Colonial women were not only wives, concubines, spinsters, mothers, and nuns; they were also participants in the local colonial economy. Unfortunately, the place of women in the economy – as investors, consumers, and above all as a workforce – has tended to be ignored by historians. We are just beginning to understand the role played by women. This chapter will look at female participation in various sectors of the colonial economy, paying special attention to the importance of social class, ethnicity, and physical location in women’s economic pursuits.

Because of their number in colonial Latin America, an active economic role for women is not surprising. By the eighteenth century and possibly before, women were in the majority in virtually all the cities of colonial Latin America. For example, by 1778 in Córdoba, Argentina, 54.8 percent of the population was female; in late eighteenth-century São Paulo (1798), women accounted for 53.3 percent of the total; Quito also became increasingly female and by 1797 had only 53 men per 100 women.

The ratio of women to men differed by place and social or racial category, but from the seventeenth century on, women were in the majority in virtually every urban nonwhite group. In São Paulo, for example, women predominated in the free population (83.52 men for every 100 women), whereas in the slave population the sex ratio was almost equal (99.04 men for every 100 women). Among the casta population of Córdoba, there were only 71.3 men for every 100 women.