Gender Inequality and Health: Mexico City 18th and 19th Centuries

The general objective of this research is to focus on the living and health conditions of a group of individuals who lived in Mexico City during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were buried in the Cemeteries of San Andrés and Santa Paula. The interpretative approach is based on the biocultural model which emphasizes demographic biological and cultural processes within an essential ecological framework. In order to meet the objectives the processes of health and disease were analyzed from a gender perspective. For this purpose it was necessary to resort to historical sources that provided information on daily life and allowed the reconstruction of sociocultural differences between men and women socialization patterns family roles obligations and types of occupation that interact with biological factors related to the differential physiological functioning of both organisms. This can generate different rates of resistance and vulnerability as well as patterns of protection and risk in their ways of facing health-disease processes which could also be observed through the evidence in the skeletal remains.