In amongst the tales of battles, political intrigues, and the exploits of young men, one finds little mention of women, their deeds, or their views. Flora Tristan, when revisiting her birthplace of Lima in the 1830s, provided a fascinating portrait of the women of Lima She proclaimed that nowhere else on earth were women more free or more influential. In Lima they were the "instigators of everything". Nearly all were married at 11 or 12 years of age. They repeatedly enchanted foreign visitors with their opaque white skin, bright red lips, curly black hair, and dark eyes. They exuded an indefinable expression of spirited pride and languor. (Tristan, 1993).
Flora Tristan described the women of Lima as uneducated and illiterate, but charming and with natural wit and intelligence. They wore a distinctive style of dress, called the saya y manto, a long pleated and closely-fitted dark-colored skirt of satin, lined with silk or cotton. They pulled a mantle of black satin over the shoulder to hide one eye. The saya y manto allowed the women to go everywhere, to bull fights, the theater, balls, churches, promenades, and public meeting without restriction and without being known.
Tristan contends that the women of Lima required proof of devotion in the form of gold or gifts. The affairs of the household held little interest for them, but they involved themselves in politics and intrigue, with positioning their husbands and their families in lines of authority within the cultural hierarchy.
By 1867, Madeleine Dahlgren, wife of a U.S. Navy Admiral stationed in Callao, reported that this style of dress had all but disappeared, to be replaced more often by a mantilla, or spanish veil. The women still might go to the opera unescorted, except for a servant, wrapped in a manta. Satin shoes with silk stockings completed their attire.
Mrs. Dahlgren, newly arrived in Lima in the years leading up to the war, also formed an opinion of the state of affairs. In her South Sea Sketches A Narrative By Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, she observed:
"A republic must be based upon the intelligence of the people at large and cannot flourish or indeed have an existence laid upon a foundation of ignorance and we have, in effect in Peru, only a republic by name, but in reality an oligarchical organization with some republican forms. The army rules. Although it is not very large it is in good discipline and forms in the hands of a popular executive as an instrument of administrative power a force which God forbid the military element may ever attain in the United States."
She later says:
"The South Americans are generally able as diplomatists. We do not understand this particular bent of the genius of this people in the United States and we are apt to send them mere politicians of a very mediocre calibre, obtuse men who have little or no comprehension of those metaphysical niceties in which they delight. It is fortunate that our affairs are usually so little complicated with these nations that mere red tape suffices. Were it otherwise we would soon find out that the minds of these men have a legal acumen and astuteness, a love of finesse, a pliancy of mental fence which requires careful handling. In all negotiations wherein nice points of international law must decide they will be found skilled exponents. Let us then be represented near these countries by men of keen perceptions whose minds have a fineness of edge that may cope with and turn aside the swift flash of the Saracenic blade. Let us reserve the battle axe of Saxon force which our race knows so well how to wield with an aim which demolishes for the nations of the north. Here the heavy and measured blow falls harmless for it is eluded ere it falls."
Resources:
Tristan, Flora, Doris Beik, and Paul Harold Beik. 1993. Flora Tristan, utopian feminist: her travel diaries and personal crusade. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 195 pp.
Dahlgren, Madeleine Vinton. 1881. South Sea sketches: a narrative. Boston: James R. Osgood. 238 pp.
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