^* The author has benefited from the comments and criticisms of several individuals who read earlier drafts of this paper, especially Nettie Lee Benson, Vera Blinn Reber, Jonathan Brown, Alan Knight, Sandra Lauderdale-Graham, José Antonio Fernández, and Irma Eichorn. Many thanks to Laura Gutiérrez Witt, Donald Gibbs, and the entire staff of the Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas at Austin for their assistance in locating sources. My special appreciation to Tony Stroud and Elaine Ganson for their intellectual stimulation, words of encouragement, and support. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 46th Congress of the Americanists in Amsterdam, Holland, in July 1988.

¹ Published in de Kostianovsky, Olinda Massare, La mujer paraguaya: su participación en la Guerra Grande (Asunción: Talleres Gráficos de la Escuela Salesiano, 1970), 94.Google Scholar The translation of the poem from Spanish into English is my own.

² See note 1. The history of women has been a major theme in Paraguayan historiography. The first historical essays were written after Paraguayan women had made major contributions during the Chaco War against Bolivia (1932–1935) by serving as nurses and war godmothers (madrinas de guerra). Every Paraguayan soldier and officer had a war godmother, usually his wife, mother, or sister, to send him clothing and medical supplies. In 1939 Carlos R. Centurión wrote “La mujer paraguaya através de la historia,” a brief account of the history of women from the conquest to the 1930s. In more recent decades, a number of prominent Paraguayan historians have made valuable contributions, including Idalia Flores de Zarza, Antonio Ramos, and Victor I. Franco. In the 1970s, a group of women historians founded the Instituto Feminino de Investigaciones Históricas which recovered from the Brazilian government the Libro de Oro, a gold album containing the names of the women who made donations to the Paraguayan government during the war, which fell into Brazilian hands after Paraguay’s defeat. Much of the writing in Paraguay about women at war has been patriotic in nature. Vittone’s, Luis La mujer paraguaya en la vida nacional (Asunción: Imprenta Military, 1970)Google Scholar is an example. Although much has been written about the political, diplomatic, military, and economic history of the Triple Alliance War, historians still have neglected many of its social aspects. For one exception, see Vera Blinn Reber’s recent excellent study of the demographic impact of the war. She presents new historical evidence that Paraguay lost only between 8.7 and 18.5 percent of its population, rather than fifty percent, as has been often suggested. “The Demographics of Paraguay: A Reinterpretation of the Great War, 1864–1870,” Hispanic American Historical Review 68 (May 1988): 289–319.

³ Sources for this research include selected manuscripts from the Archivo Nacional de Asunción, contemporary newspapers, foreign travelers’ accounts, military officers’ memoirs, a few women’s letters, wills, censuses, parish registers, records of local justices of the peace, and diplomatic correspondence. It was not customary for Paraguayans to keep diaries or write autobiographies which would have revealed women’s perceptions of themselves and men’s attitudes toward women. Nor were there any female journalists or writers in Paraguay as there were in some nineteenth-century Latin American countries such as Mexico. Despite the variety of primary sources, little is still known about all the diverse aspects of women’s lives, especially those of Indian women who left little trace for the historian.

⁴ For studies on the roles of women in the American Civil War refer to Scott, Anne F., The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Massey, Mary Elizabeth, Bonnet Brigades (New York: Knopf, 1967)Google Scholar; and Abrahamson, James L., The American Home Front: Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War I, World War 11 (Fort Lesley: National Defense University Press, 1983), 175.Google Scholar For a description of American women’s work during the First World War, see Greenwald, Maurine Weiner, Women, War, and Work: The Impact of World War 1 on Women Workers in the United States (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980)Google Scholar and Foner, Philip S., “Women and the American Labor Movement: A Historical Perspective,” in Working Women: Past, Present, Future, eds. Koziara, Karen Shallcross, Moskow, Michael H., and Tanner, Lucretia Dewey (Washington: The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc., 1987), 175–77.Google Scholar On the question of women and their changing status in American society during the Second World War see Anderson, Karen, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during World War II (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981).Google Scholar

⁵ Mallon, Florencia E., “Nationalist and Antistate Coalitions in the War of the Pacific: Junin and Cajamarca, 1879–1902,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World: 18th to 20th Centuries, ed. Stern, Steve J. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 219–32Google Scholar; Mallon, , The Defence of Community in Peru s Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 80–122.Google Scholar Bonilla questions whether a peasant “nationalism” existed in Peru without a consolidated national market and a bourgeosie. Bonilla, Heraclio, “The Indian Peasantry and Peru,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, 213–19.Google Scholar There is a conceptual problem in writing about “nationalism.” Historians have many different ideas about its meaning, which in part explains why there is debate on the subject. For the purpose of this paper, I am referring to a consciousness on the part of individuals or groups, of membership in a nation or state who have a devotion to, or advocate national unity and independence. By the term “state,” I am simply referring to the government's political apparatus: the president of Paraguay, the vice president and government ministers, and local justices of the peace and military commanders in the countryside. To date, little has been written about the development of “nationalism” in Paraguay. John Hoyt Williams, however, has identified some of its salient features, which have helped create and heighten a consciousness of a separate identity in the region. He stresses the importance of race, geography, linguistic homogeneity, miscegenation, and threats from Indians, as well as from the Portuguese and the porteños in Buenos Aires, as the colonial basis for the development of Paraguayan nationalism in the nineteenth century. Williams believes a collective awareness of national uniqueness and identity emerged earlier in Paraguay than in most Latin American countries. Williams, John Hoyt, “Race, Threat, and Geography – the Paraguayan Experience of Nationalism,” Canadian Review of Studies on Nationalism 1 (Spring 1974): 173–91.Google Scholar Still, no historian, including the author, has carefully documented when this separate regional or national identity first emerges in Paraguay.

