De hembra a mujer: identidades de género en la Edad Moderna. La construcción de la feminidad en el siglo XVII y sus proyecciones

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This research aims to examine, based on the consulted sources, the feminine archetype in the seventeenth-century Castile from the vision of man and his influence on real life to understand how femenine identity was constructed and to what extent. The sources that have been used for this purpose allow us to get a closer look to the social variability and to femenine diversity, facilitating the reconstruction of values and behaviors that women had to grow, while they reprimend about deviations in practice, which give us glimpses of reality that, together with the bibliography, allow us to constrast the feminine ideal model and the reality of their acceptance and implementation. The hypothesis that we set is that seventeenth-century women found their strategies and mechanisms to escape from the model advocated by moralists and theologians. After analyzing the information, this research permits us to prove that there was an ideal model of womanhood that remained virtually unchanged until the eighteenth century: women as a weak, inferior and no decision-making capacity being, forcing men to guide them. The quiet and timid girl, the demure and passive maiden, the submissive and faithful maid, the obedient and hardworking wife, the pure and withdrawn single and widow were the perfect prototypes. In sum, women had to be obedient, hard-working, honest and merciful, whose ultimate goal was their reproductive function and economic complement to male society. However, reality was much more complex: the model was renegotiated and moral were called into question with individual, material and temporal needs. From female to woman, from the theoretical to the real.