Searching for the Oasis in Life: Fashion and the question of female emancipation in late nineteenth-century Argentina

Americas

Volumn 60, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 363-390

  Root, Regina A ^a  

^a Dept of Economics and Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy at the College of William and Mary   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 65849120220     PISSN: 00031615     EISSN: 15336247     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tam.2004.0028     Document Type: Review

References (76)

1. See Oasis en la vida (Buenos Aires: Compañía Sud-Americana de Billetes de Bancos, 1888), p. 57.
2. See, for instance, Stephen Kent's study of Anatomy and Destiny: A Cultural History of the Human Body (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1975)
3. and Helene E. Roberts' essay on "The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman," in Signs: Journal of Woman in Culture and Society (Spring 1977; 2: 554-69).
4. Valerie Steele writes, "It is absurd to blame clothing for limiting women, and pointless to blame "men" or "society" for forcing women to wear restrictive or "feminine" dress" (Fashion and Eroticism, 246).
5. See Donald Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 96.
6. The interrelationship of Latin American dress, body and culture has received little attention until very recently. See Susana Saulquin's La moda en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1990)
7. Ruth Corcuera's Ponchos de las tierras del Plata (Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes in collaboration with Verstraeten Editores, 1998)
8. and Isabel Cruz de Amenábar's El traje. Transformaciones de una segunda piel (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 1996)
9. Fernando O. Assuncao's Pilchas criollas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1991)
10. and Regina Root, ed., Latin American Fashion (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, forthcoming).
11. See Roland Barthes, The Fashion System (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), p. 249.
12. Efrat Tseelon addresses the need for attention to sartorial diversity in order to resist stereotypes in the realm of fashion research. She especially questions the validity of the qualitative and quantitative divide that permeates this interdisciplinary field. See her "Clarifications in Fashion Research," in Through the Wardrobe: Women's Relationships with Their Clothes, edited by Ali Guy, Eileen Green and Maura Banim (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2001), p. 253.
13. For an analysis of the historical presentation of style, which C. Evans and M. Thornton believe has not accounted for the way in which "worn fashion generates meaning," see "Fashion, Representation, Femininity," in the Feminist Review, 38 (1991), pp. 48-66.
14. See "A Woman's Two Bodies: Fashion Magazines, Consumerism, and Feminism" in On Fashion, edited by Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 59.
15. I borrow this turn of phrase from Maura Banim, Eileen Green and Ali Guy. They write, "The fashion system is fluid enough to show 'gaping seams' which allow women some control over their clothed images and identities, spaces which permit personal agency and negotiated images." See their introduction to Through the Wardrobe: Women's Relationships with Their Clothes (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2001), p. 7.
16. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo. Civilizatión y barbarie (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1972)
17. and José Rivera Indarte's Rosas y sus opositores (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de mayo, 1853).
18. See issue number 1, November 18, 1837, pp. 2-3. For an in-depth analysis of La Moda and its sequel, El Iniciador (Montevideo, Uruguay), see Regina Root, "Tailoring the Nation: Fashion Writing in Nineteenth-Century Argentina" (Fashion Theory 2000, 4: pp. 89-118).
19. See Francine Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism. Women, Nation and literary Culture in Modern Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 23.
20. See Mary Louise Pratt's essay on "Women, Literature and National Brotherhood" in Women, Culture and Politics in Latin America, edited by the Seminar on Feminism and Culture in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 52.
21. On other occasions, I have discussed the question of public access through fashion. See "Tailoring the Nation: Fashion Writing in Nineteenth-Century Argentina," Fashioning the Body Politic, ed. Wendy Parkins (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002).
22. "La moda como metonimia" analyzes the peineton, a three-foot by three-foot comb worn by the fashionable women of Buenos Aires to assert their presence in the public sphere (Folios 1999; 35.6: pp. 3-11).
23. See La aljaba (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Estado, 1830), p. 1.
24. Nestor Tomás Aúza believes that a group of nameless women edited La camelia, despite popular attribution to Rosa Guerra. See his work on Periodismo y feminismo en la Argentina 1830-1900 (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1988), pp. 166-8.
