The political status of South American men and women changed radically in the course of the nineteenth century. From subjects of Iberian absolutism without political rights, they became potential citizens of independent republics founded on the principle of liberty. The transition was spasmodic and the outcome assured only in retrospect. For the people living through these turbulent times the political future was uncertain, its resolution largely contingent on where they lived. If, in the 1810s, they lived in areas which acknowledged the legitimacy of the 1812 Spanish liberal constitution, they were governed by a constitutional monarch in absentia; in liberated areas controlled by the Spanish American patriots they might be citizens of centralised or federal republics, city states aspiring to autonomy, or provinces incorporated into larger confederations. If they lived in Brazil in 1822, they formed part of an independent monarchy that was not replaced by a republic until 1889 (see below). The name of their homeland might suddenly alter: the Nuevo Reino de Granada on the morning of August 8 1819 was the Republic of Colombia by the evening (Vergara y Vergara 1958: 11). The protagonist of Juana Manso's novel Los misterios del Plata (written 1846–50) flees Buenos Aires city for a newly independent country, Corrientes, which was later to be incorporated as a province into the Argentine republic.

Irrespective of national boundaries, the shift from absolutism to republicanism signified one crucial fact: that while absolutism denied political rights to virtually all men and women, the new republican constitutions (and there were many) denied political rights systematically to women only. This included Brazil, where slavery was abolished in 1888, which, in turn, led to the formation of a federal republic.