According to Sanabria, “Marianismo posits that women acquiesce in their relationships with their spouses and also adopt a self-sacrificing stance towards their own sexuality and sexual desires” (Sanabria, p. 156). This then posts a house/street divde where women’s roles are mainly defined by the domestic domain. Latin America and Caribbean households were matrifocal houses holds in which women headed them. In the late 1980s these households were considered to be a new phenomenon. These female-headed households have several interrelated characteristics in common. Two issues with these households were boundaries were recognized as porous constantly incorporating new members and losing members. Brittle sexual liaisons and conjugal unions marked
