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9780271019024 Academic Inspection Copy

From Subjects to Citizens

Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780-1854
  • ISBN-13: 9780271019024
  • Publisher: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Imprint: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
  • By Sarah C. Chambers
  • Price: AUD $77.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 14/07/2011
  • Format: Paperback 296 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: History of the Americas [HBJK]
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Offering a corrective to previous views of Spanish-American independence, this book shows how political culture in Peru was dramatically transformed in this period of transition and how the popular classes as well as elites played crucial roles in this process.

Honor, underpinning the legitimacy of Spanish rule and a social hierarchy based on race and class during the colonial era, came to be an important source of resistance by ordinary citizens to repressive action by republican authorities fearful of disorder. Claiming the protection of their civil liberties as guaranteed by the constitution, these "honorable" citizens cited their hard work and respectable conduct in justification of their rights, in this way contributing to the shaping of republican discourse. Prominent politicians from Arequipa, familiar with these arguments made in courtrooms where they served as jurists, promoted at the national level a form of liberalism that emphasized not only discipline but also individual liberties and praise for the honest working man.

But the protection of men's public reputations and their patriarchal authority, the author argues, came at the expense of women, who suffered further oppression from increasing public scrutiny of their sexual behavior through the definition of female virtue as private morality, which also justified their exclusion from politics. The advent of political liberalism was thus not associated with greater freedom, social or political, for women.



“Sarah Chambers’s From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854 smartly challenges the notion that ideas of citizenship originate with the propertied classes and trickle down to the ranks of the poor.”

—Heidi Tinsman, Feminist Studies

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