Why read Moon, Sun, and Witches?

Book cover of Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru

Book description

When the Spanish arrived in Peru in 1532, men of the Inca Umpire worshipped the Sun as Father and their dead kings as ancestor heroes, while women venerated the Moon and her daughters, the Inca queens, as founders of female dynasties. In the pre-Inca period such notions of parallel descent…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Moon, Sun, and Witches as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Susan Kellogg

Author

This book is a classic of Latin American women’s history, telling the story of how Andean women’s relative gender equity (what the author calls “gender parallelism,” a concept that applies to gender structures in many Latin American societies, especially the Aztecs—known as Nahuas—about whom I’ve also written) became transformed first by the Inca, then by the Spanish.

Written with feeling about forms of both complementarity and exploitation, Silverblatt shows women of the past, non-elite and noble, to have been productive, creative, and responsive to the social and economic conditions around them.

From Susan's list on The best books about the history of Native women in Latin America.