⁶ Archivo Nacional de Asunción, Serie Nueva Encuademación, vol. 3291, “1846 Census of Ybycuí.” Hereafter the Archivo Nacional de Asunción will be cited as “ANA.” Portions of the Archivo Nacional de Asunción have been microfilmed by UNESCO, and are available at the Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas at Austin. Ybycuí and Atyrá were selected randomly from a list of villages. To analyze these prewar censuses, I counted and categorized each inhabitant according to age, sex, and ethnic group. The results are not completely accurate, since I had to determine an individual’s sex only by name, and the quality of the archival manuscripts was poor. The census of Ybycuí also appeared incomplete. Anneliese Kegler de Galeano states that Ybycuí had 5,372 inhabitants and 719 families in 1846. de Galeano, Anneliese Kegler, “Alcance histórico-demográfico del censo de 1946,” Revista paraguaya de sociología (January-April 1976): 91.Google Scholar Williams in contrast counted only 3,932 inhabitants in Ybycuí. Williams, , “Observations on the Paraguayan Census of 1846,” Hispanic American Historical Review 56 (August 1976): 424–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also de Rivas, Barbara Ganson, “Las con-secuencias demograficas y sociales de la Guerra de la Triple Alianza,” (Asunción: Instituto Paraguayo de Investigaciones Historicas, 1985)Google Scholar and “Paraguayan Lace to Lances: A History of Women in the Social and Economic Life of Paraguay, 1537–1900” (M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1984): 51–82.

⁷ ANA, Serie Nueva Encuademación, vol. 3291, “1849 Census of Atirá.”

⁸ de Galeano, Keglar, “Alcance histórico-demográfico,” 91.Google Scholar

⁹ Borah, Woodrow and Cook, Sherburne F., “Marriage and Legitimacy in Mexican Culture: Mexico and California,” in The Law of the Poor, ed. Tenbroek, Jacobus (Scranton, Pennsylvania: Chandler Publishing Company, 1966): 626.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Pane, Ignacio A., “La mujer guaraní,” in Ensayos paraguayos (Buenos Aires: Colección Pan Americana, 1945), 104.Google Scholar Pane based his conclusion on the Jesuit missionary account of Nicolás del Techo, Historia de la provincia del Paraguay y de la compañia de Jesús (1703). Susnik, Branislava, El indio colonial del Paraguay (Asunción: Museo Etnográfico Andrés Barbero, 1965) 1: 13, 38.Google Scholar

¹¹ Historians such as Alida C. Metcalf, Elizabeth Kuznesof, Donald Ramos and Anne Hagerman Johnson have noted a high proportion of female-headed households in other parts of Latin America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly in southeastern Brazil. Most scholars would agree that one of the principal causes of the pattern appears to be related to the migratory nature of male employment on the frontier. Yet, it is still unclear why this phenomenon occurred in some regions and not others. No one has fully studied the process. Refer to Metcalf, Alida C., “Fathers and Sons: The Politics of Inheritance in a Colonial Brazilian Township,” Hispanic American Historical Review 66 (August 1986): 455–484 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kuznesof, Elizabeth Anne, Household Economy and Urban Development: São Paulo, 1765–1836 (Boulder and London: Westview, 1986), 160–3, 169Google Scholar; Ramos, Donald, “City and Country: The Family in Minas Gérais, 1804–1838,” Journal of Family History 3 (Winter 1978): 361–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnson, Anne Hagerman, “The Impact of Market Agriculture on Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Chile,” Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (1979): 625–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² “Testamento de María Dorotea Agüero,” ANA, Serie Testamentos, vol. 501, no. 6, Año 1840. Testaments are of special interest for the study of women because a will, more than other notarial records, summarize the whole material and social outcome of an individual’s lifetime. Wills can indicate a woman’s civil status, class, and culture. They are also revealing sources for studying women’s relationships and economic interests established or consolidated through marriage or just through normal living. Spanish wills are based on the cultural postulate that a person’s spiritual and material interests may be separated. A woman's religious beliefs are explicitly stated. On the spiritual side, wills contain descriptions of the pious works requested by women, including bequests to religious institutions, the freeing of slaves, and donations to charitable institutions. On the material side, every will must manage the calling of material debts and credits, and the distribution of goods among survivors. Wills, in addition, provide clues to the behavior of women within the family and their many social roles. See Lavrin, Asunción and Couturier, Edith, “Dowries and Wills: A View of Women’s Socioeconomic Role in Colonial Guadalajara and Puebla, 1640–1790,” Hispanic American Historical Review 59 (1979): 280–304 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Salomon, Frank, “Indian Women of Early Colonial Quito as Seen Through Their Testaments,” The Americas 44 (January 1988): 329–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³ “Libro de matrimonios de la parroquia iglesia de San José de Ybycuí,” vol. 2, Mss. for the years, 1835–1858. Civil marriage was not introduced into Paraguay until the 1890s. Paraguay, , Ley de matrimonio civil (Asunción: Talleres Nacionales de H. Kraus, 1898).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Testimony of General McMahon, Martin T., U.S. Minister to Paraguay, U.S. House of Representatives, Report of the Committee on Foreign Affairs on the Memorial of Porter C. Bliss and George F. Masterman in Relation to Their Imprisonment in Paraguay (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1870), 224.Google Scholar This document does not appear to be the best source to cite as evidence for this conclusion, yet, McMahon was a keen observer of the conditions in the Paraguayan countryside. Davis, Arthur H., Martin T. McMahon: Un diplomático en el estridor de las armas (Asunción: Instituto Paraguayo de Estudios Geoplíticos e Internacionales, 1985).Google Scholar Cohabitation outside marriage appears to be a common phenomenon in Latin America. María Angélica Marin Lira, for example, discovered that free unions in Central America today amounted to forty percent of all unions of women, except in Costa Rica, where the figure is lower. She stated that there is insufficient data to study this phenomenon in depth, but that its importance can be explained in terms of the economy, religion, and other factors. Marin Lira, María Angélica, “Les unions consensuelles en Amérique Latine: L’Amérique Centrale,” in Marriage and Remarriage in Populations of the Past, eds. Dupaquier, J., Hélin, E., Laslett, P., Livi-Bacci, M., and Sogner, S. (London: Academic Press, 1981), 111–26.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Fulgencio Yegros, Consúl de la República, Sebastian Antonio Martínez Jean, Secretario, Para-guay, Supremo Govierno de la República del Paraguay, “Acuerdo prohibiendo matrimonio entre ningún europeo y mujer americana conocida por española,” Asunción, 10 July 1814. Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Gondra Manuscript Collection, (MG 2057u).

¹⁶ Parish Baptismal Records of the Obispado de Villarrica, 1858-1888. Many nineteenth-century parish records of Paraguay have been reproduced on microfilm by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah. Villa Rica was selected because after Asunción, it was one of the most important towns in Paraguay.

