New Technologies, New Work

This chapter argues that towards the end of the nineteenth century in Spanish America the acceleration of technological innovation and the development of a middle class created new opportunities for middle-class women to enter the labor market. Although women increasingly worked outside the home, writers typically sent the message that women’s work is not valuable or important, that women should avoid work, especially paid work, as much as possible, and that men should help them stay out of the labor force and the capitalist job market. This chapter reads these statements as contesting certain discourses of modernity from the metropolis that privileged women’s entry into the public sphere via paid employment as a vital component of the modernizing project and as taking advantage of modernity’s newfound emphasis on domesticity. Technologies of transportation (trains) and communication (telephones) in Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera’s La novela del tranvía, the Chilean journals Zig-Zagand Familia, and the Guatemalan La Ilustración Guatemalteca. Depictions of work, consumer culture, and gender in Gorriti’s La oasis en la vida, César Duáyen’s Mecha Iturbe and Federico Gamboa’s Santa are also analysed.

Public Space/Private Discourse

The chapter argues that the notions of public and private, while mapped onto exterior and interior spaces respectively—the street and public institutions vs. the home—are uncontainable within supposedly set parameters. The permeability of the barriers between exterior and interior means that private and public become enmeshed as both positive and negative, sometimes simultaneously. Using Habermas’s concept of private and public spaces, the chapter analyzes the countryside, small villages, and cities represented in, respectively, María by Jorge Isaacs, Aves sin nido by Clorinda Matto de Turner, Martín Rivas by Alberto Blest Gana, and La mestiza by Eligio Ancona and discusses how these authors explore, test, and question the ways in which social norms are mapped onto physical and psychic spaces. As these representations enforce or subvert particular behavioral codes, they also draw attention to the constructed nature of the ways in which human beings possess and use the spaces around them. These novels perpetuate the separation of public and private spaces and the fixed gender roles assigned to each space to encourage the incipient bourgeoisie and its accompanying middle-class ideals. The insistent linkage of gender identity and space results in restrictions on women’s mobility, literal and metaphorical.

Introduction

Distinguishing between the physical phenomena of modernization and the rhetorical conditions of modernity, this chapter argues that during the nineteenth century in Spanish America, men and women took advantage of the rhetoric of modernity in order to attach their own, sometimes very different, agendas to discourses about modernity and that they responded to modernity based on their attitudes about gender. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the field of cultural production, the chapter explains the book’s inclusion of multiple texts. It argues that the malleability of the discourses of modernity enables writers to use gender as a staging-ground for ideas about national progress and also to advance arguments about the importance of women in the nation.

Women’s Education

This chapter argues that the plasticity of discourses about modernity meant that both those who favored women’s full access to higher education and those who wanted more modest improvements that did not threaten the status quo deployed the same series of concepts about modernity, progress, and women’s role in the emerging nation-states. Ambivalence about women’s role is demonstrated in La emancipada by Miguel Riofrío, which limits its argument for education for women by depicting an overly educated heroine who is socially destructive. The chapter also analyzes essays in the periodicals La Aljaba, El Museo Literario, El Perú Ilustrado, and the positivist journal Violetas del Anáhuac as well as Juana Manuela Gorriti’s literary salons and another essay by Laureana Wright de Kleinhans.

Constructions of Domesticity

The chapter argues that discourses of domesticity were connected to modernizing ideals, resistance to social change, and conflicts over gender and family roles, and these meanings often existed simultaneously and even within the same text or cultural product. Nineteenth-century men and women created images of domestic life to present arguments about the many issues to which they related domesticity and to promote ideas about the potential or actual roles for women in society at large. By claiming continuity between the home and the nation, authors of domestic narratives made the case for the importance of women’s role in constructing and maintaining the nation. The division between private and public space gave rise to domestic discourse and the theme of the angel in the house but because that division was rhetorical, many writers envisioned a connectedness between the two realms that allowed for the possibility of women’s seamless movement from the domestic to the public realm. Magazines from Mexico and El Salvador are analysed along with Ignacio Altamirano’s El Zarco, Soledad Acosta de Samper’s novels Laura and Una holandesa en América, and short stories and Cocina ecléctica by Juana Manuela Gorriti.