Aztec Women

We understand much about Aztec history and life in the Valley of Mexico from the surviving native histories, largely oral narratives written down in the Spanish colonial period, but also illustrated annals and cartographic histories with considerable native input. These written sources, however, are exclusively male in authorship, and usually focus on the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). Archaeological excavations in Mexico City have also revealed the remains of the Aztec Great Temple, with many sculptural representations of gendered gods. Elizabeth Brumfiel has studied the Aztec interpretation of gender roles, but instead of through such documents and core architecture, Brumfiel has studied rural households in the colonized hinterland, through archaeological excavation.

Throughout Central Mexico prior to Spanish contact weaving, spinning, and textile production were seen as gendered female tasks. This was reinforced through girls being given spindles by the age of four to begin learning to spin. Cloth was used throughout Central Mexico for basic protection against the elements, and as an indicator of status, gender, class, and ethnicity. Within the Aztec imperial system, cloth was demanded as tribute by administrators of subordinate groups. Brumfiel has examined the presence of small spindle whorls, used to spin cotton, in rural households, as an indicator of female production of cotton cloth. She demonstrates that in areas near the major cities the production of cotton cloth did not increase under Aztec control, presumably because food production for sale in urban markets allowed households to acquire the cloth they needed to give in tribute. In more peripheral areas, however, spindle whorls do increase in number in the archaeological record, demonstrating the increase in cotton tribute cloth by women in these households. The spindle whorls, however, are less decorated than they were in previous eras, perhaps thus showing us a decreasing pride, or identification, of women with the activity of spinning. This is combined with a related change in household ceramics. Households near urban areas began to rely more heavily on griddles to make dry, portable foods, probably to till distant fields and participate in urban markets. In more peripheral areas, however, an emphasis on jars to produce stews remained constant, even after Aztec conquest, suggesting a continuing reliance on eating meals at home.

The changes that Brumfiel notes in households colonized by the Aztec can be placed in the terms of Bourdieu’s practice theory. The doxa of gender roles in the region remained unquestioned, in assigning the task of spinning to women. Yet Aztec colonization did appear to change the habitus of these women, with tribute production of cloth somehow devaluing the previous focus on production for local consumption, and thus perhaps the daily practice of rural non-elite women, whose former pride in household cloth production was compromised by the demands of a state eager to extract tribute from this preexisting domestic labor arrangement.