White Slavery and Mothers Alive and Dead: The Troubled Meeting of Sex, Gender, Public Health and Progress in Latin America (review)

Historians interested in issues ranging from Pan Americanism and gender studies to the intersections of law and science will welcome this new book. The short collection unites for the first time Donna Guy's published essays on such topics as women's labor in northwestern Argentina, social reformers Emilio and Gabriela Coni, and the relationships among feminists, social workers and pediatricians in the hemisphere-wide child rights movement. Spanning nearly two decades of work, the volume enables the reader to survey a variety of topics related to gender, modernity and politics in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Latin America, and to appreciate how one historian's approaches to the issues have changed over time.

In a new Introduction, Guy explains that her interest in gender history grew out of her work in labor history and that her research methods are firmly grounded in the fields of legal history and political economy. The first selection, the author's 1994 speech to the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) that was reprinted in The Americas that same year, reviews the development of the field of gender history in Latin America. In the three essays that follow Guy demonstrates how a gendered analysis can help historians understand how such intellectual and social movements as feminism, higienismo, Pan Americanism and child's rights developed in hemispheric context.

Guy's work regarding gender, labor and health in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Argentina appears in the second half of the volume. This section offers readers an opportunity to track how Guy's approach to specific issues has changed over a nineteen-year period. "Lower-Class Families, Women and the Law in Nineteenth-Century Argentina," which appeared in the Journal of Family History in 1985, offers an analysis of patria potestad, or "the right of male heads of households to control family members, including their labor" (p. 108), based largely on published legislation. However, "Parents Before the Tribunals: The Legal Construction of Patriarchy in Argentina," which appeared in Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux's collection, Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America (2000), uses unpublished court cases to reconstruct "how men and women discursively defended their custodial privileges in court" (p. 173).

Because all of the essays in White Slavery and Mothers Alive and Dead has appeared previously in diverse venues, some information is repeated. For example, the articles on feminism, higienismo, and Pan Americanism appeared in such publications as the Journal of Family History and Gender and History. Although the articles treat different subjects—one examines the rise of the welfare state in Latin America while another examines the different ideologies and personalities that underpinned women's participation in Pan American movements to promote the rights of the child—some of background information is duplicated. Also, there are no footnotes or endnotes in the collection. Instead, the reader interested in knowing where a particular source was published or archived is encouraged to consult the original publication. Guy does address her major sources in the bibliographic essay, however, and reference information is clearly presented and acknowledged at the end of the volume. Nevertheless, readers without access to these earlier editions may find this omission frustrating.

This new volume provides the specialist and non-specialist, alike, with an engaging introduction to the way the sub-field of gender history has developed over the past two decades. By posing challenges for research in the coming decades, moreover, the collection serves as a foundation upon which future historians interested in gender, society and the state in Latin America will want to build.