LA TI An Anthology of Essays on Women in Latin America
Pa
Bias
artial & sed The History of Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America
The history of women’s participation in literary culture and political life in Latin America is a history still in the making. The partial and often biased record of women’s thought and activity in that cultural region has limited our historical perspectives and our understanding of feminist contributions. For the members of our group, this work is a process of discovery and reevaluation that has widespread effects on the way we read and think about history and culture.
For example, Sor Juana InÊs de la Cruz has been seen as a unique phenomenon, an iconographic feminist presence, rather than as one of many women involved in a long tradition of engagement in Latin American culture. As recent investigations in women’s history show, the activities and achievements of women have not been restricted to the celebraed appearance of rare genius, such as Sor Juana.
Gender in modern societies is a fundamental social category that shapes every dimension of human existence. Its interaction with class is dynamic and highly varied. On one hand, class hierarchies and relations of exploitation are reproduced within the gender system—for example, in relations between upper-class women and their female domestic employees. On the other hand, gender creates inevitable and significant instabilities in class hierarchies. It creates
“...[gender] shapes every dimension of human existence.” within class boundaries (upper-class women do not participate in society or culture in the same ways as upper-class men do), while it creates sameness across class boundaries (the experiences of upper-class and lower-class women have points in common). Official high culture has tended to suppress both these dimensions. The essays in this collection mainly explore the first dimension—that is, the struggle of women to participate in public
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“The common thread that binds these writers is their perception of the inadequacies of the traditional spaces from which they were allowed to speak and act...�
culture, and the particularities of their participation, especially in print culture. Motivated by their sense of social injustice or by the way in which they understand their social and cultural privileges, the women studied in this volume ally themselves with wide-ranging political issues that transcend their class and gender. The case of Alfonsina Storni is exemplary of this class transformation. Coming from humble beginnings in a working-class family, Storni
took advantage of democratic reforms in the educational codes in Argentina to pursue a career as a poet, teacher, journalist, and dramatist. Thus, the figure of the maestra is of interest not only as a transmitter of class culture but also as an actor across class boundaries and a frequent transgressor of her own class culture. Gabriela Mistral, the celebrated poet who emerged from desperate rural poverty in Chile, was later recognized, like Storni, for her pedagogical commitments, while she engaged in national debates about the destiny of her country. Victoria Ocampo was born into the Argentine oligarchy, yet she also challenged tradition by setting an independent course for herself as editor, publisher, and memorialist. The common thread that binds these writers is their perception of the inadequacies of the traditional spaces from which they were allowed to speak and act and their search for strategies that would relieve them of the burden of patriarchal tradition and fulfill the need for reform. It is from this perspective, with its specific historical context, that we perceive these writers as cultural innovators. It was female schoolteachers drawn from different classes who formed the nucleus of the first women’s
in a Pan-American context in group to articulate what may be which women could confront considered a feminist critique of global problems despite their dissociety. That is, they were the first enfranchisement at home. Feminist to protest against the pervasive inresearch in the history of women’s equality of the sexes in legal status, movements in Latin America is access to education, and political essential to a transformation of our and economic power. Two factors view of women in this period. If are of great importance. First, the it is accepted that women’s space teachers represented a new group is only interior and private, the in Latin American society—the reality of women’s work outside the educated middle sector—which home is obscured, and the role of included skilled workers, clerks, women schoolteachers, an importand government employees as well ant element in the formation of as educators, who were well aware of their precarious social economic generations of citizens in Latin America, is ignored. If we go furand legal status. Second, these ther to examine what is meant by women were in touch with one an“interior” and “private,” we find other through their institutions of that these terms do not necessarily learning and through professional imply women’s exclusion from associations, forums in which they cultural and political processes, could share their common experiregardless of their exclusion from ence. Many who lived in the most voting booths or elected office. Nor cosmopolitan centers of Latin has women’s activity been tied America were aware of local issues specifically to interior spaces: womand ideas, as well as national and international politics. Furthermore, en operate in the open space of the as the essays included here explore, marketplace, in some influential spheres in the public space of it is this moment of self-conscious churches, and in the practice of reassessment of roles that is crucial journalistic writing, an emphatito our understanding of a new cally public arena instrumental to function of women writers in women’s international organizing Latin America. Francesca Miller’s efforts. Likewise, much male-domresearch into the historical roles inated political decision-making is of women from the 1880s to the done in enclosed, exclusive spaces. 1940s has revealed a world of acThe assumptions attached to tivism across national boundaries, 7
“...women’s writing differs from the masculinist tradition...” traditional images are challenged by the historical evidence. Similarly, the related commonplace that women speak from indoors, from womblike spaces, does not hold as an absolute: in relation to the land and landscape, women’s writing differs from the masculinist tradition by abandoning the terms of conquest and domination, which seek to label and classify according to the known and thereby to control the mystery of the unknown. Our collective work led us to
examine how women poets write nationalist epics. If feminists were concerned more with Pan-Americanism than with loyalties to individual countries, and women’s relationship to the land was circumstantially different from men’s because of inheritance and ownership laws, then we could expect a different kind of “epic,” which, in turn, would change the way we read traditional nationalist epic poetry. Mary Louise Pratt’s study of travel literature illuminated
her reading of Gabriela Mistral’s Poema de Chile : the poetic voice is not the unified, dominating voice that names, lays claim to landmarks, and legitimizes authority. It is a rootless wandering and a dialogue in which a mother attempts to answer a child’s questions; it does not narrate consecrated historical events or “explain” the national geography. Not only is Mistral’s familiar canonical image as frustrated mother challenged but the position of nationalist epic 9
TĂş me quieres blanca...
