by Doug Bradley, Docent 2017
Lynn Maxwell and Doug Bradley Prelado members and docents since 2017, in the herreria of Mission La Purísima, 2020
As a docent blacksmith, one of the most common questions that visitors ask me is whether there were female blacksmiths during the Mission era. This may be prompted by the fact that my wife, Lynn Maxwell, and I often work alongside each other. Visitors can plainly see Lynn smithing, yet may scoff at the idea that this is historically ‘accurate’ or authentic. The honest answer is that “it’s complicated” due to a lack of reliable historic sources on the subject; however, there is solid evidence to suggest that female blacksmiths did, in fact, exist at the time, and may have had some role, peripheral or otherwise, in the missions. Let’s take a look:
Where we see mention of blacksmiths in the letters of mission padres, the typical comment is that experienced blacksmiths are scarce and difficult to find. Most blacksmiths could earn a more comfortable and lucrative living in larger settlements such as Mexico City, and the Spanish missions represented the far-flung frontier. At Mission La Purísima, we see the relatively lavish quarters of the herreria (blacksmith shop), which includes a spacious, well- equipped smithy, a private apartment, and cocina. Due to fire danger and the noise of hammering, the herreria itself was located as an outbuilding away from the central administrative apartments, shops and quarters, which also gave the resident blacksmith and his family some limited privacy. This would have provided some incentive for blacksmiths to take up residence at Mission La Purísima, but I have often wondered whether the remoteness of the herreria was also because smithies were regarded as distinctly secular spaces, where women’s roles sometimes overlapped those of men.
The mission padres were a patriarchal group, and unmarried male and female acolytes were often kept separated, which brings us back to whether it is realistic to believe that female blacksmiths existed within the mission system. We gather some hints by bracketing the Mission Period with what know about female blacksmiths before and after this period.
Post-Mission Period
If we work backward from the present day, there is no question whatsoever that female blacksmiths exist and thrive. The non-profit California Blacksmiths Association (CBA), of which both Lynn and I are members, counts numerous women among its membership, and some are widely celebrated, award-winning virtuosos. (I must include Lynn within this circle too, as she hold one advanced degree in metalworking and jewelry, and has won awards for her remarkable metalwork.) YouTube is rife with female blacksmiths showing off their artistry.
As I scanned the literature and internet for signs of working female blacksmiths, I was rewarded with other contemporary examples of women working in professional blacksmith shops around the world (Figs. 1 and 2).
Figure 1. A 21st-century, female blacksmith working in a roadside stall shop in India.
Figure 2. Female blacksmiths in England.
Historically, we often find male and female blacksmith working as married business partners, sharing duties alongside each other, including the hard work of hammering, shaping, bending, etc. It is also not uncommon to find daughters and sisters working alongside their blacksmith fathers—particularly where there were no sons born into a blacksmithing family—engaged in the same chores, and even assuming ownership of their fathers’ businesses after they died as part of a guild tradition that dates back to the Medieval blacksmith guilds of Europe.
Another, closely related task that often fell to women and children was the cutting and gathering of firewood for the making of charcoal essential to the blacksmith trade. This consists of hauling wood, sometimes for miles, to a kiln and firing it in a reduced atmosphere. During both pre- and post-mission eras, we find women and children engaged in this dirty, difficult work that supplied the essential fuel for reaching forging temperatures. This remains a common task of women and children throughout the developing world today.
These post-Mission era examples prove that womens’ abilities to do the work of blacksmithing has never been in question. Moreover, these are not ‘token’ or merely hobbyist female blacksmiths and farriers, but productive, full-time workers with lifetimes of experience. And where they are not directly employed as smiths, their support role as makers and suppliers of charcoal provide the lifeblood of the blacksmith trade. But can we extrapolate back to Mission times and claim that female blacksmiths were as common then as in the late-19th, 20th and 21st centuries?
Pre-Mission Period
Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrandt, who are famous as scholars of semiotics, highlight the unusual social role of blacksmiths in antiquity:
...[Th]e blacksmith’s symbolic share in the world of creation carries with it the serious danger of negation, of diabolic parody in forbidden activity. Furthermore, since metal is drawn from the bowels of the earth, the smithy relates to subterranean fire and smiths are sometimes [mythical] monsters or identified with the guardians of buried treasure. They therefore embody an aspect which inspires fear and may rightly be termed ‘infernal.’ Their trade connects them with sorcery and magic and this is why they are often more or less excluded from society and why their labors are usually surrounded by ritual purification, sexual taboos and exorcisms.
This may explain why female blacksmiths were accepted, albeit reluctantly in some areas, throughout antiquity, up through the medieval period, the Renaissance, and beyond: they were part of what was widely perceived as an odd profession, where gender roles might be shared or reversed, and where the highly specialized, sometimes esoteric knowledge of the blacksmithing trade found women to be the equals of men. It is also not unreasonable to suppose that the padres of the mission system, trained in Mexico City, were familiar with women in the metalworking trades there. Whether they were willing to countenance this sort of gender role on the frontier is unknown, nor whether they regarded blacksmithing generally as a realm “excluded from society” where gender roles might be tested against the patriarchy of the Church.
Figure 3. Female blacksmith making a nail from the Holkham Bible folio, ca. 1350.
A detail from the Holkham Bible, a folio printed in the early-mid 14th century, depicts a female blacksmith making a nail (Fig. 3). There are other depictions of female blacksmiths from this period and later in woodcuts, and we know that the blacksmithing guilds of the time allowed the wives and daughters of blacksmiths to assume ownership and control of family blacksmithing businesses. Although not commonplace, they were directly employed in the smithing of tools, armor, weapons, farming implements, horseshoes, etc. Nail-making, depicted in Figure 3, is one such specialty of blacksmithing that requires precision and endurance.
So, what about the missions of Alta California? Did the padres employ women as smithies? Thus far, I have been unable to locate any direct references to mission female blacksmiths, and
it is unlikely that the patriarchal culture of the padres would have encouraged such an idea. That being said, the existence of female blacksmiths in European economies is, as we have seen, well established. It is also known that the Chumash culture of the time held women in high esteem. Women served as tribal chiefs and were a regular part of the social elite and trades, and there is no evidence they would have been discouraged from learning the blacksmith trade. Even supposing they were not hired as blacksmiths in the herrerias of the missions and presidios, they could still have easily learned the trade from their brothers, fathers, and husbands, then practiced those skills in the smithies of rancherias and small settlements throughout the frontier. More research in this area is needed.
My personal, purely conjectural opinion is that female blacksmiths did exist among mission-era Californianos. They may not have been commonplace, but their skills would certainly have been highly sought-after and valued. The frontier of the time was mostly concerned with day- to-day survival, and people seldom stood on ceremony where survival and business were concerned. Even where women were not seen in the open doorways of smithies as the sole proprietors, some almost certainly worked within as apprentices, journey[wo]men, and masters, making tools and ornaments, tack, horseshoes, nails, and other vital accoutrements of the time. Their commonplace existence today certainly proves they were more than up to the task then.
