Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta and the Quest for National Solidarity in Cuba

By the mid-1920s, the feminist movement was gaining strong support within Cuban society, at the same time that Cubans were growing discontent with the repression and corruption of Gerardo Machado’s dictatorial regime. Within this context, women writers like Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta fused the feminist fight for women’s rights with a nationalist movement against the oppressive regime, transforming a discourse of female solidarity into a yearning for national unity. This article proposes the writings of Rodríguez Acosta as an example of the ways in which Cuban feminists engaged in the political dialogue of the 1920s and 1930s. It argues that Rodríguez Acosta’s newspaper articles and fiction elaborated a notion of solidarity, which provided an ideology that coincided with the nationalist agenda of the time, and offered feminists a new rhetoric for political action. While the relationship between female and male characters in novels such as El triunfo de la débil presa illustrated the model of unity that Rodríguez Acosta wished for, her newspaper articles asserted the positive effect of that solidarity in the national arena.