Forging a Healthy and Beautiful Body

Chapter 4 examines the popular media’s campaign to promote female physical culture in order to show how notions of health and beauty were used to promote and justify women’s exercise and how these conceptions redefined traditional ideas of femininity. Physical culture’s appeal was based on its combination of a modern agenda, which focused on the social rewards of individual physical fitness and beauty, and nationalist and eugenic concerns. A well-built, healthy, beautiful female body went hand in hand with a vigorous nation.

The Flapper and the Joven Moderna

Chapter 2 studies how the flapper, the archetypical modern girl, was construed by popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Mass media was engaged in a debate about the defining traits of the American flapper and her Argentine counterpart. While the flapper inhabited a distant land, the joven moderna combined popular fashions and mannerisms both foreign and domestic. Portrayed as an upper-class character, she went beyond the traditional female role of the devoted daughter. An oversimplified media construction, the Argentine flapper alerted the public of the dangerous effects of international consumer capitalism and Americanization on gender and national identity.

Embodying the Nation

Chapter 5 turns to modern girls who were called to serve the nation through their beauty. Beauty contests, such as Miss Universe, functioned as an arena for debates about Argentina’s ideals of womanhood and its national identity. Beauty contestants embodied an ideal that valorized whiteness as it emerged from the intermingling of diverse “white European races,” and promoted a mollified version of the upper-class modern girl figure. At the same time, in forging images of argentinidad and representing a modern Argentine femininity, the winners of these contests embodied values of nationhood that symbolized the progress Argentina was achieving, as well as its potential among nations.

Building a Modern Nation

Chapter 1 examines the sociocultural changes that characterized Argentina, and particularly Buenos Aires, in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the emergence of a consumer society and the expanded presence of women in public spaces. Rapid social and cultural transformations sparked a debate on the promises and perils of becoming a modern nation. Intellectual movements and government programs to promote cultural nationalism advanced their own ways of reconciling modernity and local tradition, while popular culture became a platform for debating the role of women in constructing a modern national identity.

Introduction

The introduction situates the figure of the Argentine joven moderna within current debates on consumer culture, mass culture, and alternative modernities. It explores cultural commodities as key to analyzing social and cultural constructions of femininity and examines the central role of gender in discourses of modern nationhood.

Epilogue

The epilogue examines Peronism, and especially Evita’s figure, through the lens of the reformulation of gender identities in 1920s and 1930s and highlights the changes and continuities that the Peronist administration brought regarding female representations and their role in the gendering of Argentina.

The Modern Working Girl

Chapter 3 turns from the upper-class flapper to representations of female workers in order to explore how pink-collar labor impacted women’s daily lives, especially in the areas of dating and fashion. By tracing the representations and lived experience of these working modern girls, the chapter examines the contradiction expressed by the popular media, which alternatively praised the freedom, autonomy, and personal fulfillment associated with female work while at the same time condemning the effect of work and consumption on traditional gender roles.