Colombianas en la vanguardia (review)

In Colombianas en la vanguardia, Lucy M. Cohen attempts to make visible the crucial roles women played in the complex transformations of higher education in Colombia during the last 70 years. Expanding on her earlier work (Las colombianas ante la renovación universitaria, Ediciones Tercer Mundo, 1971) concerning the first female graduates to obtain a professional education in Colombia, Cohen selected 41 women from this group and 34 of their children to produce an ethnohistorical account of how women actively created—and experienced—new opportunities for professional training. Combining personal narratives of women who earned degrees in medicine, dentistry, law, and engineering with variety of written sources (newspapers, government publications, personal archives), Cohen argues that the entrance of women into the university was "a revolutionary phenomenon that affected the society as a whole" (p. xiii).

Specifically, Cohen describes how during the turmoil of the late 1920s women began to struggle for new opportunities to broaden their participation in higher education and new forms of employment. While women were not formally excluded from the professions, they could not earn a degree at the university level because they were not usually allowed to obtain bachelor's degrees (bachilleratos)—a quintessential formal requirement for professional education. Although during the 1920s conservative administrations made some effort to address the question of women's education, the emergence of the liberal republic during the early 1930s offered more favorable conditions for the expansion of female education. These favorable conditions, argues Cohen, crucially helped—and were shaped by—women and their struggle to obtain a university-level education. The fourth International Women's Conference in 1930, the passage of the civil code in 1932, Enrique Olaya Herrera's decree in 1933, the reconfiguration and expansion of colegios, and the reorganization of the Universidad Nacional in 1936 created opportunities for women to earn bachelor's degrees and, by extension, to study for professional degrees. These critical transformations united the feminist movement against the obstacles erected by those strongly opposed to women's professional education, who posited "feminine incompetence," problems of questioning traditional gender roles and compromise of women's femininity and reputation.

Cohen also contends that these women's careers demonstrate that they crucially contributed to society in three important ways. They opened new spaces for women, exercised moral influence, and attempted to implement several policies designated to serve the community: in particular, to address "problems regarding women's situation" (p. 243). In addition, Cohen describes the generational shifts between those "vanguard women" who initiated the struggle for participation in higher education and their children. She asserts that although women have produced "remarkable changes" in female higher education, "cultural notions" about the differences between the sexes have created salary hierarchies between men and women with the same educational background.

While Cohen describes the experiences of these women and their children, she does not fully explore the reconfiguration of gender as women's participation in higher education expanded. For instance, Cohen argues that by the 1980s, dentistry had become a female-dominated profession. Aside from some few descriptions, Cohen does not inquire deeply into how the entrance of women into a profession previously considered masculine reconfigured gender relations. Nor she does offer a careful analysis of the gendered justifications that shaped the distribution of professions.

As a result, there is a strong tendency in the book to homogenize women as historical actors, assuming that "woman" denotes a common identity in their political struggles. The book makes clear that these women played critical roles in in-creasing access to education and professional training. Yet Cohen ignores how these processes created differences among women and affected them in different (and often contradictory) ways. When these professional women became influential in the implementation of policies addressing the "woman question," she neglects a more careful analysis of how these norms created new circumstances for different social sectors. How...