¹⁷ Illegitimacy rates in Latin America vary from 17.3% for Chile, 43.1% for Paraguay, to 69.5% for Panama from 1950 to 1970, the period for which data is available. High illegitimacy rates over sixty percent occur in most Central American countries. In a study of two hundred years of illegitimacy in Costa Rica, Héctor Pérez Brignoli found an increase in illegitimacy toward the end of the colonial era linked to mestizaje. Since the nineteenth century, he found that rates have been relatively low, except in border regions. He attributed the causes of this situation to the expansion of coffee exports throughout the nineteenth century. Brignoli, Héctor Pérez, “Deux siècles d’illégitimité au Costa Rica, 1770–1974,” in Marriage and Remarriage in Populations of the Past, 481–95.Google Scholar

¹⁸ ANA, Serie Testamentos, 1841 and 1862.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Otero, Luis Mariñas, Las constituciones del Paraguay (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica del Centro Iberoamericano de Cooperación, 1978), 57–64, 129, 140.Google Scholar Chapter X, Article III of the Constitution guaranteed all inhabitants of the Republic the right to have their complaints heard before the government. Many Paraguayans, however, probably were reluctant to exercise this right freely. ANA, Serie Histórica, vol. 320, 1856. Hereafter “Serie Histórica” will be cited as “SH.”

²¹ “La Educación,” El Semanario de avisos y conocimientos útiles (Asunción) 12 March 1863.

²² Ibid.

²³ “La Solterona,” El Semanario, 27 December 1862.

²⁴ Mansfield, Charles, Paraguay, Brazil and the Plate: Letters Written in 1852–1853 (Cambridge: MacMillan, 1856 Google Scholar; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1971), 392.

²⁵ Masterman, George, Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay: A Narrative of Personal Experience Amongst the Paraguayans (London: Sampsom, Low, Son and Marston, 1870), 42.Google Scholar

²⁶ ANA, SH, vols. 320, 336. The elementary school population of Paraguay was considerably high on the eve of the war. In 1861 Carlos Antonio López ordered all the justices of the peace to send to school all children between the ages of nine and ten who had no excuse for staying away. In 1862 there were 435 schools throughout the country with 24,524 pupils. Nevertheless, many rural children probably still did not attend school. Sir Richard Burton (1821–1890), the noted British explorer and author, who visited Paraguay in 1869, claimed no Paraguayan was allowed to be illiterate in contrast to England. SirBurton, Richard, Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (London: Tinsley Bros., 1870), 16–7.Google Scholar Carlos Antonio López sent sixteen teenage boys to Europe for advanced study in 1858. Masterman noted that nearly all men could read and write. Masterman, , Seven Eventful Years, 42.Google Scholar Valázquez, Rafael Eladio, Breve historia de la cultural del Paraguay (Asunción: Edicones, Novelty, 1970), 163–4.Google Scholar Washburn, Charles, A History of Paraguay with Notes of Personal Observations and Reminiscences of Diplomacy Under Difficulty (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1871), 1:31.Google Scholar

²⁷ Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 1:442, 2:99–100Google Scholar; “Resumén de importación en el mes de agosto,” El Semanario, 24 December 1853, 13 September 1862; de Graty, Alfred Marbais, La República del Paraguay, trans. Calvo, Carlos (Benzazón: Imp. de J. Jacquis, 1862), 352–7Google Scholar; Plá, Josefina, Las artesanías en el Paraguay (Asunción: Ediciones Comunes, 1969) 38 Google Scholar; Alcalá, Hugo Rodríguez, El Paraguay en marcha (Asunción, 1907), 228–37.Google Scholar

²⁸ As could be expected, nineteenth-century censues did not contain information on bilingualism in Paraguay. Washburn noted that Guaraní was seldom written, and even in the nineteenth century was so mixed with Spanish that it was no longer the same language it once was during the Jesuit missionary period (1609–1767). Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 1:31.Google Scholar Guaraní remained the dominant language of Paraguay due to special historical circumstances. During the colonial era, the province of Paraguay was a backwater region of the Spanish empire. Few Spaniards migrated to the colony, and thus, through intermarriage with Guaraní Indian women, Paraguayan mestizo children learned Guaraní from their Indian mothers. Missionaries also helped to preserve the language. Fray Luis de Bolaños, a Franciscan, translated Christian prayers into Guaraní. Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, a Jesuit missionary, wrote a dictionary, Arte y Vocabulario de la lengua Guaraní, and a grammar book, Catecismo de la lengua Guaraní. Susnik, El indio colonial, 1:10–11; Benítez, Justo Pastor, “Guaraní Has a Word for It: Profile of a Language,” Americas (March-April 1962), 19.Google Scholar More importantly, the Guaraní language survived the conquest simply because of the vitality or expressiveness of the language itself. An eighteenth-century Franciscan missionary who worked among the Avá-Chíriguano Indians, a western Guaraní tribe in what is today southern Bolivia, wrote the following: “The Chiriguano speak Guaraní which is such a rich and energetic language that every word is an exact definition that explains the nature of things and makes things understandable… One would never imagine that in the center of barbarism there would be a language that is so noble and beautiful which is not at all inferior to the many languages spoken in Europe, but requires years to speak with perfection.” Gerónimo Guillen, “Informe hecho a Nro. Rmo. Padre Fray Manuel de la Vega Lector Jubilado…y comisario general de las Indias sobre el estado presente de las misiones.” Tarija, June 1, 1782. Gondra Collection, (MG 916).

²⁹ Burton observed that Paraguay’s “rudimentary agriculture, in which a wooden plough is used to turn the loose soil, is limited to procuring subsistence, and even before the war began it was considered women’s work rather than men’s.” Burton, , Letters from the Battlefields, 30.Google Scholar John Parish Robertson commented that Paraguayan “women were remarkable for their industry as men were for their lazy and indolent habits.” Robertson, John Parish, Francia s Reign of Terror (London, 1839, repr., New York: Ams Press, 1970) 3: 168–9.Google Scholar

³⁰ Quoted in Service, Elman R., Spanish-Guarani Relations in Early Colonial Paraguay (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1954), 35.Google Scholar

³¹ Ibid., 36. The status of Guaraní Indian women was very low in colonial society. Spanish colonists referred to Guaraní Indian women as “piezas” (objects) and considered them an important item of trade, especially in the immediate period after the conquest. Colonists bartered Indian women in exchange for horses and clothing. Although Indian women were in a subordinant position in colonial society, their labor was highly valued by encomenderos. They served the Spanish encomenderos as hilanderas (textile weavers), brazos agrícolas (farmers), and domestic servants. Susnik, , El indio colonial del Paraguay, 1: 13, 38, 80.Google Scholar Guaraní Indians practiced the slash-and-burn agricultural method as did most of the tropical lowland Indians in South America. When not occupied in hunting or warfare, men cleared new tracts of forest and mixed ashes from the charred logs with the soil, thereby, adding to its fertilizing, for the growing of their most important crop, manioc, manihot esculenta. Women planted manioc by inserting stem cuttings into the ground in low mounds. Once the plant grew to a height of six to nine feet at least eight months later, they harvested the manioc tubers by pulling up the whole plant, and then processed them by scraping the husks and boiling the roots. Indian women later broke the leftover stems into cuttings, and replanted them sometimes in the same mounds.

