This book takes us into the private worlds of spouses from (mainly) Santiago and Valparaiso in the second half of the nineteenth century through a reading of the Causas de Divorcio in ecclesiastical court. The first of the book's three sections helps the reader to understand the legal aspects of divorce, from canon law to Chile's Law of Civil Matrimony approved in 1884, and the procedures by which a divorce lawsuit could be opened in ecclesiastical court, followed by the demographics of divorces. Indeed, chapter 2 provides a very thorough analysis of the Causas’ demographics in terms of location, years of marriage, gender, class and reasons (causales) to petition for a divorcio.

A majority of cases were brought by wives against their abusive husbands. In the second section, we learn more about the nature of maltrato (mistreatment): it could be of a physical, economic or sexual nature, or a combination thereof. Women used the legal platform to negotiate the terms of their submission to their husbands, and by doing so, they reshaped their domestic roles and the ways in which earnings and personal patrimony were handled by couples and families. One interesting finding is that by 1865 there were more divorces than marriages, a phenomenon that the author attributes to economic crisis; also relevant are an increase in the male marriage age and the fact that, in Santiago, there were more women than men. The third section deepens the analysis of maltratos by showing husbands’ reactions to the accusations of their wives, reactions that were (mostly) phrased in terms of adultery and their better right to ‘correct’ the behaviour of their wives. The final chapter (7) brings us to the ‘results’ of the Causas de Divorcio – that is, what happened to the varied set of lawsuits, what the level of reconciliation was, and what the judicial sentences looked like – with some final comments on what such rulings meant in terms of shifting gender relationships. Out of the 575 Causas presented, 290 did not end in a judicial sentence, 89 cases saw a perpetual ‘separation of table and bed’ (as divorce was defined until civil divorce was made possible in 1884), and 43 cases ended in a reconciliation of the spouses. Other cases were either rejected outright or were of a temporary nature.

The main conclusion of the book may be phrased in Rengifo's own (translated) words: ‘In the second half of the 19th century, women's demands began questioning female subordination to their husbands … what judges and laws defended was domestic peace, not marital happiness or love … Conjugal relations were a sacramented contract, not a consecrated love affair’ as was the case in other cities throughout Latin America.

While reading through the elegantly written pages, a couple of questions came to my mind (coming from my reading of similar files and lawsuits from the nineteenth century in the Lima Archbishopric Archive, quite a while ago): were there only Causas de Divorcio in Santiago, and no Litigios Matrimoniales and/or Causas de Nulidad? Viewing both series, together with the Causas de Divorcio, allows for a reading of the institutional progression of individual lawsuits and the inclusion of the lack of dispensations as an argument for obtaining a definite separation, with the annulment of the sacramental bond. Rengifo mentions oral complaints from women asking for the intervention of a priest to stop a bad husband. Were these complaints no longer recorded in the second half of the nineteenth century? Were they ever in Santiago? Another question (also derived from my reading of Lima files) is the importance or not of ethnic difference. Chile did and does indeed still have a different demographic composition than Mexico City or Lima, but did ethnicity (or, more generally, culture) make any difference in terms of how these lawsuits were pursued and their outcomes? There were urban slaves and castas, who in Lima's case quite avidly participated in the ‘negotiations’ in ecclesiastical courts.

A third question involves the ‘historical context’. The second half of the nineteenth century saw dramatic changes in Latin American destinies. Were such changes reflected in how matrimonial issues were judicially and socially presented and sentenced? To what extent was there an awareness of the need to ‘regulate’ family lives and conjugal relationships? Did changes have an impact on how the ‘divorce trajectory’ developed? Rengifo provides some sense (based on scant information in the files themselves) of who the litigants were by sometimes mentioning the kind of work they did, by indicating whether they belonged to the ‘clases populares’ or ‘clases acomodadas’, and by figuring out the kinds of dwellings they lived in. In the end their social belonging, it seems, did not have much bearing on matrimonial behaviour or on what each litigant's matrimonial expectations were. Did the expanding Chilean mining sector (and the concomitant migratory patterns) have any bearing on how, when and why couples married/divorced? A very interesting finding is that toward the century's end, more lower- and middle-class couples filed Causas de Divorcio, probably signalling female vindications moving ‘downwards’ and/or – as indicated by Rengifo – that more people had access to the courtroom because they lived closer by and had more resources to pay for fees and lawyers.

Daisy Ripodas Ardanaz, back in the 1970s, was – as far as I know – the first person to unravel the intricacies of canon law and its effects on women's lives (in Buenos Aires). I hold her in dear memory and would not like her work to be forgotten, especially in the context that Rengifo is presenting us with. Besides this little side comment, I have to express my admiration for a well-researched, deeply documented piece of work published in Chile in 2011. It brings us one step closer to understanding the worlds of men and women, yesterday and today.