“Expressions of the Fury of the Women”: How Andean Women Were Direct Participants in the Great Rebellion

This article confronts a longstanding issue in the historiography of colonial Latin America, examining the role that subaltern actors—specifically, Indigenous, non-elite women—played in revolutions. This essay demonstrates that women directly participated in both combative and non-combative roles in both the Catari and Tuparista factions of the Andean’s Great Rebellion, as well as in the Comunero Revolution. In particular, the article discusses how these women resolutely fought in and commanded armies, provided the insurgent army with funding, and took on administrative tasks. Specifically, women revolutionaries such as Micaela Bastidas, Tomasa Titu Condemayta, Bartolina Sisa, Gregoria Apaza, and Marcela Castro led the revolution forward for both men and women soldiers through their military command. Furthermore, the harsh sentences and lengthy trials that the women revolutionaries were subject to were evidence that their revolutionary efforts were taken seriously by the Spanish Court. The article closes by presenting scholar Ella Schmidt’s interpretation of how Micaela Bastidas’s testimony in her criminal trial may have been Bastidas’s effort to confront her agency and resist the gender norms placed upon her by the Spanish Crown.