In recent decades, research on women has gained new momentum and great attention. Susan Socolow's book, The Women of Colonial Latin America, is a clear and well-organized introduction to the roles and experiences of women in colonial Latin America. Socolow explicitly states that her aim is to examine the social roles and rules of masculinity and femininity, and study the boundaries and variability of female experience, while maintaining that sex was the determining factor in status. It traces the female experience from indigenous society to the Enlightenment reforms of the 18th century. Socolow focuses on the diverse culture created by Europeans who arrived in Latin America, native women, and African slaves imported to the area. Her book does not argue that women were victimized or empowered in the culture and time in which they lived. Socolow specifies that she does her best to avoid judging the situation of women by using a modern point of view, but rather attempts to study and understand colonial Latin American women in her own time. Socolow begins the book with a look at women who would play significant roles in colonial Latin America. It is about Iberian women and their combined Islamic and Catholic heritage which led to contradictory ideals. Women were to be protected, virginal, and cloistered, but were granted many rights to property and inheritance that other European contemporaries did not have. Before the conquest, Native women held no authority and were relegated to gender-specified tasks and jobs. Men were considered more important than women. Native women were used as sexual objects, but Spanish soldiers and officers did not often marry them. This is... middle of paper... information about broken commitments. While these are excellent resources for discussion in undergraduate courses, his research could be supported more strongly by drawing less from these primary source documents and similar, rather than the extensive secondary sources to which he often references. Socolow manages to remain nonjudgmental while exposing being and examining well the roles of men and women in patriarchal colonial Latin America. This text is a good source for introductory university courses that do not require prior knowledge, but are not of interest to specialists, who are more detail-oriented. Socolow tackles a broad topic, expanding over a large period of time, but does quite well. With some maps to aid geographic orientation, this book is an interesting and reference text for university students interested in women's gender roles in colonial Latin America..