Gender, Property, and Retirement Strategies in Early Modern Northwestern Spain

Abstract

Demographic studies indicate that elderly women were a prominent part of early modern rural society. Particularly in northwestern Spain, where partible inheritance left women in control of significant property, older women played a critical role in determining not only their own elder care but intergenerational relationships and family economies as well. An examination of retirement contracts from the region of Galicia in northwestern Spain indicates that peasant women used their familial authority and wealth to ensure that they and their families would be properly cared for as they aged.The study of older peasant women embodies most of the difficulties involved in studying marginalized peoples. As members of the rural population, they had scarce opportunities for interactions with the institutions that generated documentation. Most could not write, and few from the literate classes took notice of them. As a result, the daily lives of European peasants often were reduced to an aggregation of literary tropes, travelers' descriptions, and nineteenth-century romantic portraits. Without diaries and correspondence to communicate their emotions and rationales, historians tend to lose touch with the agency and energy with which peasants ran their lives. This is particularly true of peasant women as they aged. They tend to disappear from historical view once their childbearing years ended, not to reappear until the death of a spouse or their own demise. Thus, just as women emerged from the confines of motherhood, their inability to recount their own histories often left them just beyond the grasp of the historian and with little evidence of the experience of growing older in peasant society. 1 As a result, historians have relied on two diametrically opposed interpretations of aging in early modern Europe. In most analyses, the early modern elderly suffered in dismal poverty, having been abandoned by their families or, worse, having survived them all. 2 On the opposite end of the spectrum, others have portrayed the elderly as diligently cared for until their deaths in the communal and familial spirit that seemingly dominated family relationships in the past. 3 While such interpretations no doubt represented the experiences of many early modern elderly, both are passive scenarios that 313 Allyson M.

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