“Under No Circumstances Shall a Woman Be Elected”

This chapter discusses gender roles in colonial urban cofradías. It explains the assumption that cofradías were masculine institutional spaces is fact for Mexico. Despite their wealth and social prestige, Hispanic and mestizo women were never members of the governing boards in the mixed-sex cofradías to which they belonged. According to historian Nicole von Germeten, men in cofradías increasingly rejected female leadership because it made their organizations look very different from confraternities led by their social betters of European descent. The chapter clarifies that even if women were included in many cofradías, Catholicism was not democracy.