Using mortgage contracts and probate records recorded by notaries, this article analyzes the participation of women in the local mortgage market, taking into account the legal context in which it developed, and explains how legal tradition and civil codes contributed to the distortions that affected women in the local credit market. This article shows specifically that the analysis of women's participation in economic markets in the nineteenth century must take their marital status into account, as well as the unequal legal position of husbands and wives under the laws of the time, and concludes that marital property rights, and by extension marriage, played an important and unexpected role in the region's credit market.

After describing the project of domestic education carried out by the Catholic Church in Petrópolis, I focus on various attempts to use the force of law to interpret, regulate, and order work performed in private homes, aiming to reveal how domesticity became a site of power that was subject to the interference and control of various voices and institutions of the nascent republican state.

Nonetheless, numerous facets of the essay run counter to the findings of many historians who have laboriously reconstructed the Bourbon tax system in Spanish America. A reading of the historical literature produced over the last two decades suggests that while political negotiations between the Spanish monarchy and privileged corporations and urban governments were of great importance, it would be a mistake to discount the importance of coercion and censorship as essential and frequently used instruments of the crown and the powerful to maintain the status quo. These were common instruments in the metropolis but were not infrequently applied with singular severity in the colonies. In the case of Spanish America in the second half of the eighteenth century, the nature of coercion and the brutal response to popular protests (particularly tax revolts) have been analyzed by numerous historians but are downplayed in the essay under discussion. Similarly, it is important to note that most recent historical studies demonstrate that the fiscal reforms carried out by the Bourbon regime throughout Spanish America were much more homogeneous and successful in extracting a rapidly rising level of tax resources from the colonial population than the authors would appear to suggest.