1. David Rock treats this period most succinctly in Politics in Argentina, 1890-1910: The Rise and Fall of Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). [BACK]

2. On this topic, see Maxine Molyneux, "No God, No Boss, No Husband: Anarchist Feminism in Nineteenth Century Argentina," Latin American Perspectives 14, 1 (Winter 1986): 119-145. Asunción Lavrin also addresses some of the problems surrounding women in the anarchist movements in The Ideology of Feminism in the Southern Cone, 1900-1940, Latin American Program Working Papers 169 (Washington, D.C.: Wilson Center, Smithsonian Institution, 1986). [BACK]

3. On women's activism in this period, see Donna J. Guy, "Women, Peonage, continue

and Industrialization: Argentina, 1810-1914," Latin American Research Review 16, 3 (198I): 65-89. [BACK]

4. The exaltation of the prostitute comes in part from anarcho-socialist protests over the white slave trade and the traffic of women. For a detailed discussion of this, see Molyneux, " No God ," 135. [BACK]

5. On the social organization of women, see Sandra McGee Deutsch, Counterrevolution in Argentina, 1900-1932: The Argentine Patriotic League (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), especially chapters 1 and 2. On women's participation in labor, McGee states: "In 1914, females were 22% of the labor force over fourteen years of age. As many as 30% of all industrial and manual laborers were female, as were 52% of instructors and educators. And 84% of those providing personal services. . . . The fact that women tended to work longer hours under worse conditions for less pay than men led some of them to participate in the labor and feminist movements" (15). [BACK]

6. On the feminist demands for democratic reform, see Cynthia Jeffress Little, "Education, Philanthropy, and Feminism: Components of Argentine Womanhood, 1860-1926," in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives , ed. Asunción Lavrín (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), 235-253. [BACK]

7. See Lila Sosa de Newton, Las argentinas de ayer a hoy (Buenos Aires: Zanetti, 1967), especially chapter 3. [BACK]

8. On Pan-Americanism, see Francesca Miller, this volume. On women in Cuba, see Karen Lynn Stoner, "In Defense of Motherhood: Divorce Law in Cuba During the Early Republic," Journal of Third World Societies , 15 (March 1981): 1-32. On the women's movements demands for reform of the Argentine civic code, see Catalina Wainerman and Marysa Navarro, El trabajo de la mujer en la Argentina: Un análisis preliminar de las ideas dominantes en las primeras décadas del siglo XX , Cuadernos del CENEP 7 (Buenos Aires: CENEP, 1979), 111-114. [BACK]

9. Even the socialist movement, though supportive of women's rights, clearly urged women to celebrate their roles as mothers and cherish the family nest. [BACK]

10. In Argentina, for example, a Society of Beneficence was established in the early nineteenth century in which women were invited to participate actively in the administration of a public school system for girls and, later, in social welfare programs. Women were charged with the management of the society and the administration of programs. On this topic, see Cynthia Jeffress Little, "The Society of Beneficence in Buenos Aires, 1823-1900" (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1980). [BACK]

11. On the hygiene movement and legal restrictions on women see Donna Guy, "Lower Class Families, Women, and the Law in Nineteenth-Century Argentina," Journal of Family History , 10, 3 (Autumn 1985): 318-322. [BACK]

12. See, for example, the advice manuals printed by the Argentine Antonio Zamora through his publishing firm, Claridad. Although supposedly representing the interests of women, these manuals were clearly pornographic. [BACK]

13. Even in the Pan-Americanist women's journal Mujeres de América , the column on health and hygiene advised women to serve their husbands. Beatriz Sarlo has commented on the representations of women's bodies in popular fiction in her El imperio de los sentimientos (Buenos Aires: Catálogos, 1985). [BACK]

14. José Ingenieros. Tratado del amor , ed. Anibal Ponce (Buenos Aires: Ramón J. Roggero, 1950). break [BACK]

15. Ricardo Rojas, La literatura argentina (Buenos Aires: Librería La Facultad, 1924), vol. 1. [BACK]

16. Rojas, ''Los modernos," in La literatura argentina 7:767. See also his La restauración nacionalista: Informe sobre educación (Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Justicia e Instrucción Pública, 1909), in which he describes the moral crisis of modern Argentina. [BACK]

17. Manuel Gálvez, "La literatura argentina contemporánea," in La vida múltiple (Buenos Aires: Nosotros, 1916), 210-211. [BACK]

18. "Protestamos," Inicial 1, 1 (1923): 5-6. [BACK]

19. "Directrices: feminismo y democratización," Revista de Avance 3 (1929): 36. [BACK]

20. See Stoner, "In Defense of Motherhood." [BACK]

21. Elizabeth A. Kuznesof and Robert Oppenheimer, "The Family and Society in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: An Historiographical Introduction," Journal of Family History 10, 3 (Autumn 1985): 215-234. [BACK]

