Entre silencios y voces: Genero e historia en America Central, 1750-1990 (review)

Entre silencios y voces: Género e historia en América Central, 1750-1990. Edited by EUGENIA RODRÍGUEZ SÁENZ. San José, Costa Rica: Centro Nacional para el Desarrollo de la Mujer y la Familia, 1997. Tables. Notes. xvi, 254 pp. Paper.

This book is a collection of ten essays originally presented at the Third Central American Congress of History in 1996. (Several of the contributions have recently been reprinted in English in Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, ed. Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux [2000].) The work announces from the first pages that it intends to demonstrate that women have had a "growing, decisive, and transformative" effect on Central American society. It also aims to disprove claims that Central American women are passive subjects, incapable of challenging patriarchal authority (p. vii). Overall, the book succeeds in its aim of revindicating female agency, but this reader at least was left with the feeling that doing this is a fairly easy task.

The least ambitious chapters stick narrowly to this agenda, but the volume also contains some excellent historical research. The chapter by Eugenia Rodríguez is a first-rate study of the arrival of "bourgeois marriage" in the Central Valley of Costa Rica. Rodríguez argues that the discourse of companionate marriage legitimated patriarchal domination, rather than undermining it. Her well-documented study thus offers a critique of Lawrence Stone's view that the companionate marriage replaced the patriarchal marriage. Similarly, the chapter by Victoria González on Somocista women criticises the existing historiography for implying that Nicaraguan women supported only left-wing movements. Her stimulating study notes the close relationship that developed between the Somoza family and the Ala Feminina del Partido Liberal, which Luis Somoza referred to, not as the wing, but as the pechuga of the Liberal Party (p. 198). Elizabeth Dore's fine chapter on the impact of coffee cultivation on the Nicaraguan town of Diriomo demonstrates that the arrival of coffee caused a cultural revolution, as well as an economic one.

Several promising chapters examine the construction of masculinity. Carmen Murillo Chaverri suggests that the railway--the falo ferrovial--played a vital role in shaping Costa Rican ideas of masculinity during the nineteenth century (p. 115). Her study paints an evocative picture of the railroad as a site of national longing, but leaves the reader wanting to know more about the particular sort of masculinity it helped create. Rocío Tábora examines the autobiographies of three Honduran politicians in an attempt to probe the impact of civil war on men's sense of themselves. Femininity, rather than masculinity, is the topic of the multiauthored chapter on child abandonment in Costa Rica, which suggests that the idea of the state as a civilizing and hygienic force complemented, rather than competed with, the moralizing language of the nineteenth-century Catholic Church. In a chapter that would have benefited from a broader historiographical horizon, the authors argue that female-run charitable organizations and the courts concurred in blaming mothers (and exonerating fathers) for the problem of child abandonment.

Other chapters aim rather lower; for example, in their description of the Costa Rican community of Palmares, Yamileth González García and María Pérez Iglesias argue that women formed an indispensable pillar of rural life. The chapters thus vary in quality and ambition. They also reveal varying degrees of familiarity with current historiographical debates outside Central America. Several of the chapters offer counterexamples to the rather dismal picture of Latin American women's history as fundamentally derivative painted in the chapter by Virginia María Carvajal. Overdependence on the U.S. historiography does not appear to be the principal problem. In sum, the book will be of value to scholars and students interested in the construction of gender identity in Central America, and in women's participation in...