True Womanhood in Latin America

Since 1966, the image of ideal, nineteenth-century middle-class wom anhood described by Barbara Welter has shaped not only U.S. history, but also women's history generally. It described a society that perceived itself as literate as well as ethnically and religiously homogenous (even if it was not), where male patriarchs could support their kin through their own labor so that women could remain at home. With the separation of spheres, politics seemed to have no place in the home, and Protestantism, marriage, and domestic obligations shaped women's daily lives. After 1860, this domestic tranquility was no longer possible because of the onset of the U.S. Civil War. Did this image have any relevance for Latin America?

Although there were journals that produced articles for women and even some women's journals in early post-independence Latin America, many of the former were written by men, and the latter reached a narrow urban audience. Often published for only a few years, journals such as O Journal das Senhoras (Brazil, 1852-1855), El Aguila Mexicana (Mexico, 1826), and La Alborada del Plata (Argentina, 1870s and 1880s) remain a testimony to a desire to create a modern Latin American woman, but one that affected few women. Women's magazines began to appear with some regularity by the late nineteenth century. ¹

For most Latin American women, the opportunity to join the ranks of "true women" came in the twentieth century, rather than the nineteenth, and the ideologies that guided them were inspired less by religion and literacy than by nationalism and public health campaigns. Prior to that time, the absence of significant industrialization, generally low levels of literacy, and periods of intermittent and violent civil wars did not empower the weak and amorphous middle classes to create new gender ideologies based on the virtues of female domesticity. The impetus came from elsewhere.

Struggles to control the power and influence of the dominant Catholic Church led to strong anti-clerical movements throughout the region, and their efforts to secularize society ranged from relatively successful in Argentina to extremely problematic in Peru, and even led to such religious rebellions as the 1926 Cristero rebellion in Mexico. In the meantime, the number of female religious in Latin America declined, but they still provided an alternative to modern secular womanhood as new orders focused on such professional tasks as teaching, nursing, and operating prisons. For this reason, the proponents of the modern woman emerged more frequently from secular than religious milieus.

As the vanguard of a modernizing rhetoric, public health programs seemed to be as effective as Protestant moral reform campaigns in encouraging women to care for their children, avoid alcohol, and assume domestic responsibilities. Many of the new professionals who oversaw them were clearly middle class, and although they rarely talked about their reforms as class based, they readily identified the poor as the source of problems, and education and medicine as the cure. Thus they set themselves up as an educated professional class that clearly presaged the rise of bourgeois values.

Unlike in the United States, it was impossible to ignore racial and ethnic groups and their influence in Latin American societies. Ethnic diversity included Caribbean and Brazilian societies with high proportions of Afro-Latin Americans, Indian and mestizo Mesoamerica and Andean countries, and Argentina and the Río de la Plata region with a predominant European immigrant population. Although white experts dominated the professional discussions, such diversity prevented the creation of a single voice that could define the nature of ideal womanhood, although the upper classes tended to imitate European and U.S. fashions and practices. One might even question whether Latin America ever experienced a period of "Victorianism" in the early nineteenth century: in Mexico City, for example, a significant portion of the poor population could not afford clothing, and many upper-class women did not know how to maintain households that conformed to European standards. This situation...