Liberalism in the Bedroom: Quarreling Spouses in Nineteenth-Century Lima (review)
This important book delivers much more than the title implies. Whereas most research on "quarreling spouses" is drawn primarily from cases of ecclesiastical divorce, Hiinefeldt has mined over one thousand conjugal suits that include petitions for dispensations of impediments to marriage, cases of dissension, and annulments in addition to divorces, and has followed the disputes over alimony and marital property in the civil courts. Furthermore, she has supplemented these sources with examinations of requests for marriage licenses and wills, which lend themselves to quantitative analysis. For example, she uses wills to trace rates of fertility, illegitimacy, and re-marriage over the course of the century. Her thorough and meticulous archival research has resulted in a wealth of information about couples and families in the Archbishopric of Lima throughout the nineteenth century, a period in which Peru passed through the wars of independence, a mid-century export boom based on guano fertilizer, and the War of the Pacific.