Mujeres con imprenta propia: estudio y catálogo de los primeros talleres tipográficos de Nueva España (1539-1634)

The history of women related to the first printing businesses in New Spain as a specific area of interest within the framework of studies on the history of books and printing in Mexico is a recent creation. The intention to focus on women's contribution to the historical and cultural process of printing in various parts of America arisen with the growth and consolidation of the current known as Women's History and the change in the historiographical treatment that the female social sector had traditionally received. Compared to the traditional historical methodology in the field of Mexican printing, this approach shifted the purely androcentric focus of interest to the historical experience of women in different areas, including the printing business, shedding light on the historical structures and social processes that define the exercise of all women who gave continuity to the printing offices and disarming the usual ideological presuppositions. This doctoral thesis is part of this area of knowledge because of two reasons: on the one hand, it tries to record the specific condition of the first women who traveled to America and settled in New Spain together with their relatives to carry out different activities related to the primitive printing offices. On the other hand, it aims to determine the mechanisms of patriarchal power that conditioned their experience and the stereotyped opinion that defends their scarce historical and cultural incidence in the development of the printing industry. In doing so, it seeks to overcome the contributory treatments, which have reduced their contribution to an auxiliary and passing labor, linking their life and professional career to the set of social, political and cultural transformations that conditioned their framework for action in the colonial context of the first Mexican century.Specifically, the subject of study of this research will be the first women who emigrated mainly from Spain to America and who were related to the field of printing during the 16th and early 17th centuries. The analysis of the significance of their activities and their reach will be limited to the territorial entity of New Spain, since it was the first place in the American continent to have its own printing office. While the delimitation of the time frame of this research will be limited to the specific time interval that elapsed between 1539, when the first printing press was established in Mexico, and 1634, the year in which the bibliographic tradition agrees in dating the disappearance of the first printing offices active in the territory.Understanding the social functioning of these women and their work situation in the printing presses requires an analysis that shows their productive activity, outside the traditional interpretative schemes that have judged their importance in comparison with the printers', whose reality was inevitably different from their female counterparts'. To accomplish this, this study provides an alternative conceptual and methodological background that makes it possible to review and update the sources and documentation available in international archives and collections on the history of these women. At the same time, it reveals the usefulness of prioritizing, within this process of historical revisionism, the analysis of the specific systems of control that defined the complexity of their historical experience as women, but also as workers and reproducers of the labor force of manual printing presses. Consequently, the analysis carried out in this doctoral thesis includes, therefore, a whole series of phenomena that have been little studied in the area of printing studies, such as the sexual division of labor in the printing offices; the reproductive function of women in these family businesses and, finally, their transcendental role as wives and mothers of the future labor force of the printing presses, which would guarantee their development and continuity.For all these reasons, and to conclude, this research aims to complete the traditional approach to the history of women printers, but also to propose a new direction in the research on women and printing that, without separating it from the specific systems that conditioned their reality, becomes an instrument for bibliographical research and historical review with a gender perspective.