eir courts with little less than regal splendor, and it
cannot be that those courts were unadorned by the presence of women of
high claim to remembrance; yet there comes down to us no name of those
days touched with the halo of romance or in any way made worthy of
memoir. Doubtless the ladies of the viceregal courts flaunted as costly
attire and held themselves as haughtily as their sisters in the court of
Spain itself; but they passed away and left no trace, even as an
influence. For years of varying fortunes but of constant prosperity in
high places, Spain held Mexico under dominance, until the oppression of
the lower classes began to bear its invariable fruit, and there came
first threats, and then acts of rebellion. There was revolution after
revolution; but although the unsuccessful revolts bequeathed to history
the names of such men as Hidalgo and Morelos, and the successful attempt
to throw off the galling yoke of Spain, the names of Yturbide and Santa
Anna, there comes down to us even from these later times the name of not
one woman of renown. Moreover, there is but little in the way of
development and change which is found for record. Long before the
expulsion of the Spaniard, the Mexican people had come to be recognized
as a nation, not merely descendants of the Spaniards, but a people of
self-gained characteristics. Mexico was no longer New Spain; she was
herself, even as, a few years before, a greater country on her borders
had come to be itself in the matter of nationality, even before it had
gained autonomy. To be a Mexican woman was not merely to be a lesser
Spaniard, but to be something definite, something individual. Some of
the older national traits had become developed, some atrophied; but long
before Mexico had achieved her independence, the Mexican woman had
attained her own freedom from Spanish dominance in matters of custom,
thought, and even heredity.

Yet it cannot be said that there was progress. There was fixed
development of nationality as displayed in the establishment of a
characteristic femininity, but there was no evolution toward a higher
type of individual or of civilization than had been known in the days of
the coming of the Spaniards. On the contrary, there may be said to have
been retrogression. The woman of Mexico--by which name we must now
distinguish the descendants of the Spaniards, while those of Aztec
blood, or descendants from any of the native tribes, may be called
generical