³² Robertson, John Parish, Francia’s Reign of Terror, 3:168–9.Google Scholar

³³ Whigham, Thomas J., “The Politics of River Commerce in the Upper Plata, 1780–1865,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1985), 225, 253.Google Scholar Cattle raising often kept the men away from their homes during most of the day and for longer periods during cattle drives. Herding cattle also was not labor intensive, and thus, peons could wander off from their herds into the village where they could enjoy their favorite beverages, yerba maté or caña (rum), and partake in more leisure activities such as sleeping in a hammock, gambling, cockfighting, and horse racing. Six months out of the year Indian men and peons from rural communities worked in the gathering and processing of yerba maté under harsh conditions. Washburn described the yerba maté labor process in detail. Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 1:450–60.Google Scholar

³⁴ Mansfield, Charles B., Paraguay, Brazil and the Plate, 379–80.Google Scholar

³⁵ Masterman, , Seven Eventful Years, 39.Google Scholar

³⁶ George Thompson, a British military engineer who commanded Paraguayan troops during the war, wrote that Paraguayan “females from the highest to the lowest” possessed a large quantity of jewelry. Thompson, George, The War in Paraguay (London: Longman’s, Green and Company, 1869), 200.Google Scholar Washburn also noted that women of all classes had an “incredible amount of jewelry, considering their general poverty.” Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 11:172.Google Scholar

³⁷ Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 11:98–9.Google Scholar

³⁸ Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 2:228, 446–9Google Scholar; Alcalá, Rodríguez, El Paraguay en marcha, 228–37Google Scholar; Plá, , Las artesanías, 53.Google Scholar

³⁹ Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 2: 177 Google Scholar; Washburn to Secretary of State, December 25, 1866, U. S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, 1867, vol. 2 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1868; repr., New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1965), 705–6; Washburn to Britain’s Minister Plenipotentiary in Argentina, September 24, 1868, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, 1868, vol. 2 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1869; repr., New York: Kraus Reprinting Corporation, 1965), 837; Thompson, George, The War in Paraguay, 207.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Hutchinson, Thomas J., The Paraná with Incident of the Paraguayan War and South American Recollections from 1861 to 1868 (London: E. Stanford, 1868), 343 Google Scholar; Williams, John Hoyt, The Rise and Fall of the Paraguayan Republic, 1800–1870 (Austin: University of Texas, 1979), 218.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Ibid., 218–9. Williams obtained these figures from Efraim Cardozo’s, Hace cien años (Asunción: Ediciones Emasa, 1961–1982) V:140, 287 and VI:132, and de Kostianovsky’s, Olinda Massare El Vice-Présidente Domingo Francisco Sánchez (Asunción, 1972), 89–96.Google Scholar As evidenced in the agricultural reports in the Archivo Nacional de Asunción, villages all over the countryside reported sizeable plantings of manioc, corn, cotton, beans, rice, tobacco, peanuts, barley, squash, watermelons, onions, and fruit trees which were reported to the national government on a monthly or quarterly basis. In Ybycuí, for example, in October 1866, 10,731 liños of manioc were planted. This figure dropped to 4,630 liños in August 1867, but then, increased to 12,872 liños in November 1867. In January 1868, only 760 liños of manioc were planted. Corn production followed a different pattern in this same district. In October 1866, 11,110 liños of corn were planted. Then corn production increased in August 1867 to 126,054 liños, but then declined to 11,311 liños in November 1867. Cotton production, in turn, increased steadily from 1,821 liños in October 1866 to 2,738 liños in August 1867 to 6,383 liños in November 1867. Growing seasons, of course, were not always the same for each crop. The government requested monthly or quarterly agricultural reports from their local justices of the peace in all the rural districts in 1863 in order “to obtain a general knowledge of agriculture in the country, and to improve this branch of the economy,” and apparently not for tax purposes. Thus, these sources may be more reliable than one could expect. “Tablas de agricultura,” El Semanario, 14 November 1863. It is difficult to obtain an accurate measurement of agricultural production during the war. Agricultural reports are available for some months and not others. There also appear to be no clues with regard to how these measurements were taken in the various districts. Agricultural measurements themselves, in addition, varied from country to country in Latin America during the nineteenth century. According to El Semanario, one liño was equal to the space of one cuerda or 83.3 varas castellanas. Ibid. This newspaper article, however, did not provide the dimensions of either a cuerda or a vara castellana. According to the Comprehensive Technical Dictionary, one cuerda in Puerto Rico is equal to .40 acres, one vara in Paraguay is 34 inches, and one vara in Spain in general is 33.4 inches. Sell, Lewis L., Comprehensive Technical Dictionary; Spanish-English (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1949), 521, 1656.Google Scholar There is insufficient data to determine whether one cuerda in Puerto Rico was equal to one cuerda in Paraguay. Nevertheless, there is an abundance of agricultural reports in the Archivo Nacional de Asunción from the year 1863 until as late as 1869 in some rural districts from all over the country which still have not been studied in great depth. ANA, SH, vols. 350, 354–56.

⁴² U.S. House of Representatives, “The Paraguayan Investigation,” 223. Both Washburn and Burton also noted that peasant women tilled the ground and harvested the crops during the war. Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 11:177 Google Scholar; Burton, , Letters from the Battlefields, 380.Google Scholar Acosta, Juan F. Pérez, Carlos Antonio López: Obrero Máximo: labor administrativa y constructiva (Asunción: Editorial Guarania, 1948), 78–9.Google Scholar

⁴³ Cardozo, , Hace cien años 11:264 Google Scholar; ANA, SH, vol. 339, Cattle census of the Ministerio de Hacienda, January 1864, documents nos. 250–1.

⁴⁴ ANA, SH, vol. 348, Vice President Francisco Sánchez to Jefe de Milicias y Juez de Paz de Itauguá, 18 July 1866; ANA, SH, vol. 350, 16 June 1866.

⁴⁵ ANA, SH, vol. 351, Decree signed by Vice President Francisco Sánchez, Asunción 18 July 1866; ANA, SH, vol. 348, Sánchez to Jefe de Milicias y Juez de Paz de Itauguá, 18 June 1866.

