Widows’ Rights Questioned: Indians, the State, and Fluctuating Gender Ideas in Central Highland Ecuador, 1870-1900

This essay uses court disputes over indigenous widows’ land rights to examine the impact of an expanding national state on indigenous peasant interpersonal relations in late nineteenth-century Ecuador. In doing so, it offers a response to historian Carmen Ramos Escandón's recent call for historical studies of changing family life in order “to know how this domestic web is related to social processes in a broader sense and how the organization of the family contradicts or reflects society's structures.” Specifically, the confrontations under scrutiny reveal the extent to which indigenous peasants’ notions of marriage and widowhood rights adhered to, diverged from, or were influenced by state views of gender relations. Most court cases from the central highland province of Chimborazo in this period uncover parallels between indigenous and state views of marriage and widowhood; yet the three focal cases here, in which widows’ privileges came under question, highlight differences between indigenous and state understandings of gender relations. In the first case, an Indian woman's father-in-law recognized her right as a widow to inherit a portion of her former mother-in-law's lands; court officials, however, decided to uphold patriarchal legal standards when they granted the land in question to the woman's second husband rather than to her. In two other cases, widows’ claims were undermined not by state authorities themselves, but by Indian men in their own communities. Calling upon patriarchal notions that were at the center of the state's marriage laws, these men wrested control of property from women whose customary claims to it were stronger than theirs. Though cases like these rarely appeared in the court data from Chimborazo, they are illuminating because they promote an exploration of the relevance of ethnically distinct gender ideologies.