is also necessarily shifted from the center to another position on a sphere.If Mistral’s “epic” changes not only the way we read Mistral but also the way we read epic and position it in a literary hierarchy, then rereading other women authors and other genres has similarly wide-ranging effects. Alfonsina Storni’s political writings have been neglected in traditional analyses, which see her poetry as desperate, frustrated, and focused on the male lover. Gwen Kirkpatrick’s rediscovery of Storni’s journalistic writings permits her to be seen as a working woman, acting autonomously for change in the social status of women. She no longer represents the woman seeking her reflection in the mirror of male desire. Her poetry is a different kind of statement, not simply speaking to the male lover but also speaking to her readers about the way in which male-female relationships are articulated in poetic imagery. Marta Morello-Frosch’s reading of the profound irony in “Tú me quieres blanca” illustrates this challenge to the traditions of love poetry. The poem involves not only the apostrophe to the ostensible “tú” but also an indirect, strong address to a listener who overhears a criticism of the one-sided and previously
acceptable demand for female purity and innocence. Kathleen Newman exposes another aspect of the public role of woman in her study of the media images of women between 1916 and 1926, as they reflect political anxieties of a changing society. She examines the modernization of femininity in relation to the historical context of social unrest and the entrance of women into the work force. The possibility of a public, but not political, image of femininity in the film star once again complicates these traditional categories. Literary scholarship influences the ways in which a work may be read: the scholarship we and other feminists have been doing is meant to expand the possibilities. Feminist analysis of the literary-historical situation of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) exposes the internal contradictions of the poetic canon and the effect on women’s writing of the patriarchal definitions of public and private spheres. The three mythic female figures of Mexican Colonial history—the Virgin of Guadalupe, La Malinche, and Sor Juana—represent modes of inscription of the feminine in the theological and political discourse of colonization; the process of inscription recasts each one in the cultural coinage of 11
successive regimes. The most This is the same gaze that Sor Juapopular image of Sor Juana sets na cleverly mocks as she instructs the stage for the role of the woman the observer in the proper viewing writer as passionate, self-destructive of her portrait. Our research has heroine. Until very recently, booknot been directed toward establishlength studies of Sor Juana cening Sor Juana or other poets more tered on scrutiny of the personal solidly as precursors, as cultural life of the nun and speculated on “mothers,” or as models for Latin her sexuality, rather than on Sor American women poets. Rather, Juana’s highly praised poetry and we have sought to recover what prose. . Like Storni and Mistral, has been left out of the processes whose public work in journalism of canonization: works, writers, and political activism was obscured genres that do not fit a male model in the process of anthologizing and of women’s lives. Our research, canonizing their work to conform by restoring the aspects left out to cultural norms, Sor Juana is a of some conventional images, writer whose place in her context is shows why these works, writers, important to our understanding of and genres are omitted: with all women’s writing in her own time their aspects included, the lives and after. Recent feminist scholand works of women writers take arship has opened the possibilities full form in areas that disregard for rereading the personal to reveal the artificial boundaries of public its political implications. Sor Juana and private. Sor Juana’s intellecand Storni, for example, represent tual speculation in her Sueño and the female body and the consequencher appreciation of the beauty of es of the male gaze in women’s a female friend and patron are lives and women’s creation of inextricable from her precariwoman-centered art. Storni, in ous political situation. As social “Hombre pequenito[*] “ or “Tú representation, what can be more me quieres blanca,” is confronting public than a nun’s renunciation of the way in which the male gaze is her previous individual identity in enshrined in poetry. the interest of serving the Church?
“...the body conse the m
e female and the equences of male gaze...�
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subsequent centuries, when single mothers, schoolteachers, and orphaned children as well as traditional families are represented in fiction as metaphors for the state and its perceived enemies, the domestic is no longer the domain of the private, but its use in sexual politics is indicative of social insecurities. Our research in women’s journalism has been essential to our awareness of the social and historical context of women’s roles and women’s writing.
Each of us in her area of interest has been led to pursue research in periodical literature produced by, for, and about women. Literate women have not been isolated from one another, but the scope of their dialogue has often been hidden. To read what was previously unread or to read familiar texts in a new way always offers the possibility of discovery. We have examined not only the relationships between literature and social realities but also the impact of neglected
or critically misrepresented works upon their literary and social contexts. This perspective rearranges the canonical view of art as an unbroken tradition representing dominant views of class, race, and sex with negligible voices of dissonance on the margins. Instead, we find a varied and conflictive field of activity in which the judgments of critics do not represent the response of readers or the dialogue among writers.
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LATINA
L An Anthology of Essays on Women in Latin America