by Megan Pierce

Created on: June 01, 2010

Colonial Peru underwent major changes during the conquests of the Europeans in the 16th century, and its complex class system was faced with the differing Spanish ideals of gender and social position. Irene Silverblatt’s historical work on women in the Incan society, “Moon, Sun, and Witches” focuses in depth not only the changes that the Europeans brought to this Peruvian civilization, but also the ways of their culture before any exterior influence. “This book examines the complexities of interplay between political hierarchy and gender,” writes Silverblatt, “as first the Incas and then the Spanish consolidated their rule.”

[1] These systems of hierarchy richly diversified the Incan people, but had the most effect on the women who were mostly subjected to the strains of gender roles and priveledges.

            The existence of the Incan peoples before Spanish influence was “a cultural mosaic” that greatly varied in intricacy but was most effective in a large living community.[2] Kinship began to define the identities of the Peruvian individual; Classes began to emerge and trades, languages, and ancestors also took root as the basis for Incan society. However, these “Andean peoples, whether of the Inca nobility or of the vanquished peasantry, perceived their social world as divided along gender lines.”[3] The division of labor certainly solidified this ideal. Women were mostly contributed to the weaving, spinning, cooking, sowing, and child care, while the men were responsible for the valued work of farming, building, and soldiering. Even though there was not a strict line between what could be done by both male and female, particular tasks were commonly associated by gender and the men and women were inter-dependent on the duties of one another. Without this complementary standard, Andean society would not have survived to see European arrivals.

            The religious organizations of Colonial Peru were greatly influenced by gender, and  Incan “women and men conceptualized the functioning of the universe and society in terms of complex relations between sacred beings, grouped into sexually distinct domains, and between sacred beings and humankind.”[4] Segregation even existed in the celestial universe of the Incan dieties categorized into two separate gender worlds.

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