Gender, Welfare and the Catholic Church in Argentina: Conferencias de Senoras de San Vicente de Paul, 1890-1916

Between 1880 and 1916, elite women engaged in social welfare and transformed the politics of subordination in Argentina as they brokered a new accommodation between the Catholic Church and the Argentine state. Without ever claiming equality, women made it clear that the progress of the new nation--as male intellectuals and statesmen conceived it--could not be accomplished without their assistance. By stressing what they considered to be their essential contributions to social peace and national integration, elite women completely ignored both traditional and liberal ideas of the divisions between public and private responsibility without appearing to challenge gender norms.

These were not necessarily their goals, of course. Like female activists of the privileged classes throughout the Western world during this period, Argentine women helped shape the modern society that was emerging in unexpected ways from rapid urbanization and geographic mobility. In Argentina, however, the ways in which this process intersected with the consolidation of the state apparatus and the political situation of Catholicism enabled women to have extraordinary influence over the design of welfare programs and their operation.

Out of the handful of key associations that channeled women's energy during this time, the Conferences of Señoras de St. Vincent de Paul stood out not only because of its unambiguous embrace of Catholic ideology, but because of the vastness of its membership. It was the scale of the Vincentian endeavor that makes it such a crucial indicator of how ideas about both welfare and gender developed during the transitional era of the conservative republic before 1916. Guided by their General Council, the women volunteers in the Vincentian cause pragmatically approached the poor and utilized their faith to support the nation and the state. Only after they and their spiritual advisors perfected their ideas and their methods in Argentina, did the local ecclesiastical hierarchy come to appreciate women's contributions to the politics of Catholicism.

The lion's share of the scholarship that has investigated the conflicts between Catholics, liberals and socialists during this era has not been devoted to the Catholics, and certainly not to the Vincentian women. Argentina's most prolific historian of Catholicism, Thomas Auza, has shown little interest in women's activities, casting them outside the field of social Catholicism in his most important work. ¹ A similar imbalance has also characterized women's history, with a far greater share of investigative effort going to socialist and/or feminist women. ²

Important exceptions to this situation are the pioneering efforts of Marysa Navarro, Catalina Wainerman, and Sandra McGee Deutsch. These authors explored the Catholic Church's pronouncements on women in general and on women workers in particular. They were the first to systematically outline the elaborate philosophical framework for women's nearly compulsory role as wife and mother, clearly subordinate to husband and father, defined by Scripture and papal encyclicals, and supported in the writings of important Argentine clerics. ³ At the same time, these historians were pioneers in underscoring the ambiguity of the Church's response to poor working women, as individual clerics and important lay leaders expressed compassion or even encouragement to women forced to seek employment.

In weighing the impact of Catholic teaching on gender, however, it is vital to consider the organizational efforts of elite Catholic women who were the prime audience for Catholic doctrine and the most likely agents to disseminate it among women of the popular classes. Compared to other regions of Latin America and Europe, the Catholic Church was historically weak in Argentina and faced new challenges in the 1880s and 1890s. Even in Córdoba, where the Church was historically strong, the ratio of clergy to population was very low. Having never extended a pastoral mission to the popular classes of the littoral, in the 1880s the Church fought for influence in "an atmosphere of...