22. See Ricardo Rodríguez Molas, "Sexo y matrimonio en la sociedad tradicional," Todo Es Historia 16, 187 (December 1982): 8-43. [BACK]

23. Max Horkheimer, "Authority and the Family," in Critical Theory: Selected Essays , trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 99. [BACK]

24. I have also written about the evolution of the literary treatment of Manuela Rosas in "Nationalism and the Discourse on Gender" (Paper delivered at the Seventh Berkshire Conference on Women's History, Wellesley College, June 1987). On the representation of women in nineteenth-century Argentina, see my "Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Family and Literary Culture in Mid-Nineteenth Century Argentina," in Hernán Vidal, ed., Cultural and Historical Grounding for Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Feminist Literary Criticism (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1989), 517-566. [BACK]

25. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977). [BACK]

26. Manuel Gálvez, La maestra normal (Buenos Aires: Tor, n.d.). [BACK]

27. See, for example, Oliverio Girondo, Espantapájaros , in Obras completas , ed. Enrique Molina (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1968), or Vicente Huidobro, Temblor del cielo , in Altazor/Temblor del cielo , ed. René de Costa (Madrid: Cátedra, 1981). [BACK]

28. I have addressed this question in my Lenguaje e ideología: Las escuelas argentinas de vanguardia (Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1986). [BACK]

29. See "Parnaso Satírico" in Martin Fierro magazine (Buenos Aires, 1924-1927), a page of limericks and expressions of mutual admiration by the avant-garde poets of the 1920s. Of interest also is the publication of poetry in a female voice about prostitutes involved in Argentine white slavery. This poetry, which poked fun at the travails of women of the streets, was authored by César Tiempo under the pseudnonym Clara Béter in a volume called Versos de una  . . . (1926). It inspired a series of critical discussions by Tiempo's male colleagues, who knew of the false authorship but preferred to express mock horror about the trade of prostitutes for the purpose of literary fun. For details of the controversy, see César Tiempo, Clara Béter y otras fatamorganas (Buenos Aires: Peña Lillo, 1974). [BACK]

30. These critical discussions are generated from Freud's essay "The Family Romance," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), 9: 237-241. Lacanian readers of literature have emphasized the missing father as the principal generator of fiction. See, for example, continue

Robert Con Davis, ed., The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981). [BACK]

31. Marthe Robert, Novela de los orígenes u orígenes de la novela (Madrid: Taurus, 1973). [BACK]

32. Teresa de la Parra, Ifigenia: Diario de una señorita que escribió porque se fastidiaba (Paris: Casa Editorial Franco-Iberoamericana, 1924). [BACK]

33. Elizabeth Garrels, in Las grietas de la ternura: Nueva lectura de Teresa de la Parra (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1986), makes note of de la Parra's exchanges on the topic of women's position in the world of letters. [BACK]

34. Cynthia Steele has suggested that much of the fiction by Latin American women fits the category of "failed bildungsroman," in her article. "Toward a Socialist Feminist Criticism of Latin American Literature," Ideologies and Literature 4, 16 (1983): 327. [BACK]

35. As a discussion relevant to my argument, it is worth considering Margaret Homans's essay, "Her Very Own Howl: The Ambiguities of Representation in Recent Women's Fiction," Signs 9, 2 (1983): 186-205, in which she studies the uses of nonverbal utterances in women's fiction. [BACK]

36. María Luisa Bombal, La última niebla (Buenos Aires: Andina, 1981). [BACK]

37. I have commented on the uses of female irrationalism and flight in the two writers mentioned in "Sara de Etcheverts: The Contradictions of Literary Feminism," in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols , ed. Beth K. Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 243-258. [BACK]

38. Teresa de la Parra, Memorias de Mamá Blanca (1929; reprint Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1966). [BACK]

39. Elizabeth Abel addresses the subtext of female bonding in "Narrative Structure(s) and Female Development: The Case of Mrs. Dalloway ," in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development , eds. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983), 161-185. [BACK]

40. Norah Lange, Los dos retratos (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1956). break

* The work presented here has been shaped by discussions with many people. My colleagues in the UC-Stanford Seminar have been an ongoing source of guidance and inspiration. I am also indebted to many graduate students in the Department of Spanish and Portugese at Stanford, who have been vital interlocutors on issues of gender and literary history over the past several years. In particular, this paper has benefited from discussions with Magali Roy (on women and nationalism), Nina Menéndez (on Gorriti), Marcela Prado (on Mercedes Marín del Solar), Elena Feder (on de la Parra), Efraín Kristal (on indigenismo ), and Linda Koski (on Brunet and Bombal). [BACK]