The political status of South American men and women changed radically in the course of the nineteenth century. From subjects of Iberian absolutism without political rights, they became potential citizens of independent republics founded on the principle of liberty. The transition was spasmodic and the outcome assured only in retrospect. For the people living through these turbulent times the political future was uncertain, its resolution largely contingent on where they lived. If, in the 1810s, they lived in areas which acknowledged the legitimacy of the 1812 Spanish liberal constitution, they were governed by a constitutional monarchin absentia; in liberated...

The first part of this book examines the rhetorical strategies employed in Spanish American independence discourse, which predicates individual rights on the male universal subject. A strategic rereading of the canonical works of the military and political leaders of the Spanish American revolutions will draw attention to what Bourdieu refers to as ‘le mode d’opération propre de l’habitus sexué et sexuant et les conditions de sa formation’ in those texts (Bourdieu 1990: 11). Simón Bolívar, the wealthy, white, European-educated, Venezuelan aristocrat (son of a Basque landowner), fought between 1810 and 1824 to emancipate Spanish America from the Spanish Crown. He...

Although clearly not averse to rhetoric, Bolívar was sceptical of literary mythification where he and his generals were concerned. He disapproved, for example, of José Joaquín Olmedo’s epic poem ‘La Victoria de Junín’ (1825), which depicts him and his officers as the semi-divine heroes of Greek myth. In a letter to Olmedo he objected ‘Vd. nos hace a su modo poético y fantástico; y para continuar en el país de la poesía, la ficción y la fábula, vd. nos eleva con su deidad mentirosa’. Myth detracts from reality and devalues the efforts of real-life men; ‘vd. pues, nos ha sublimado...

The writings of Esteban Echeverría, like those of Bolívar and Bello, tend to mythify the feminine and historicise the masculine, which, in turn, extend to troped representations of man and woman in imaginative literature, as we shall see. This chapter draws on recent work on war, gender and the history of masculinities, in particular the concept of hegemonic masculinities (Tosh 2004: 54), as mobilised by historians, to explore the development of contradictory or competing masculinities (including revolutionary masculinities) in nineteenth-century politics and war. Joan B. Landes’s discussion of heterosocial desire in French republican culture highlights the symbolic significance of the...

The final chapter of the first part of this book explores representations of the feminine in satire, one of the most successful literary genres in late colonial Spanish America, and further enquires into the relational complexities of gender (vis-à-vis class and race), as is evidenced so far in the work of Echeverría. It then goes on to suggest how women writers might resist.

Satire flourished in neoclassical Spain and the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and has continued until today. As we have seen, it appears in Echeverría’s writings and to some extent in Bolívar’s. A principal structural...

María Leoncia Pérez Rojo’s poetry of resistance appropriately introduces the second part of this book, which focuses on women’s literary culture. How did women inscribe gender, and how did they conceptualise sexual difference in their writings? What kind of dialogue did they initiate with the canonical texts and genderdoxastudied so far? These questions can only be answered with reference to historical context. Before analysing in detail a selection of women’s published and unpublished writings, therefore, this chapter will provide an overview of the impact of the Spanish American Wars of Independence on women and on gender.

Women have...

As will have become apparent, despite efforts to restrict their education many Spanish American women were literate during the colonial period and were writing letters in the public and private spheres. The quality of education of women varied throughout Spanish America: in Peru, for example, the education of selected elite girls in convent schools had been formalised by the end of the sixteenth century (Martín 1983: 75); whereas Mexican laws in 1810 stated that women could be taught to read, but not to write. This was said to prevent women from composing love letters (Arrom 1985: 296). But such legal...

So far, this book has considered the physical political intervention of women and the political significance of their family networks, everyday lives and private correspondence. This chapter will study selected works of two of the earliest published women writers in post-independence Spanish America, Josefa Acevedo (b. 1803) and Mercedes Marín (b. 1804). The focus shifts to the literary cultural sphere of theletrados.Both writers are neglected and are thus poorly recognised. As women, they were hindered by negative symbolic capital, a direct consequence of the gendering of the socially female (Moi 1999: 291) (see Chapter 1). However, both were...

The idea that women’s political activism is stimulated by men going to war is a recurrent concept in women’s history and certainly applicable to Spanish America, as we have seen. This chapter, focusing on Brazil, will argue that it describes the Farroupilha or Ragamuffin Revolt of Rio Grande do Sul (1835–45) particularly well, not only as regards the changes wrought in women’s consciousness about their role in society, but also in respect of women’s self-perceptions in relation to Brazilian national and regional identities in the wake of formal independence in 1822. The Farroupilha Revolt has long since entered the...

The second quotation above is taken from a letter sent by the soon-to-be Argentine President, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, from New York to his friend Juana Manso on October 15 1867.¹ Sarmiento was consoling Manso, who had had foul-smelling plant gum (asafoetida) smeared on her dress and stones thrown at her by a group of men during a small ceremony marking the opening of the public library in Chivilcoy, in the Pampas. The object of their anger, Sarmiento writes, is not Manso’s speech on women’s education, nor that she is a writer and a teacher, but that she is a ‘mujer...

During and after independence, political rights continued to be denied to over half the population of Latin America on the basis of sexual difference, a predominant criterion for exclusion after the abolition of slavery and the ending of legal discrimination against indigenous and mixed-race groups. Gender polarity and power asymmetry persisted. Nevertheless, gender parameters shifted notably in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the dominant culture of the late colonial period, the feminine was perceived as a powerful threat to the rational order and authority of the paterfamilias and the colonial state; conversely, threats to the established order...