The Many Roles of Aztec Women in Society

For modern readers, it’s difficult to imagine a pre-modern society where women were not subordinated by men. This stems largely from how dominant European history has become as a means of explaining world history. But, Aztec women had a much different role in their society than we typically realize or acknowledge. While they did have a different social status than men, it was not necessarily a lesser one. Women were acknowledged as strong, brave, and crucial to the survival of the Aztec Empire.

Womens’ Roles in Aztec Marriages

Marriage was an important part of Azted life, and Aztec women played a crucial role in every aspect of marriage. While it was expected that most girls would grow up to marry and have children, women weren’t passive commodities in the world of Aztec marriages – they had an active part to play in every part of married life.

Matchmakers

Matchmakers, or cihuatlanqui in Nahuatl, performed an important function in Aztec life: she brought eligible men and women together who would make for a good marriage.¹ The matchmakers worked only among the commoner class of Aztec society. The elites had their own marriage patterns, often arranging marriages to form or cement political alliances.²

The matchmaker’s role in courtship took place as a three-step ritual: 

1. She approached the bride’s family with the offer of marriage, which they ritually denied.
2. The matchmaker would return the next day and the bride’s family would promise to consider the marriage proposal.
3. On the third day of the proposal ritual, the cihuatlanqui would return and receive a positive response to the proposal. 

Though this might seem excessive to the modern reader, all of this was done to ensure the financial and physical safety of the bride-to-be. While Aztec women had more freedoms than women in contemporary European societies, Aztec society was still a male-dominated one. Thus, the cihuatlanqui played a crucial role in the negotiation of a woman’s rights as she entered into marriage and adulthood.

Apart from her role to ensure the physical and financial well-being of a young birde, the matchmaker also saw to her spiritual needs on the wedding day. Carrying the young bride into the ceremony on her back, the matchmaker would place her down on the ceremonial mat in front of her home’s hearth (the Aztec version of a wedding altar). After the bride and groom were in place, the cihuatlanqui performed the wedding ceremony. 

As part of this ceremony, she tied the bride’s dress (huipilli) and the groom’s tunic together and led them to the bedchamber. Once there, the matchmaker stayed with the young couple for four days. After four days, the cihuatlanqui left and the couple consummate their marriage.³

Wives

One of the most important roles women played in Aztec society was that of wife. Normally, Aztec women got married around the age of 15, but it was possible to be married by the young age of 10-12 years old.⁴

No matter their social standing, married women were responsible to seeing to the physical well-being of their home and the spiritual well-being of their community. We’ll discuss gender roles within Aztec homes in more depth below, but it’s worth mentioning the basics here. 

Married Aztec women spent time grinding maize, cooking, weaving cloth, clearing their homes, and having children. On top of these responsibilities, they also prepared for priests of the local temple and any warriors that needed feeding. 

WHen an Aztec woman reached the age of 50, she was no longer expected to perform the household chores that had defined her daily routine for decades. Now an elder among her community, her responsibilities shifted to providing sage advice. Elder women were so revered in Aztec society that they were allowed to drink pulque, an alcoholic drink otherwise reserved for the elites of society.⁵

Gender Roles in Aztec Households

Aztec men and Aztec women each occupied distinct roles in Aztec society. Most men were working on farms most of the year and went on military campaigns when called to fight. 

While men farmed and fought, women were in charge of the domestic realm. Aztec women performed a variety of domestic tasks, including cooking, cleaning, domestic rituals, weaving, and raising children.⁶ For women in the commoner class, cooking and preparing food took up most of their days. This required spending five to six hours each day grinding maize for tamales and other popular foods. Aztec women used the food they made to feed both their own households, as well as the local priests and lords, as well as their city’s military units.⁷

Noblewomen, on the other hand, spent much of their time weaving. While all women wove cloth to sell at the local markets to supplement their family’s income, noblewomen spun and wove cloth as a past-time and art form.⁸

