This article will survey the contribution made by the most recent historiography on Spanish American women in the period 1790 to 1850 and, in the light of this, examine two works written by women in the 1840s that represent self-perception and the social expectations of women in that decade. These are the diaries written by María Martínez de Nisser, from what today is Colombia, and Agustina Palacio de Libarona, from Argentina. These texts provide insight into the thoughts and motivations of men and women caught up in the political struggles of the first half of the nineteenth century.'Sólo el que trabaja por el bien jeneral de la patria, debe esperar protección del cielo' (Martínez de Nisser 1983: 82).1 This sentence, which could have been uttered by any of the male leaders of the Wars of Independence in South America, was written by María Martínez Nisser, an obscure woman from the small town of Sonsón in Antioquia Province, New Granada (Colombia). María Martínez (see Fig. 1) became the official historian of some of the events of a civil war carried out in the early 1840s in Antioquia between the constitutional government in Bogotá and provincial caudillos, known as los supremos, whose prestige dated to the Wars of Independence. The fact that María Martínez wrote a historical opus is most unusual for the period and for the newly minted republic of Colombia. Across Spanish America the first uncertain decades of the republican period featured men constantly engaged in struggles for power. It was a world dominated largely by a masculinist logic and masculine constructions of self, nation, and culture. Women had little incentive to express themselves in writing and even less to participate in events of a political nature. Thus, the writing of historical accounts by women was a most unlikely endeavour. In this article I will examine the writings of two women who achieved local and eventually national notoriety for contravening the usual expectations of their contemporaries.A review of the years 1790 to 1850 shows that in the last decades of the eighteenth century women had only just begun to receive attention from the policy makers in Madrid and the vice-regal capitals. The two key reasons for this attention were their economic potential as workers in nascent industries, and the need for their education. Both assumptions contained potentially disruptive consequences for family life and gender 1 I have kept the original spelling.