from Mary to modern woman: the material basis of Marianismo and its transformation in a Spanish village

1986/02/01 by JANE F. COLLIER, Jane F. Collier
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Spanish Literature and Culture Studies #Historical Gender and Feminism Studies

paper · doi:10.1525/ae.1986.13.1.02a00060

Abstract

In one generation, married women in an Andalusian village appeared to have turned from emulating the Virgin Mary to emulating the modern woman of Spanish advertisements and TV. Drawing on the notion that gender conceptions are aspects of cultural systems through which people negotiate relations of inequality within complex social wholes, I suggest that a concern for female chastity gave way to a concern for personal capacities and preferences when inequalities in income and life-style among villagers no longer appeared to rest on inheritance, but on the urban, salaried jobs people obtained. [Mediterranean society, gender, political economy, honor code, ideology]

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