Governadoras : Women administrators, gender, and colonization in Sixteenth-Century Portuguese America

In sixteenth-century Brazil, several European women governed the captaincies of their late or absent husbands during the first century of Portuguese colonization. A contextual and lexical analysis of the male-authored sources reveals that these women acted decisively to protect and expand familial patrimonies and, in doing so, were part of the colonizing movement. Although extensive written evidence survives that attests to their authority and agency over colonial affairs, their importance has been overlooked in the scholarship. Therefore, this essay argues that a small group of elite European women became imperial agents who wielded power against colonial subjects in select circumstances.

© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Renaissance Society of America. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that no alterations are made and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use and/or adaptation of the article.