts of Asia Minor. No men were permitted to dwell in their country, though once a year the warrior women visited a neighboring nation for purposes of procreation, slaying all male children or returning them to their fathers, and recruiting the baby girls. Their name allegedly came from the Greek a-mazos (without breast), from their custom of amputating the right breast to make the drawing of the bow more convenient, but a variety of other derivations have been put forward. The explorer Francisco de Orellana, at Amazonas Forest, 1541, said that women at Maranhão River threw arrows against his expedition. This myth dissipated that because of these actions the women received the name of the Greek warriors. 1 Who were those "single-breasted" maidens, and what was their role in society? And how did their sexuality defy gender relations? Embarking on Isabel de Montoya's individual life history, and thereafter parting onto the vast landscape of singleness in early and mid-colonial Mexico, the goal of this book is to provide a fresh approach to lingering views on single, plebeian women in Latin American historiography in general, and in Mexico in particular. This book is dedicated entirely to single women of the lower echelons of society, whether they were Spanish, creoles, mulatas, or blacks. Indigenous single women during the period discussed amounted to as high as 39% of all mothers in rural areas such as San Martin Huequechula (state of Puebla); however, they are usually During the sixteenth century, according to Spanish law, men were relegated to the heads of families and filled most of the roles within the family and outside it: the

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This article reconsiders the model of the “alternative household” of single, unattached caste women in mid-seventeenth-century New Spain. It also explores the particular “strategies of survival” adopted by single women to challenge, to undermine, and to overcome local conditions, barriers, and norms of suppression, as well as to regenerate and reformulate change, and to effect revenge, from their alternative, familial frameworks. Benevolent and malevolent gifts shared among these women and passed on to men, as this article shows, were part of the package of such ritualized strategies and were closely tied with the rule of concubinage. A close study of the women's own testimony in these diverse tales brings forward also the need to review the inner working of the social mechanisms behind the uses of “love magic” in the New World, as well as in Europe.

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