It would be easy to either dismiss or romanticize the lives of Aztec women. When I teach this material, I have learned to place certain topics out of bounds for student papers. The list has been short: human sacrifice, cannibalism, blood letting. I have begun to wish I could justify adding women to the list of topics too complex for a single semester's worth of thought. Reading the authorities, my students inevitably find that Aztec women led lives full of oppression. I do not recognize these patterns. I want to recover another reading from these texts, in which women's lives were celebrated from before birth and after death. To accept this alternative, though, I find I have to lead my students straight through the very topics I am reluctant to have them write about, and others less exotic but equally unintelligible: the value of labor, the comfort of having a defined place in a family, and the pervasive presence of the sacred in the everyday. - more about Aztec women's lives . . . -