1
For information on Gálvez's life and literary works see Serrano y Sanz and Jones.
2
Two relatives of her family had been viceroys to Mexico -Matías Gálvez was viceroy in 1781, followed by his son Bernardo, who had commanded in battles against the English in the southern United States in the early 1780's. For more information on these American connections, see Joseph R. Jones's article on María Rosa Gálvez, as well as entries on the two Gálvez viceroys in Enciclopedia universal ilustrada.
3
See Kathleen Kish for a discussion of eighteenth-century attitudes toward women in male-authored drama.
4
Other plays in this collection that deal with important female issues include: El egoísta (vol. I), Florinda (vol. II), Blanca de Rossi (vol. II), Safo (vol. II), Amnón (vol. III), and La delirante (vol. III).
5
See Tzvetan Todorov's On Human Diversity for a discussion of the Esprit des lois and its relation to contemporary problems of racism and nationalism.
6
Many feminist critics point out the strong connection that early feminism had with the abolition movement. Among them, Josephine Donovan, Moira Ferguson, Doris Kadish and Françoise Massadier-Kenney, and Karen Sánchez-Eppler. Ferguson in particular finds some thirty British women who wrote abolitionist works, a number that proves the attraction this subject had to them.
7
This end to the old asiento system allowed for freer trade, and for the participation of Spanish merchants in the lucrative slave business. See Solano and Guimera 66.
8
See the discussion of El delincuente honrado in Alborg 660-65. Alborg is one of several literary historians to note the importance of this drama of the middle class.
9
For other issues of post-colonial and post-modern theory see Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin's edited collection of essays by various authors, Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism.
10
This is «surprising» since both Ferguson and Sánchez-Eppler have found complicity with colonization in most white women's anti-slave writings. Despite their opposition to slavery, these women still saw blacks as fundamentally «other». Gálvez's rejection of imperialism for equal partnership between black and white, African and European, is therefore unique. See Ferguson 4 and Sánchez-Eppler 13.