Unlike Western societies, the domestic tasks of Aztec women were not subordinated to the social roles of men. Instead, the roles of men and women were seen as two halves of a whole, and women’s responsibilities were equated to the responsibilities of warriors. By equating the home to the battlefield, Aztec culture made women complementary and equal to the role of men. In fact, the Aztecs believed that if women’s jobs were not performed well it led to men’s failure on the battlefield.⁹

Women in Aztec Child Birth and Child Rearing

The most important role a woman played in the Aztec world was that of mother. Giving birth to and raising the next generation of Aztec children was a sacred duty, held in equal esteem to fighting in battle.

Aztec Women as Mothers

As mothers, Aztec women perpetuated cultural norms, imparted wisdom, and raised the next generation of Aztec warriors. As mothers, it was their job to raise children who followed the expected social conventions and grew up to contribute meaningfully to society. We know this because the Florentine Codex, a history of the Aztec people compiled by Friar Bernardino de Sahagún and several Aztec men in the years following the Spanish conquest of Mexico, stipulates what a “bad woman” was. According to the codex, a “bad mother…causes disregard of conventions…expounds nonconformity” and a bad grandmother “others into darkeness” by setting “a bad example.”¹⁰ From this, we can gather that women were supposed to model everything that a good, upright citizen of the Aztec Empire was supposed to be.

When an expecting mother gave birth, her family would cover their bodies in ash before entering her home to ensure the child was able bodied. They would then gather around and praise her for enduring the pain and fatigue caused by childbirth. After the child was born, their joints were covered in ash and a fire was kept lit in the mother’s home for four days to symbolize the importance of the new child to society.¹¹

If tragedy struck and the woman died in childbirth, she was exalted as a warrior and her spirit was deified. In Aztec religion, it was believed that the deceased’s soul traveled through the underworld. If a woman died while giving birth, however, her soul went to the palace of the Sun, where her soul joined other women who died in childbirth to become the goddess Cihuateteo.¹²

Aztec Women as Midwives

To help them navigate pregnancy, Aztec women received the help of a midwife. Called temixiuitiani, tietl, or tlamatqui in Nahuatl, midwives’ duties started around month seven or eight of a woman’s pregnancy.¹³

In the months leading up to the pregnant woman’s labor, the midwife ran the house in her stead. On top of performing the pregnant woman’s household duties, the midwife also massaged her stomach in order to ready her womb for labor and gave her medicinal advice. According to Aztec midwifery, a pregnant woman could not chew gum (tzictli), as it it would cause the baby to have a swollen mouth and, thus, be unable to breastfeed; women were also barred from looking at the color red during their pregnancy, lest their child be born in the wrong position.¹⁴

As an Aztec woman got close to giving birth, the midwife gave her a medical plant called ciuapatli to induce contractions.If this didn’t do the trick, she then gave the expectant mother tlaquatzin (mixture of water and opossum tail) to bring on contractions.¹⁵ When Aztec women went into labor, their midwife gave them tobacco to dull the pain.¹⁶

After guiding the mother successfully through childbirth, she gave the following speech to the new mother: 

My beloved maiden, brave woman … thou hast become as an eagle warrior, thou has become as an ocelot [jaguar] warrior; thou hast raised up, thou hast taken to the shield, the small shield. … Thou hast returned exhausted from battle, my beloved maiden, my brave woman; be welcome.¹⁷

Finally, the midwife performed a ceremony with the umbilical cord. If the child was born a girl, the midwife placed the now dry umbilical cord in the family’s hearth and prayed that the newborn become a talented cook and weaver. If the child was born a boy, then the midwife buried the umbilical cord on a battlefield and prayed that the baby boy would grow up to become a valiant and decorated warrior.¹⁸

How Women Contributed to the Aztec Economy

Women played an active and vital role in the economy of the Aztec Empire. Apart from the domestic responsibilities discussed above, women worked in trade, agriculture, and commodity production. 

