Women as war leaders during the Great Andean Rebellion
Seldom were women viewed as war leaders, but the Tupac Amaru rebellion produced four. The most visible, Micaela Bastidas, the mestizo wife of Tupac Amaru, demonstrated superior military ability and reportedly was ‘fiercer than her husband’.
She ruled with an iron hand at the rebel headquarters during Tupac Amaru's military expeditions, threatened waverers and ordered reprisals against deserters, including Spaniards. It is noteworthy that a mestizo woman could exercise unquestioned command over an army of indigenous Andeans and creole Spaniards, although the rebellion eventually transformed into a caste war of indigenous Andeans versus the Spaniards. Bastidas was not the only woman commander of the rebellion; in the same province, Tomasa Tito Condemaita also led followers to the battlefield, if not into battle. The authority of these cacicas suggests that rural Andean society was open to rule by females, either jointly with males or in their own right.Noble women had fared better than their male kin after the Spanish conquest because of the Crown’s recognition of the royal lineages and its desire to avoid their becoming ‘fallen women’. By contrast, the strength and martial prowess of commoner cacicas such as Bastidas and Condemaita did not fit the role of females in need of protection. The Spanish authorities had them gruesomely killed and savagely dismembered, not just in revenge for the many killed by the rebels, but also as a warning of what would happen to those who followed the same path. The cacicazgo, however, survived until independence in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Thereafter, the authority vested in elite indigenous women as encomenderas and cacicas disappeared, together with all titles of nobility. Women subsequently moved further into the background of political life, which more than ever became the province of males.