⁴⁶ ANA, SH, vol. 348, Sánchez to Ciudadano Jefe de Milicias de Paraguarí, Asunción, 9 September 1866.

⁴⁷ McMahon also mentioned that “There are others, and there are many I suppose, who have very opposite feelings.” U.S. House of Representatives, “Paraguayan Investigation,” 223.

⁴⁸ Under Dr. Francia (1811-1840), for example, state herds of cattle were used to feed the poor in the rural district of Villa Rica which was subject to frequent crop failures. Whigham, “The Politics of River Commerce,” 292, 308.

⁴⁹ ANA, SH, vol. 348, Sánchez to Señor Comandante de Villa de Ygatimí, 9 July 1866; Sánchez to Juez de Paz of Concepción, 7 May 1866; Sánchez to Ciudadano Juez de Paz of Belén, 8 May 1866; Thompson, , War in Paraguay, 206–7Google Scholar; Washburn, , History of Paraguay, 1:270 Google Scholar; de Acosta, Juan F. Pérez, Carlos Antonio López: Obrero Máximo, 69.Google Scholar Carpets from the ballrooms of the National Club and the railroad station in Asunción were also cut up into ponchos for soldiers. Thompson, , War in Paraguay, 208.Google Scholar Thompson did not explicitly state that women cut up the carpets, but there is a good possibility that women did, as they were responsible for making most of the soldiers’ uniforms.

⁵⁰ Acosta, Pérez, Carlos Antonio López, 68–70.Google Scholar

⁵¹ ANA, SH, vol. 348, document signed by Félix Candía and Juan Manuel Benítez, Itauguá, 20 April 1866.

⁵² Hutchinson, , The Paraná with Incidents of the Paraguayan War, 343.Google Scholar

⁵³ ANA, SH, vol. 348, document signed by Benjamin Urbieta, Juez de Paz de Paraguarí, 9 November 1866. As a consequence of the allied blockade and in the absence of imported alcoholic beverages, peasant women from Caraguatay and other vilages developed a new kind of orange liqueur. El Centinela, 11 July 1867.

⁵⁴ ANA, SH, vol. 345, Francisco Bareiro to local justices of the peace and miltary commanders in Villa Rica and other districts in the country, Asunción, 16 June 1866. Paraguay’s iron foundry, the first of its kind in Latin America, was constructed by the government in 1850 using Paraguayan government financing and British technology. See Acosta, Pérez, Carlos Antonio López, 178–80,Google Scholar and Whigham, Thomas J., “The Iron Works of Ybycuí: Paraguayan Industrial Development in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” The Americas 35 (1978): 201–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁵ “Actos recomendables,” El Semanario, 8 July 1865.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 11 November 1865.

⁵⁷ ANA, SH, vol. 347, Francisco Barreiro to Señor Ministro de Guerra y Marina, Asunción, 8 February 1866? There are no clues indicating how many uniforms the regular soldiers produced.

⁵⁸ ANA, SH, vol. 346, List of contributors signed by Juan de la Cruz Pezoa, 22 February 1865; vol. 348, Sánchez to Jefe de Milicias y Juez de Paz de San Estanislao, 18 June 1866, vol. 351, Familias necesitadas del Barrio de la Encarnación. With remaining funds, the local justice of the peace of Encarnación donated two to five pesos to a number of insolvent women who could not afford to pay for the burials of their deceased children or because they had a number of children in uniform. In addition, funds were spent on catechism books for school children and teachers’ salaries. Escolástico Garcete and Raymundo Ortiz, Asunción, 24 March 1866.

⁵⁹ ANA, SH, vol. 351, letter from the local justice of the peace of Yhu to Vice President Sánchez, 14 July 1866.

⁶⁰ Vice President Sánchez advised the justices of the peace in several districts that “it is necessary to remind the poor that it was necessary for families around the world to work in order to live.” ANA, SH, vol. 348. Official decrees sent by Sánchez to local justices of the peace in Itauguá and Yuty, June and July 1866.

⁶¹ William E. Barrett in his 1938 historical novel about Eliza Lynch, the Irish companion of Francisco Solano López, entitled Woman on Horseback, claimed that Lynch wore a colonel’s uniform and operated on the wounded while the Paraguayan women only nursed. Barrett however was over-exaggerating Lynch’s role in the war. Lynch herself stated that she cared for the wounded in the hospitals as well as the families that followed the Paraguayan army during the last phase of the war. Burton noted that she did her utmost to mitigate the miseries of allied prisoners. Lynch, Eliza, Exposición y protesta (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Rural, 1875), 6–7 Google Scholar; Burton, , Letters From the Battlefields, 74 Google Scholar; Barrett, William E., Woman on Horseback (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1938), 157, 170, 264, 284.Google Scholar

⁶² Masterman, a British pharmacist turned-surgeon employed by the López government, was overly critical of Paraguayan female nurses he helped trained. In Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay, he claimed that women “only amused the wounded.” Masterman, , Seven Eventful Years, 126–7.Google Scholar

⁶³ de Kostianvosky, Massare, “El papel de la mujer en la epopeya,” La Tribuna (Asunción) 1 Feb-ruary 1970 Google Scholar; Franco, Victor J., “Médicos y practicantes en la sanidad militar, 1865–1870,” La Tribuna, 14 January 1968.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ ANA, SH, vol. 347, Official government decree, “Instrucción para los empleados de Campaña sobre el regimen a observarse en la epidemia de la viruela” (Asunción: Imprenta Nacional), 22 October 1866.

⁶⁵ Ibid., vol. 352, British Foreign Office, Correspondence Respecting Hostilities in the River Plate (in continuation of the papers presented to Parliament, 20 March 1866). Mr. Thorton to Mr. Stanley, 30 November 1867, No. 13; Correspondence from Mr. Gould to Mr. Mathew, Paso Pucú, 10 September 1867. Franco, Victor J., La sanidad en la Guerra contra la Triple Alianza (Asunción: Circulo Paraguayo de Médicos, 1976), 66 Google Scholar; Cardozo, , Hace cien años, 4:15.Google Scholar The war newspaper, Cabichuí, declared that women nurses “accompanied their brothers at the front.” Cabichuí, 19 December 1867.

⁶⁶ Reber, Vera Blinn, “The Demographics of Paraguay,” 318.Google Scholar Vera Blinn Reber presents a break-down of the causes of mortality due to the war. Using minimum and maximum loss scenarios for her analysis, she claims that due to cholera, yellow fever, and other diseases Paraguay lost between 2.5 and seven percent of its total population.