25. The magazine does indeed use the pronoun "we" when discussing opinions on topics as diverse as literature and equal rights. See also Francine Masiello's edited volume on La mujer y el espacio publico. El periodismo femenino en la Argentina del siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: Feminaria Editora, 1994);
26. Janet Green-berg ("Towards a History of Women's Periodicals in Latin America: A Working Bibliography," in the Seminar on Feminism and Culture in Latin America's Women, Culture and Politics in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990);
27. and Lily Sosa de Newton in Narradoras argentinas (1852-1932) (Buenos Aires: Editorial Plus Ultra, 1995).
28. Published in London by R. Ackerman, Strand, and distributed throughout Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Perú, Chile and Buenos Aires, President Bernardino Rivadavia used this manual to introduce the concept of physical education for women to the River Plate region. From the advertisements of newspapers, as well as one signed copy of this manual in the private library of Ricardo Rodríguez Molas, we know that the second edition (published in 1827) circulated in Buenos Aires after 1830. While very little is known of its author, Rodríguez Molas ascertains that he was a Spanish native exiled in England. See his essay on "La gimnasia femenina como arma de la ilustración," in the February 10, 1993 issue of Rí Negro, p. 11.
29. Marifran Carlson, ¡Feminismo! The Woman's Movement in Argentina From Its Beginnings to Eva Perón (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1988), pp. 60-61.
30. For an interesting view of material culture, technological advancement and changing domestic roles, see the editorial comments found in Búcaro Americano (1896-1908), a magazine published in Buenos Aires and edited by Clorinda Matto de Turner. The Peruvian author documents the way in which telephones, sewing machines, electric massagers and hairdryers were transforming the daily lives of urban women. Bonnie Frederick comments on the international scope of Matto de Turner's enterprise, explaining that in the magazine's pages "women everywhere were writing literature and urging expanded women's rights." See Frederick, Wily Modesty. Argentine Women Writers, 1860-1910 (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona State University Center for Latin American Studies Press, 1998), p. 28.
31. See the Seminar's collaborative essay in Women, Culture and Politics in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 175.
32. Several scholars point to the porous nature of the public sphere in the nineteenth century, particularly when it concerns women's issues. See the volume edited by Craig Calhoun on Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 1992)
33. in particular Mary P. Ryan's essay on "Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in Nineteenth-Century America," pp. 259-88
34. and Seyla Benhabib's "Models of Public Space," pp. 73-98. When following Habermas' model, Benhabib rein-forces the idea that "participation is seen not as an activity only possible in a narrowly defined political realm but as an activity that can be realized in the social and cultural spheres as well." See p. 86.
35. See Lavrin, "Final Considerations" in Latin American Women. Historical Perspectives, edited by Asunción Lavrin (Westport, Connecticut and London, England: Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 316.
36. Donna Guy describes a civil code passed in 1871 that treated women as minors "completely under the control of their husbands or fathers." Women could not "manage their own money or property; nor could they work without patriarchal permission. Furthermore, until the 1913 Ley Palacios, family heads who forced women into prostitution committed no crime that affected their rights of patria potestad as defined by the civil code." See Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires. Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 44.
37. Lavrin's "Final Considerations," p. 316. In the context of early twentieth-century feminism, she writes, "Suffrage was a goal, but almost as a derivataive of the larger goal of legal equality."
38. Bonnie Frederick also highlights this statement by Luis Telmo Pintos. See his essay on "La mujer: habilitada para la ensefianza" in the August 1, 1875 issue of La Ondina del Plata, p. 301. Cited in Frederick, p. 49.
39. For an insightful discussion of education and "The Angel in the House," see pages 45 to 49.
40. Francesca Miller in Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1991), p. 44.
41. Twenty years later, David Rock continues, "although conditions varied greatly among the regions, in some areas education, housing, and consumption standards bore comparison with the most-advanced parts of the world." See Argentina 1516-1987. From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsín (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985 and 1987), p. 118.
42. See Marifran Carlson's chapter on "Education for Women in Nineteenth Century Argentina," p. 66.
43. For more information on Sarmiento's contradictory views on the question of female emancipation, see Elizabeth Gatrels in "Sarmiento and the Woman Question: From 1839 to the Facundo," in Sarmiento: Author of a Nation, edited by Tulio Halperin Donghi, Iván Jaksic, Gwen Kirkpatrick and Francine Masiello (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 272-93.