Though men tended to do the farming, Aztec women saw to it that all the food produced by their male counterparts was processed and turned into goods for use in the home or for sale at the local market. This grinding maize into dough, and spinning cotton and weaving it into cloth.¹⁹

The largest role women played in the Aztec economy, though, was in the markets. These were bustling centers of trade, where shoppers could find goods from the farthest corners of the Aztec Empire. By and large, these markets were dominated by female merchants, who used their knowledge on the production of goods to negotiate, strike deals, and turn a profit. According to Sahagún’s account of an Aztec marketplace: 

“Everything was there assembled; all the loads of merchandise, all the consignments, the possessions of the principal merchants, and the goods of the merchant women, were arranged separately… Then they went forth… If perchance [a long-distance trader] had gone forgetting something… neither did even one of all the old merchants [and] merchant women go following them.”²⁰

Women in Aztec Religion

Aztec women were crucial to the everyday religious practices that permeated Aztec civilization. Every Aztec home would have had small shrines dedicated to the gods of the Aztec pantheon and it fell to the women of the house to keep this shrine and its surroundings clean and orderly. By keeping these shrines clean and performing the necessary ceremonies at these shrines, Aztec women were working to safeguard the house from any danger that not appeasing the gods could bring.²¹

But it wasn’t just in the home that women exercised influence over religion.

Female Priests

Though only men were able to attain the highest offices of Aztec religion, girls were sometimes chosen to become a priestess. If this happened, the girl was selected as an infant, and taken by her mother to the local temple to be dedicated to the priesthood. When the girl become a teenager, she officially became a cihuatlamacazqui, or female priest.

Female priests had to remain celebate and dedicate their lives to their duties within the temple. These duties probably included sweeping sacred sites, preparing ritual areas for rites, and extinguishing and lighting fires in the temples at the proper times.²² What appears to have been their most important duty was assisting in rites during a religious service. Aztec sources tell that these women danced, dressed, and leant a powerful presence to important ceremonies.²³

Though female priests had to remain celibate during their time as an official priestess of the Aztec religion, they were free to marry and leave the priesthood. But, for this to happen, her potential husband had to make what was deemed a suitable proposal to both the priests at her temple as well as the men of her family.²⁴

Sources on Aztec Women

1. Aguilar-Moreno, Handbook to Life in the Aztec World (New York: Facts on File, 2006), 353
2. Susan Toby Evans, “Concubines and Cloth: Women and Weaving in Aztec Palaces and Colonial Mexico,” https://anth.la.psu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/06/Evans_2008ConcubinesandCloth.pdf 
3. Aguilar-Moreno, Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, 353-354
4. Aguilar-Moreno, Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, 356
5. Ibid
6. Michael E. Smith, The Aztecs, (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 140-141
7. Smith, The Aztecs, 141
8. Ibid
9. Mark Cartwright, “Aztec Society,” worldhistory.org
10. Caroline Dodds Pennock, “Women of Discord: The Power of Women in Aztec Society,” cambridge.org
11. Aguilar-Moreno, Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, 356
12. Ibid
13. Aguilar-Moreno, Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, 354 and Kay Read, “A Day in the LIfe of an Aztec Midwife,” ed.ted.com
14. Aguilar-Moreno, Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, 354
15. Aguilar-Moreno, Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, 355
16. Read, “A Day in the LIfe of an Aztec Midwife,” ed.ted.com
17. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex, via mexicolore.co.uk
18. Ibid
19. “What was life like for women and girls in the Aztec Empire?” historyskills.com 
20. Miriam López Hernández, “The economic contribution of women in Aztec society,” mexicolore.co.uk
21. Christine Alwan, “Dependence on or the Subordination of Women? Examining the Political, Domestic, and Religious Roles of Women in Mesoamerican, Andean, and Spanish Societies in the 15th Century,” ecommons.udayton.edu
22. Carassco, The Aztecs, 115
23. Carassco, The Aztecs, 116
24. Ibid