At the time of the discovery of the New World, a queen sat on the throne of Spain. Isabel I was a strong, even dominant woman. A fanatical defender of the Holy Roman Catholic faith, she was instrumental in imposing religious unity on both her own country and neighboring Portugal. At the same time, she fiercely maintained the juridical independence of Castile and established the laws of her kingdom as the foundation of Latin American jurisprudence. But Spain itself was the product of several traditions, as well as the conflicting experiences of warrior and mercantile societies. Church, law, and tradition all affected the role of women in the Iberian Peninsula and by extension in the American colonies.

Because both Spain and Portugal had experienced years of Moslem conquest, followed by years of Christian reconquest, the position of women in the Iberian Peninsula was quite different from that throughout the rest of Europe. The role of women in these societies reflected the combined effect of Islam and Roman Catholicism. On the one hand, the Islamic ideal of the cloistered, sheltered woman, the woman protected in the home or the harem, continued to resonate in Iberian society, as did the strong link between female virginity and honor. On the other hand, the gap between the idealized conduct of women and their real behavior was sizable. Women in Christian society, for example, especially the rural peasants, enjoyed a good degree of independence. Furthermore, women in Iberian societies benefited from legal rights that went far beyond those accorded to other European women at the time.