Colombianas en la vanguardia (review)

In 1971, Cohen, a North American anthropologist and ethnohistorian, published Las Colombianas ante la renovación universitaria, a study of the first women graduates who obtained professional degrees from Colombian universities in Bogotá and Medellín between 1930 and 1955. In this second work, she has selected 41 women from the original group and 34 of their children to explore in greater depth the ethnohistorical context surrounding the transformation of higher education for women in Colombia. Her goals were, first: to use the women's personal narratives to place their careers in broader context, and, second: to compare and contrast their experiences with those of their male and female children in the 1970s and 1980s. The result is a fascinating survey of developments in higher education over the past seventy years as well an important contribution to our understanding of the transformation of women's roles in Colombian society.

Cohen draws on primary and secondary sources located in Bogotá, Medellín, Washington, and New York archives, to trace these women's careers, almost all of whom earned degrees in medicine, dentistry, law, and engineering. She shows that while preliminary fissures in all male universities began in the 1920s, the real breakthrough occurred with the election of Enrique Olaya Herrera and the holding of the Fourth International Women's Conference in Bogotá in 1930, the passage of the Civil Code in 1932 and a presidential decree in 1933 which permitted women to earn bachelor degrees (bachilleratos) in secondary schools and to attend courses in public and private universities. Despite these legal breakthroughs, women "in the vanguard" had to overcome many personal and social obstacles to obtain their coveted degrees, and the individual stories of such salient figures as Paulina Gómez Vega, Gabriela Castro, and Cecilia López Restrepo are compelling reading.

However, the most interesting data is found in the penultimate chapter which deals with the experiences of the children of the "vanguard" women and underscores the enormous transformation in higher education that had occurred in the last half of the twentieth century. To cite just one example, in 1940 there were only ten universities in Colombia (five public and five private). By 1996 that number had grown to 92 universities including 39 public and 53 private. Unlike their parents, all but one member of the second generation attended private rather than public schools, and most completed additional training abroad, either in France or the United States. While a few young women specialized in dentistry, which by the 1980s had become a profession dominated by females, the majority majored in engineering, medicine, or law.

Both men and women of the second generation affirm that prejudices against women in university classrooms had virtually disappeared although perceived and real differences between the sexes remained. For example, women were believed to be "wiser and more critical than men . . . and more disciplined in their studies"(p. 289), while it was thought that male students lacked emotion and were guided more by the "left side of their brains" (p. 291). Once graduated, women received lower salaries than men occupying identical positions and suffered more from a lack of networking. Finally, opportunities for women to reach the highest posts in their chosen professions were more abundant in the public than the private sector. These disparities were especially noticeable in engineering, economy, and law, and they existed even when women and men had similar educational backgrounds.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of the experiences of the second generation is the degree to which their careers were unaffected by the turbulent political events of the 1970s and 1980s. Although Cohen does note that they shunned public universities for fear that frequent strikes might interrupt their training (p. 275), she describes their educational progress as straightforward, and upon graduation, the individuals returned to work at their careers in Bogotá or Medellín without...