⁶⁷ ANA, SH, vol. 346, Pedro Cano to Vice President Sánchez, Piribebuy, 30 December 1865.

⁶⁸ ANA, SH, vol. 346, Juan Manuel Benitez to Vice President Sánchez, Itauguá, 31 December 1865; Juan Bautista Quintana to Vice President Sánchez, partido de Pedro González, 31 December 1865; Juan Báez to Vice President Sánchez, Altos, 31 December 1865.

⁶⁹ ANA, SH, vol. 348, Sánchez to the Ciudadano Juez de Paz de Belén and Itá, Asunción, 16 March 1866.

⁷⁰ Cardozo, , Hace cien años, 13: 113.Google Scholar

⁷¹ Cabichuí, 19 December 1867 and 1 June 1868; U.S. Minister to Paraguay and Civil War hero, General Martin T. McMahon, drew many vivid illustrations of Paraguayan women which appeared in his two articles, “Paraguay and Her Enemies,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 40 (February 1870): 421-29 and “The War in Paraguay,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 40 (April 1870): 633–47.

⁷² Thompson, , War in Paraguay, 206–07.Google Scholar

⁷³ Ibid.; Burton, , Letters from the Battlefields, 318.Google Scholar Washburn, in his anti-López account, gives the impression that the López government compelled women to volunteer to join the army “under fear and compulsion.” He claimed that except for women of the upper class in the capital, all women, including the daughters of the most wealthy and respectable citizens, as well as slaves and peons, between the ages of sixteen and forty were conscripted into the army to work as menial laborers. Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 11:175–6.Google Scholar No other contemporary accounts, however, confirm that camp women were actually drafted into the army. On the other hand, camp women probably received orders from the military officers and their superiors within their own ranks. When Washburn referred to “women” in his account, it is often unclear whether he was referring to the women who followed the army or those who remained to work in their respective rural districts. Washburn, unlike McMahon and other foreigners, never left Asunción to observe actual conditions in the countryside.

⁷⁴ de Caxias, Marquez, Diario do Exército, Campanha do Paraguay (Río de Janeiro: Tipografía Nacional, 1868), 86.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Washburn described the daily routine of peasants in A History of Paraguay, 1:446–8. He noted that music was played for several hours every day at or near the barracks at all times of the year. Ibid., 11:98.

⁷⁶ Burton, , Letters from the Battlefields, 386.Google Scholar

⁷⁷ Cherpak, Evelyn, “The Participation of Women in the Independence Movement of Gran Colombia, 1780–1830,” in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives, ed. Lavrin, Asunción (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978): 220–26.Google Scholar

⁷⁸ Soto, Shirlene, “The Mexican Woman: A Study of Her Participation in the Revolution, 1910–1940,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico, 1977), 3–4 Google Scholar; Meyer, Jean, The Cristero Rebellion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 129–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷⁹ Cabichuí, 16 December 1867.

⁸⁰ Ibid., (San Fernando), 22 June 1866.

⁸¹ Ibid., 10 October 1867.

⁸² The historical and religious themes in the patriotic rhetoric of Paraguayan women are reminiscent of those used during the Mexican insurgency movement in 1810. The figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe, an Indian Catholic saint, united both Indians and creóles. The Mexican clergy was responsible for writing manifestoes, as may have been the case in Paraguay during the Triple Alliance War. In Mexico, however, there seemed to be a greater exaltation of the indigenous past than in Paraguay. Brading, David, The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (Cambridge: Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, 1985), 3, 12, 23, 55.Google Scholar

⁸³ For Francisco Solano López’s birthday on July 24, 1866, the upper class women in the capital had given him several presents, including a Paraguayan flag embroidered with gold, with diamonds and rubies, and a silver staff, as well as sword of honor with a sheath made a gold, and a crown of laurels with golden leaves. Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 11:171.Google Scholar Thompson observed that the “patriotic movement was commenced at the proper instigation among the ladies, some of whom formed themselves into a committee in Asunción.” Thompson, , War in Paraguay, 200.Google Scholar Burton also noted Paraguayan women’s nationalist sentiments, especially among the “ladies of Asunción.” Burton, , Letters from the Battlefields, 380 Google Scholar; de Zarza, Idalia Flores, “La mujer en la epopeya nacional,” Anuario del Instituto Feminino de Investigaciones Históricas 1 (1970–1971): 31.Google Scholar

⁸⁴ ANA, SH, vol. 352, Undated letter to the Sección Quinta de la Comisión Directiva of the capital, a special committee established to collect donations for a golden sword to be given to President Francisco Solano López for his forty-first birthday in 1867, signed by Doña Inocencia Marique, Doña Joaquina de la Torre, members of the commission of the village in Itaugúa.

⁸⁵ Quoted in de Kostianovsky, Massare, La mujer paraguaya, 25.Google Scholar

⁸⁶ El Semanario, 8 September 1867.

⁸⁷ de Kostianovsky, , La mujer paraguaya, 100.Google Scholar

⁸⁸ Thompson, , War in Paraguay, 340–45Google Scholar; Phelps, Gilbert, Tragedy of Paraguay (London: Charles Knight and Company, 1975), 101–02.Google Scholar

⁸⁹ de Kostianovsky, Massare, La mujer paraguaya, 25.Google Scholar

⁹⁰ Ibid., 102–03.

⁹¹ Ibid., 111.

⁹² A study of the role of priests in the Triple Alliance War utilizing ecclesiastical records in Paraguay is greatly needed. Given the fact that many women were illiterate and that religion often served as the peasants’ main ideology, one could expect that priests wrote most of the women’s manifestoes. Washburn claimed that women’s speeches in the capital were “usually written by priests, some men employed by the government, or foreigners.” Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 11:173.Google Scholar A bitter enemy of López, Washburn, in part, gave the impression that women had not acted of their own free will because they were conscripted in the rural areas to serve as camp women. On the other hand, he referred to women who were trained in the use of lances as “volunteers.” The fact that there may have been some fears of reprisals does not necessarily mean that women's demonstrations of support were exclusively involuntary. Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 2: 175–6.Google Scholar Washburn was not a supporter of López and the Paraguayan cause apparently because he had spent long periods of time behind the allied lines, which raised Paraguayan suspicions of his actions, which accounts for some of the difficulties he experienced in the country. U.S. Department of State, Secretary of State Seward to Mr. Washbum, No. 56, October 23, 1866, Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1866) 2:612-3. Phelps said Washburn was lavishly entertained by the Brazilians and Argentines before his arrival to Paraguay. Phelps, , Tragedy of Paraguay, 182–3.Google Scholar The accounts of McMahon, and even those of Thompson and Washburn, provide corraborating evidence that popular enthusiasm for López existed in Paraguay throughout the war. The remarkable number of captured soldiers who made their way back to their camp through enemy lines lends further evidence of the support López enjoyed among the Paraguayans. McMahon suggested in 1869 that Paraguay would have been subdued much earlier, except for the fact that a number of prisoners taken by the allies found their way back to López from the allied camps and Buenos Aires. U.S. House of Representatives, “Paraguayan Investigation,” 228. Arrudão, Bias Campos, “Ending the War of the Triple Alliance: Obstacles and Impetus,” (M.A. thesis: Unversity of Texas at Austin, 1981), 67.Google Scholar

