Women in the Americas in early modern North America. Throughout the Americas, bondage existed—in warmer climates, where plantation systems developed, or in the northern areas, where women were either transported as criminals or worked as indentured servants. As early as the 1530s, Portugal began using slave labor in Brazil to work sugarcane plantations. Initially, the Portuguese used indigenous people as slaves, but in 1574, the crown decreed that unless the native people were cannibals, already slaves, or were spoils of a "just war", they could not be enslaved. The Spanish also used native people as forced labor, but because under the "encomienda" system, neither
Women in the Americas They are well integrated in the nation's cultural and intellectual life. In El Salvador, the percentage of males with at least a secondary education in 2010 was 47.5, compared to females at 40.5 percent. The legal and government institutions that currently exist in Paraguay were developed in part through the efforts of feminist organizations in the country that held significant awareness-raising campaigns during the 1990s to formalize the guarantees of women's rights. During the times when slavery was legal in the Americas, enslaved women were often used as sexual objects and "had no recourse for sexual harm." In Latin America,