The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women’s Circuit, 1876–1910 by Ronald Briggs (review)

In The Moral Electricity of Print, Ronald Briggs, an associate professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultures at Barnard College, has provided us with an insightful commentary on an important and, hitherto, little appreciated group of women writers, artists, and educators who met, on a regular basis, in Lima, Peru, during the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century. Apropos of this topic, the too-long-undervalued contributions made by Spanish American women to our now expanded, more hemispheric sense of America, Briggs cites Beatriz Urraca, who envisions a new “female inter-American intellectual network,” one that would draw together writers, educators, and artists from a variety of New World cultures long handicapped by isolation, discrimination, and patriarchy (97; also 188). Briggs also reminds us of the importance of literary study to both pedagogy and nation building. In an age when humanistic study is under attack, this book demonstrates why the ability to read, write, and discuss with precision and logic is essential to a host of civic issues, including those germane to the nature of education, national identity, and women’s rights.

After a very useful introduction “Aesthetics of the Cosmopolitan Teacher,” and a concise yet intellectually expansive conclusion, a perusal of the book’s five chapters provides the reader with a solid sense of its concerns and discussions: (1) “Independence and the Book in Subjunctive”; (2) “Exemplary Autodidacts”; (3) “Collective Feminist Biography”; (4) “Novelistic Education, or, the Making of the Pan-American Reader”; and (5) “Educational Aesthetics and the Social Novel.” The author’s clear focus on how a renovated and more progressive pedagogy can inculcate into the young the values and ethical norms they will need to lead rich, full, and productive lives is refreshing. And, as he also makes clear, literature can, and must, have a role in this new understanding of what a proper education is, for both men and women. In making this argument, and on basing it largely on a group of women writers from late nineteenth-century Spanish America, Briggs addresses an issue very relevant today, the worth of literary and linguistic study. The argument he makes here is thus very pertinent to our own fraught time and place.

As the introduction makes clear, The Moral Electricity of Print will develop a comparative and, to a degree, inter-American perspective on its subject matter, which centers on the “veladas literarias” initially hosted by the exiled Argentine writer, Juana Manuela Gorriti, in Lima and attended by such luminaries as Clorinda Matto de Turner, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, Soledad Acosta de Samper, and Teresa González de Fanning, among many others. While the “participants in these veladas harbored significant philosophical and political differences,” and while some were more writers than others, they “were united on two major issues: the need for increased educational opportunities for women and the importance of public morality as a political foundation for a functioning liberal republic” (2). As the author correctly notes, these get-togethers were widely covered in the local press and, since they exerted considerable influence beyond the borders of Lima and Peru, they must also be appreciated in their comparative and hemispheric context.

In convincing fashion, Briggs argues that the writers and thinkers of the “Lima circle” develop a “discourse of Latin American feminism” that is, in his view, “inseparable from” both “a discourse on pedagogy and publishing” and from one dealing with the creation of a new kind of American novel, one closely attuned to issues of women’s rights and to the creation of new and more just American cultures (12–13; 155–81). Briggs shows how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly, would emerge as a major influence on the aesthetic and political thinking of the women in...