During and after independence, political rights continued to be denied to over half the population of Latin America on the basis of sexual difference, a predominant criterion for exclusion after the abolition of slavery and the ending of legal discrimination against indigenous and mixed-race groups. Gender polarity and power asymmetry persisted. Nevertheless, gender parameters shifted notably in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the dominant culture of the late colonial period, the feminine was perceived as a powerful threat to the rational order and authority of the paterfamilias and the colonial state; conversely, threats to the established order (inflation, poor administration, obstacles to progress) were often represented as feminine or effeminate. Derision of the effeminate man (dandy or petimetre) was symptomatic of this disquiet; the danger was that masculinity might be feminised (feminine attributes applied to those sexually differentiated as men) and dominant masculinity displaced. Similarly, ridicule of the virago or manly woman indicated fear of feminine encroachment and gender fluidity. As society became increasingly militarised during the 1810s and 1820s, dominant masculinity, more firmly associated with virility, courage and physical strength, recovered ground to the extent that it threatened to engulf the feminine; the manly woman was no longer ridiculed to the same extent, but rather encouraged for the collective good. Virility was not assumed to be a natural, feminine attribute, but a higher value that women might buy into in anomalous circumstances. The term ‘viril’ (from Latin vir or ‘man’) naturalised the identification of strength and courage with hegemonic masculinity; exceptional women might aspire to these heights. This positive representation of the feisty, combative woman signalled a major shift in gender doxa and was reinforced by analogies with the Spanish American tradition of the warrior women, the Amazons, which were usefully mobilised for the patriot cause. Masculinisation of the feminine persisted in literary discourse at least until the 1850s, as is evidenced in Echeverría's ‘La Cautiva’ (1837) and Manso's soldier-heroine, Antonia Maza (1852).