Female Citizens, Patriarchs, and the Law in Venezuela examines the effects that liberalism had on gender relations in the process of state formation in Caracas from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century. The 1811 Venezuelan constitution granted everyone in the abstract, including women, the right to be citizens and equals, but at the same time permitted the continued use of older Spanish civil laws that accorded women inferior status and granted greater authority to male heads of households. Invoking citizenship for their own protection and that of their loved ones, some women went to...