44. Tulio Halperin Donghi's essay in the same volume, "Sarmiento's Place in Postrevolutionary Argentina," offers a unique vision of this education project as a "gospel of renewal," pp. 19-30.
45. Roberto Cortés Conde discusses the transformations of this marketplace in "Sarmiento and Economic Progress: From Facundo to the Presidency," in Sarmiento. Author of a Nation, pp. 114-23.
46. James R. Scobie, Buenos Aires. Plaza to Suburb, 1870-1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 213. David Rock points to the transatlantic boom in commerce and the export of sheep wool starting in the 1850s. Sheep, it appears, outnumbered people and cattle for the second half the nineteenth century. By the late 1880s, Rock estimates a ratio of 30 sheep for every one Argentine. See Rock, p. 133.
47. Rock, p. 132. Rock writes, "By the late 1880s the nation's population was increasing threefold every thirty years. Argentina was now becoming a society of white immigrants and large cities." See p. 118. The census of 1869 indicates 1,836,590 inhabitants. In 1914, the number of inhabitants had grown to 7,885,237. Income levels also boomed as a result of international commerce, with gold prices rising from $7.8 in 1870 to $19.7 in 1910. Susana Saulquin describes how the period's affluence would convert Calle Florida into the city's best known pedestrian mall for window shopping and fashionable purchases. See La Moda en la Argentina, p. 48.
48. Such imitation had been unheard of previously. Susan Socolow has addressed those legal documents that used dress and other social conventions to denote racial status in the Spanish colonies. See her "Acceptable Partners: Marriage Choice in Colonial Argentina, 1778-1810," in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 209-46. By the late nineteenth century, however, dress codes did not distinguish race and class in the same way. Because society did not challenge the well-dressed man, working class males wore coats and ties. This also served to distance themselves from the low status of their foreign-born parents. See Scobie, pp. 220 and 232.
49. Lily Sosa de Newton writes that the modista was often foreign-bom. See her "El trabajo de la mujer" in Las argentinas ayer y hoy (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Zanetti, 1967), p. 210.
50. Julián Martel, La boisa (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Artística "Buenos Aires," 1898).
51. Saulquin, p. 51. Leigh Summers explains that the taboos of Victorian culture forced women to keep a pregnant body from view. See her "Corsetry and the Invisibility of the Maternal Body" in Bound to Please. A History of the Victorian Corset (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2001), pp. 37-61.
52. Penelope Byrde, Nineteenth Century Fashion (London: B. T. Batsford Limited, 1992), pp. 66 and 68.
53. Cited in Bernard Rudofsky, The Unfashionable Human Body (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1974), p. 26.
54. Sosa de Newton, p. 215. Wages for sewing had always been low, in part because most women knew how to sew. Donna Guy writes, "For poor women in capital city, domestic service and sewing at miserable wages were the major alternatives to prostitution." In Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires, p. 42.
55. Frederick, pp. 160-1. Many scholars have written on Gorriti's life and creative fiction. Aside from the excellent sources already listed herein, see Mary Berg, "Juana Manuela Gorriti," en Escritoras de Hispanoamérica, ed. Diane Mailing (Bogotá: Siglo Veintiuno, 1992), pp. 231-45;
56. Cristina Iglesia, ed. El Ajuar de la patria: Ensayos críticos sobre Juana Manuela Gorriti (Buenos Aires: Feminaria Editora, 1993).
57. For a more fictionalized account of history, see Martha Mercader, Juanamanuela, mucha mujer (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1980)
58. and Analía Efron, Juana Gorriti: Una biografía íntima (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1998).
59. Gertrude Yeager, "Juana Manuela Gorriti: Writer in Exile," in The Human Factor in Latin America. The Nineteenth Century, ed. William H. Beezley and Judith Ewell, (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1989): 114-27. See pp. 123-4. During these years, Gorriti supported her children and herself with income from a girl's school and an elementary school that she founded.
60. Thomas C. Meehan, "Una olvidada precursora de la literatura fantástica argentina: Juana Manuela Gorriti," Chasqui. Revista de literatura latinoamericana 10.2-3 (February-May 1981): 3-19. See p. 7.
61. "Los Oasis en la Vida," La Alborada del Plata, no. 4 (December 9, 1877): 32.
62. "El Oasis en la Vida," La Alborada del Plata, no. 6 (December 23, 1877): 45-6.
63. "El Hogar," La Alborada del Plata, no. 5 (December 16, 1877): 33-4.
64. Without question, many of the views held by women authors were extremely conservative. As one widely circulated manual encouraged, "El trabajo, la economía y el ahorro sostienen el hogar y aumentando su bienestar transmiten a todos los miembros de la familia la satisfacción y la alegría." See Emilia M. Salzá's manual for young girls, La economía doméstica al alcance de las niñas (Buenos Aires: Librería del Colegio, 1901), p. 48. