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97 4 ► She’s Leaving Home young women, gender, and sexuality On May 29, 1962, Norma Penjerek, age seventeen, left her apartment in a traditional lower-middle-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires to attend a private English class. Her class ended at 7:30 p.m., yet she never came home. On June 1, her parents filed a missing-persons report. In mid-July, forensic tests confirmed their worst fears: a body found in the outskirts of Buenos Aires was identified as hers. What had happened to Norma Penjerek ? After a year had passed with no significant news, in July of 1963 a sex worker declared to a judge that Norma had fallen into the “trap” of one of the groups devoted to drugs and pornography—or, as contemporaries would say, invoking the title of Federico Fellini’s movie, into the “Dolce Vita”—and that the leader of the group later decided to kill her. The declaration was false, and the police never found Norma’s murderers. Perhaps because it went unresolved, the “Penjerek case” caused the most intense moral panic in 1960s Argentina. As the sociologist Stanley Cohen put it, moral panics emerge at times of social uncertainty, becoming events for “drawing the line” between those mores and behaviors that will be tolerated and those that won’t. Moral panics, he argues, are at the same time transparent—that is, anyone can know what is happening—and opaque, since their broader meanings are usually mediated.¹ The moral panic constructed around the Penjerek case served to address anxieties regarding the perceived vanishing of patriarchal authority and domesticity. More precisely, it constituted a response to the awareness that young women were metaphorically—and sometimes literally—leaving home. Young women experienced, carried out, and suffered from the consequences of the changes that the dynamics of sociocultural modernization entailed earlier and more dramatically than their male counterparts . The scholars who have studied the history of gender and sexuality in 1960s Argentina have thus far accounted for the opening up of new 98 She’s Leaving Home horizons for young women, chiefly among the middle classes, as well as for the prudent liberalization of sexual mores.² While most of these studies have focused on mid-term patterns of change, they have overlooked a more situational analysis of how change—as it related to young women’s lives—was shaped, understood, and debated. This chapter shows that las jóvenes (young women) or chicas (girls)—exchangeable terms in public vocabulary —practically contested prevalent ideas of “home” by remaining longer in the education system, fully participating in the labor market, helping shape youthful leisure activities, daring to experiment with new courtship conventions and to acknowledge publicly that they engaged in premarital sex, and marrying later in life. In doing so, young women in the 1960s challenged dominant ideals of domesticity premised on separated spheres for men and women and on equating womanhood with wifehood and motherhood. That ideal became normative for the middle classes in the first half of the twentieth century and, as scholars noted, for the working classes as well, chiefly during the Peronist regime (1946–55).³ In the late 1950s and early 1960s, young women occupied a problematic space: while their pursuit of renewed educational, labor, and cultural expectations signified a collective yearning for change, the resistance they faced revealed how entrenched the status quo was and how difficult change would be. In particular, young women’s changing experiences destabilized deep-seated notions of patriarchal authority; in the process women created countless dilemmas within their familial and cultural milieus. When young women’s expectations and experiences began to expand and shift, their choices of vocations, their leisure preferences, or their courtship practices became arenas of confrontation in many families. Although advisers in popular and feminine magazines and psychologists tried to help parents navigate this new reality, the dilemmas persisted and sometimes led to young women running away, perhaps as a rejection of what they perceived as parental authoritarianism. In a sensationalist fashion , the media and conservative Catholic sectors embedded the “tide-ofrunaways phenomenon” with sexual, cultural, and political meanings: the Penjerek case confirmed their fears, becoming an avenue for many unaffiliated parents to try to curtail their daughter’s growing autonomy and thus recuperate their perceived lost authority. In an extreme, heightened way, the Penjerek case also served to catapult discussions about young women and sexuality into the spotlight, and to respond to ongoing “liberalizing...

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