Liberalism in the Bedroom: Quarreling Spouses in Nineteenth-Century Lima. CHRISTINE HUNEFELT: University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.

Abstract

What can a fight between husband and wife tell us about the past? Christine Hunefelt uses over one thousand conjugal battles from the ecclesiastical archives of Lima to paint a portrait of nineteenth-century Peru. She completes the documentary representation with the continuation of these conflicts in civil, criminal and notarial sources in order to record decades of marital strife. Her painstaking research provides her with the foundation for a very comprehensive portrait of domestic life in nineteenth-century Peru that shows the gradual alterations that occurred in families with the changes of independence and republicanism. Many historians have, quite rightly, emphasized the continuities of family law and everyday realities in the early national period. Hunefelt does not contradict these findings per se, but she shows the subtle ways that life was changing for men and women with her deft analysis.