Why do women write? Chile's colonial period writings by females

Abstract

This paper intends to show writing samples of females, which are hardly documented in Chile. Although some socio-historical studies have been carried out, historical linguistics has not referred to women, except for some studies done on Sister Úrsula Suárez. This paper makes a review on context production. In addition, thirteen judicial documents as well as personal correspondence written by twelve females between 1569 and 1756 will be analyzed. Jury texts will be studied from its rhetorical approach characteristic for this type of documents, while personal correspondence will be analyzed and contrasted in accordance with Antonio de Torquemada's work, Manual de Escribientes.