The dramatic changes wrought by the escalation of plantation slavery in the wake of the Haitian Revolution would alter the role and place of women in Cuban society as traditional elites employed patriarchy to assure the maintenance of order. Yet, patriarchal standards require foundation. Society's prescriptions for women were closely tied to marianismo, or the idea that women are morally and spiritually superior to men, and the veneration of women, religion, and motherhood played an important role in those prescriptions. Women were, in short, subordinate to fathers and husbands, and to God, a notion widely held in Hispanic America. Nonetheless, social mores for women in the Spanish American colonies were not uniform. In Cuba, where the plantation society would reach heights unparalleled elsewhere in Spanish America, the nature of women's subordination would have a distinctly local context.

A Religious Foundation

In a slave society such as Cuba where the subordination of one group to another is required, Catholicism is a useful tool for imposing and maintaining hierarchy and social order. Catholicism places one woman, Mary, quite near to God, and she occupies an important role in the Catholic faith, and did so in Cuba in the nineteenth century.