Love, Marriage and Abduction

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — While Romeo and Juliet depended on a helpful friar to escape from the control of their families, young working class couples in 19^th century Oaxaca found an ally in the courts and used virginity as a bargaining chip.

In an article published in the current issue of The Americas, University of Arkansas historian Kathryn A. Sloan examined court records in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, from about 1850 to 1920, a time that the elite leaders and courts were promoting modern ideas of individualism and freedom. The transcriptions of testimonies offered an unusual and revealing opportunity to learn the views of working class Mexicans of the era in their own words.

Sloan notes that both the court officials and the young people supported virginity as a value. However, she found that the value of virginity also could be used by young people to achieve their goals:

“The young women also knew that virginity could be wielded as a bargaining chip not only with their suitors but with parents and the state in order to achieve their aims of independence and the desire to forge a new family,” she writes.

The Oaxacan Civil Codes of 1827-28 — the first such codes in Latin America — decreed that children reached adulthood at age 21, but sons had to seek consent for marriage until age 25 and daughters until age 23. According to Sloan, the code “reflected the elite’s penchant for liberalism and secularism” by promoting individual liberty and giving power to a government official rather than a priest to marry minor children in the absence of family consent.

By and large, the parents who appealed to the courts to manage rebellious children were from the working classes. Parents contended that their children lacked sufficient maturity to choose a mate or that their daughters had a history of poor choices in young men. Often there was also an economic consideration in parental opposition to a marriage.

“Poor families also relied on each member’s contribution and losing a minor child’s financial input to marriage could spell economic hardship for many households, especially those headed by single mothers,” Sloan writes.

On their part, the young women had the opportunity to meet and interact with men as they worked outside the home or carried out chores such as going to the market for the family. Young couples testified that they were motivated by romantic love. At times, young women testified that they desired marriage to escape from abuse at home. Whether the abuse was as widespread or severe as the court transcripts indicate, this plea was “a brilliant strategy,” Sloan writes, to get the court’s attention and sympathy.

When a relationship was not sanctioned by the young woman’s family, the couple sometimes eloped — in a consensual abduction by seduction known as rapto — with the goal of forcing a marriage.

“Playing out the script of seduction, daughters lost virtue by running away with their sweethearts but also vividly brandished this loss of honor to achieve their desired outcome, an adult life with their lover and legal emancipation,” Sloan wrote.

Even for the working class, marriage ceremonies were expensive, and some couples testified in court that they planned to marry once they had saved the money. In many cases, judges rejected the parents’ demands that the young man be jailed and fined. Their decision permitted the marriage of a young woman rather than the restoration of parental authority.

Sloan is an assistant professor of history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. The article is an excerpt from her completed manuscript of Runaway Daughters: Seduction, Elopement, and Honor in Oaxaca, Mexico, 1850-1920.