This article describes the role of women in the society of the Muisca. The Muisca are the original inhabitants of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense (present-day central Colombian Andes) before the Spanish conquest of the Muisca in the first half of the 16th century. Their society was one of the four great civilizations of the Americas.
Women were important and considered egalitarian to men in most cases in the Muisca society. While the men were tasked with hunting, warfare, and other activities, the women performed the sowing of the farmfields, the preparation of foods and chicha and the education of children. The participation in the religious rituals was of both genders. The most important deities of the Muisca were female; Chía as goddess of the Moon, Huitaca of sexual liberation and Bachué the mother goddess of the Muisca people.
While the first chroniclers were all male, during the period of conquest and early colonisation Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, Pedro Simón, Juan de Castellanos and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita, 20th and 21st century anthropology has been conducted by many women scientists. Main contributors to the knowledge of women in the Muisca society have been Muisca scholars Ana María Groot, Marianne Cardale de Schrimpff, Sylvia Broadbent, Ana María Gómez Londoño, Martha Herrera Ángel and various others.
Background
Following the largely preceramic Herrera Period, the Muisca people lived in the valleys and higher altitude terrains of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense, in the Eastern Ranges of the Colombian Andes. Estimates of the size of the community vary from 300,000 to two million people at the time of the Spanish conquest as of 1537. The Muisca were predominantly farmers and merchants, with a loose political organisation in their Muisca Confederation. Agriculture was performed on simple terraces on the slopes of the mountains and on the high plains of the Altiplano, especially the Bogotá savanna. Their principal agricultural products cultivated were maize, potatoes, arracacha, tubers, beans, yuca, pumpkins, gourds, tomatoes, peppers, cotton, pineapples, avocadoes, tobacco, quinoa and coca.
Famous is their well-elaborated Muisca art, especially their goldworking. Different from the other three well-known civilisations of the Americas; the Maya, Aztec and Inca, they did not construct grand architecture.
Muisca words for women
The Muisca used various words in their language Muysccubun to refer to women, ; 'wife' or 'niece', literally 'daughter of the sister of the mother', ; 'sister-in-law', literally 'wife of the brother' or 'sister of the husband', ; 'niece', literally 'daughter of the sister of the father', and ; 'her', 'female'.
Women in Muisca society
In the pre-Columbian societies, the women formed a central part in the explanation of the world, the structuring of the family and community, the religious life, in the labour of the farmfields, mythology, arts, and in all aspects of the organisation of society. In these communities, the woman was the centre of the birth of the culture. The fertility of the women played a central role in the rich agriculture of the Muisca. Women were raised for the labour of sowing and harvest, preparation of food, textile work, ceramics and in the sacred ceremonies.
The women in the Muisca civilisation, especially under the Code of Nemequene, had special rights over their husbands, mainly the caciques. The Code consisted of a system of penalties of horrific practice, but was focused on the stability of the society, especially in cases of adultery, cheating, incest and rape. It was the Muisca men forbidden to leave their wives and if she died doing labour the spouse was ordered to pay off her family. Infidelity of the women was punished by forcing her to have sex with the ten ugliest men of the tribe. They also were condemned to fasting.
The wives of the leaders of the community wore skirts until their ankles, while common women had skirts up to their knees. Maids, or sometimes called concubines, were called tegui.
The majority of the pre-Columbian cultures which had female leaders and egalitarian conditions between man and woman, went through a process of transformation towards a male leadership through the defense of their territories.
A census held in 1780 in the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, Bogotá, resulted in a 63.5% of women in the city. The women from indigenous origin moved to the capital for two reasons; to work in the households of the Spanish colonisers and to look for husbands, as the mestizo status provided them with more security.