This is a study of women who lived without men between 1821 and 1910 in Guadalajara Mexico. In these years single and widowed women consistently outnumbered men in the city. I argue that disproportionate sex ratios created obstacles to legal marriage at a time when Mexican political leaders and reformers promoted marriage and motherhood as an important, idealized part of a solution to political instability in the aftermath of Independence in 1821. The same liberal political philosophies that motivated the fight for national Independence, promoted new economic and social reforms that displaced rural peasants forcing many to seek employment in cities. It was a trend that added to the demographic growth and industrialization of Guadalajara and created a growing class of poor urban workers. Among these new migrants were women who arrived to the city widowed and single. Some women never married, or remarried. Others lived in consensual unions and mothered illegitimate children. City officials grew anxious over the presence of unmarried working women who lived outside the boundaries of traditional marriage and patriarchal control. Increasingly, politicians, clergymen, women's magazines, police and judges of various political stripes debated the role of unmarried women in their efforts to reform what they believed to be the wayward lifestyle that typified the urban poor. For these powerful actors unmarried women became a symbol, symptom, and a cause of rising urban problems including immorality, crime and poverty. Overall, my research demonstrates that authorities in nineteenth-century Guadalajara organized institutions of power such as city police, criminal courts and Guadalajara's poorhouse to target unmarried women as a group in need of greater protection, punishment and reform.This dissertation combines extensive demographic data with fine-grained qualitative and statistical analysis of the lives of mostly poor unmarried women in Guadalajara. It draws on a wide variety of sources to attempt to capture a sense of the lives of women, many of whom found it impossible to conform to the standards of elite gender expectations. Sources utilized here include unique household-level censuses from Guadalajara, religious writings, political essays, proscriptive literature from Latin America and Europe, legal codes, criminal and civil court proceedings, maps, newspapers and state institutional records. Overall, the project is one of the first to focus exclusively on unmarried adult women in Latin America.
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