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 society throughout Mexico's history. Incan society had the concept of duality in gender parallelism during the pre-Columbian period. This allowed Incan women in the Andes of South America to have assertive roles in society. The country of Peru saw European women from Spain who were early conquistadores and encomenderas between the years of 1534 and 1620. There were at least 102 of these women who were political agents, had access to large amounts of wealth, had been granted hundreds or thousands of Native people to work for them as slaves. Many countries in the Americas have provided legal frameworks for