⁹³ An illustration in Cabichuí portrayed ten women in the capital dressed in European style gowns asking Vice President Sánchez for arms. “Las hijas de la Patria, pidiendo armas para esgrimirlas contra el impio y cobarde invasor,” Cabichuí, 9 December 1867. Since on other occasions, artists depicted peasant women in war newspapers, this illustration was probably accurate, and not an idealized view of women.

⁹⁴ Thompson, , War in Paraguay, 201 Google Scholar; Masterman, , Seven Eventful Years, 189–90Google Scholar; El Semanario, 25 November 1867.

⁹⁵ Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 175–6.Google Scholar

⁹⁶ Translated by the author into English from the Spanish version which appeared in Cardozo, Hace cien años, VIII: 15, 26.

⁹⁷ Williams, , “The Paraguayan Experience of Nationalism,” 177–8.Google Scholar

⁹⁸ Cardozo, , Hace cien años, 8:52–3.Google Scholar

⁹⁹ El Semanario, 25 January 1868.

¹⁰⁰ “La ofrecida del bellos sexo del Paraguay de todos sus joyas y alahas para la defensa de la Patria en la Asunción a 8 de setiembre de 1867,” El Centinela, 12 September 1867.

¹⁰¹ El Semanario, 25 January 1868.

¹⁰² Cardozo, , Hace cien años, 8:66 Google Scholar; ANA, SH, vol. 353, Francisco Solano López, Paso Pucú, 6 September 1867.

¹⁰³ Thompson, , War in Paraguay, 57.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁴ Ibid.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid. Soldiers also referred to López as “mita morotí” (the white child), and “carai” or “carai guazú,” (the big gentleman).

¹⁰⁶ de Zarza, Idalia Flores, “La mujer paraguaya en la epopeya nacional,” 13–4.Google Scholar Anti-López interpretations of the war emphasize that he had seized all of the women’s jewels. López however was a very charasmatic and popular leader among the Paraguayans, as evidenced especially in the work of Thompson, who himself was not a López supporter at the end of the war. Long lists of contributors to the army, military hospitals, and poor families of soldiers from villages all over the country also provide corroborating evidence of Paraguayans’ support for the government’s cause. On the other hand, these reports were published by the government in order to obtain further funding from the general populace and stir up support. McMahon, , Paraguayan Investigation, 223.Google Scholar Paraguayans, El Centinela, 12 September 1867; Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 2:200 Google Scholar; Thompson, , War in Paraguay, 200–01.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁷ “La mujer,” El Centinela, 18 July 1867,

¹⁰⁸ ANA, SH, vol. 351, Juan Manuel Benitez of Itauguá to Vice President Sánchez, 31 December 1866.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., Damase Florentino to Vice President Sánchez, Acahay, 30 June 1865. Ibid., Partido de Itacurubí Villa del Rosario, 31 December 1866. Some women were victims of crime during the disorder caused by the war. A peasant woman who lived alone in the village of Piribebuy, for example, had all her personal belongings stolen from her home in 1866. An inventory of the stolen items reveals what a rural woman might own during the López era: seven scarves, three of them silk, two men’s shirts, a straw hat, a white coat, a quilt, a gold rosary, a gold necklace, forty-eight to fifty pesos in paper money, two silver bridles, and a pair of silver spurs. Ibid., Juan Antonio Ovelar, Piribebuy, 31 December 1866.

¹¹⁰ Dorotea Duprat de Lassare left a written account of her ordeal in an appendix of the Spanish version of Masterman’s work, Siete años de aventuras en el Paraguay (Buenos Aires, 1911), 321–35.

¹¹¹ Warren, Harris Gaylord, Paraguay and the Triple Alliance: the Postwar Decade, 1869–1878 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 11 Google Scholar; Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 2: 238–40Google Scholar; Burton, , Letters from the Battlefields, 380 Google Scholar; Masterman, , Seven Eventful Years, 228.Google Scholar

¹¹² de Caxias, Marquez, Diario do Exército, 62.Google Scholar

¹¹³ Beatriz Rodríguez Alcalá de González de Oddone, Residenta? Reconstructora? (Asunción: Casa América, 1974), 25–27.

¹¹⁴ New York Times, 14 July 1868, 5.

¹¹⁵ do Caxias, Marquez, Diario do Exército, 61.Google Scholar

¹¹⁶ U.S. National Archives, Washington, D.C., Despatch from U.S. Minister to Paraguay, Martin T. McMahon, to Honorable William H. Seward, Secretary of State, Pykysyry, 31 January 1969, Despatch no. 13, Despatches from United States Ministers to Paraguay and Uruguay, 1868, M 128 Record Group 59, vol. 3.

