As will have become apparent, despite efforts to restrict their education many Spanish American women were literate during the colonial period and were writing letters in the public and private spheres. The quality of education of women varied throughout Spanish America: in Peru, for example, the education of selected elite girls in convent schools had been formalised by the end of the sixteenth century (Martín 1983: 75); whereas Mexican laws in 1810 stated that women could be taught to read, but not to write. This was said to prevent women from composing love letters (Arrom 1985: 296). But such legal anomalies did not deter women. The social and political turbulence during the Wars of Independence, however, gave women reason to embark on a frenzy of letter-writing as families were separated and women were actively and passively drawn into the civil wars by accident or their own design. As mentioned in Chapter 6, letters from women offering to fight for the independence cause were printed in the national press, but the political situation meant that the majority of letters written by women at that time were distributed in the private sphere. This chapter gives an overview of the development of women's education in the late colonial period. It discusses the growth of women's literacy through the tertulias they hosted in their homes and how the public sphere increasingly encroached on these meetings as political events dominated social gatherings. It then looks at letters written and sent to Santiago de Chile, especially those of the Carrera family, and how women voiced their personal and political aspirations through this medium.

Women, education and the late colonial press

During the colonial period, liberal ideas had spread to Latin America from Europe and North America. Scientific discoveries and experiments in physiology led to new debates about the capabilities of men and women and the intellectual differences between them. In Spain, as mentioned previously, Feijóo challenged so-called female inferiority. In his ‘Defensa de las mujeres’ (1726) he referred to the current debate about whether women's brains were softer than those of men. While acknowledging this might well be the case, he decided that this did not imply that women were inferior.