¹¹⁷ McMahon quoted in Washburn, , A History of Paraguay, 2:564–65Google Scholar; see also Thompson, , War in Paraguay, 304, 308–09.Google Scholar There was nothing unusual about women fighting to defend their homeland. For centuries women in Europe were known to have fought in battles. Ancient Greek women threw stones and roof tiles, and sent provisions to their defenders when the city they resided in was under siege. Schaps, David, “The Women of Greece in Wartime,” Classical Philology 77 (July 1982): 193–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar During the Japanese invasion of Korea (1592–1598), Korean women participated in battles against Japanese invaders by carrying rocks from the field to the front line which was vital to the successful defense of a fortress. Mr. Don-Ho Kim, interview by the author, Austin, Texas, April, 1988. A few Argentine women defended Buenos Aires during the English invasions of 1806 and 1807. de Folatti Tornadu, Sara Sabor Vila, “La mujer americana en las invasiones ingleses al Río de la Plata, 1806–1807,” Universidad (Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa fé) 34 (April 1957): 149–67.Google Scholar In the Revolution of 1848, German women fought at Berlin, Vienna, and Dresden. Zucker, Stanley, “German Women and the Revolution of 1848,” Central European History 13 (September 1980): 237–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Confederate women of the South in the United States during the American Civil War (1861–1865) donated their jewels to the government, organized patriotic committees, managed plantations, helped the wounded, founded soldiers’ aide committees, buried the dead, and made uniforms for the Confederate Army. A few Confederate women, donned in men’s uniforms, even took up arms. Some Paraguayans were aware of women’s participation in war in other countries during the López era. The government published an article in El Semanario about a twenty-three year old Mexican heroine who was “very skilled with sword,” and distinguished herself in the battle at Puebla during the French Intervention in 1863. “Heroína Mejicana,” El Semanario, 28 November 1863. The Paraguayan government also published an article in midst of the war about a French camp woman, Tereza Figneur, who followed Napoleon’s army. “Biografía de una mujer heroica,” El Centinela, 14 November 1867.

¹¹⁸ General Francisco Resquin, Datos históricos de la Guerra del Paraguay (Buenos Aires: Campañia Sudamericana, 1896), 126. Resquin wrote his memoirs in 1876.

¹¹⁹ García, Benigno Riquelme, El ejército de la epopeya (Asunción: Ediciones Cuadernos Republi-canos, 1977), 2:317–48.Google Scholar The Marquez de Caxias himself noted in his war diary on 30 December 1868 that “a great number of women and children accompanied López’s force of 1,350 men.” de Caxias, Marquez, Diario do Exéricilo, 82.Google Scholar

¹²⁰ Mr. Alfredo Bernai, Director of the Museo Histórico de Piribebuy, interview by author, Piri-bebuy, Paraguay, April, 1985.

¹²¹ Kolinski, Charles, independence or Death: The Story of the Paraguayan War (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1965), 178–80.Google Scholar For this figure of 1,500 Kolinski relied upon the Brazilian accounts of d’Escragnolle Taunay, Alfredo, A Retirada da Laguna (São Paulo: Companhia melhoramentos de São Paulo, n.d.),Google Scholar Diario do Exército (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Nacional, 1870), and Memorias do Visconde de Taunay (São Paulo: Instituto Presso Editorial, 1948).

¹²² de Caldi, R. Luisa Ríos, Diccionario de la mujer guaraní (Asunción: Editorial Siglo Veintiuno, 1977), 73.Google Scholar

¹²³ Cerqueria, Dionisio, Reminiscencias da campanha do Paraguai (Rio de Janeiro: Gráfica Lalm-mert, n.d,), 367, 381, 391.Google Scholar Cardozo quoted Cerqueria in Hace cien años, XI:73, 90, 149 and XII:315, 346–7.

¹²⁴ Cardozo, , Hace cien años, 11:23–26, 74 and XlI:116–7Google Scholar; Warren, , Paraguay and the Triple Alli-ance, 17, 20–5.Google Scholar

¹²⁵ de Rivas, Ganson, Las consecuencias demográficas y sociales, 11 Google Scholar; Oficina General de Estadística, Anuario Estadístico de la República del Paraguay, Año 1886 (Asunción: Fischer and Quell, 1888). By constructing population pyramids based on the census data available in the Anuario estadístico de la República del Paraguay, año 1886, published by the Oficina General de Estadística, one can project back fifteen years to get a general idea of what the population of Paraguay might have been in 1870. Due to many irregularities in this first official postwar census, I had to use ten-year age groupings in order to construct the population pyramids. For sound reasons, historians have questioned the validity of this 1886 census. The director of the Oficina General de Estadística, José Jacquet, thought the census results were too low and arbitrarily raised the total first to ten percent, and then by 37 percent. La Dardye, E. Bourgade, Paraguay: The Land and the People, Natural Wealth and Commercial Capabilities (London: George Philip and Sons, 1892), 103.Google Scholar Census takers did not record racial information, thus, it is impossible to examine the impact of the war on the different racial and ethnic groups in the country. Given the extremely poor means of communications in the country and the scattered nature of the population, including the numerous Indian tribes, the accuracy of the census is especially questionable. However, the figures for at least some of the rural districts do coincide with references to other postwar censuses. In the case of Arroyos y Esteros, for example, Father Maíz noted that according to a 1879 census, there were 1,557 inhabitants in this rural district, and more than two thousand in 1886. Maíz, Father Fidel, Pequeña geografía para los niños de la escuela de Arroyos y Esteros (Asunción: El Paraguayo, 1886), 76.Google Scholar The census takers of the Oficina General de Estadística reported that Arroyos y Esteros had 2,721 inhabitants in 1886. Oficina General de Estadística, Anuario Estadístico, 225–32. As in a number of Latin American countries during the nineteenth century, the social category of “Indian” disappeared from the first official census in Paraguay. Even if the figures are not fully reliable, the 1886 census is still valuable for the rich variety of information it contains, from the number of criminals and commercial houses in the capital to the occupational structure of each village over the age of fifteen. The ratio of three or four women to every man is considerably less than what some contemporary newspapers reported, and some historians have suggested. For instance, La Regeneración, a newspaper established in the allied-occupied capital, claimed there were fifty women for every man in the rural areas and three women for every man in the capital in 1869. Cardozo, , Hace cien años, 13: 148–9.Google Scholar

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¹²⁷ A British traveler, Marion Mulhall, who visited the country during the 1870s, drew an illustration of Paraguayan peasant women. Mulhall, Marion, Ten Years of a Lady’s Travels (London: E. Stanford, 1881), 221.Google Scholar

¹²⁸ Butchering of beef was the only new occupation women continued to exercise after the war. Two women in the village of Arroyos y Esteros identified themselves as butchers after the war. Anuario estadistico, 1886, 234.

¹²⁹ Paraguay, , Código rural de la República del Paraguay (Asunción: El Paraguayo, 1887), 4–5, 22, 30–4Google Scholar; Código rural de la República del Paraguay (Asunción: Imprenta de “La Reforma,” 1884), 3–4.

¹³⁰ Otero, Mariñas, Las constitutiones del Paraguay, 145–53.Google Scholar Cooney, Jerry W., “Abolition in the Republic of Paraguay, 1840–1870,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 11 (1974): 164.Google Scholar

¹³¹ Oficina General de Estadística, Anuario estadístico (1886), 260.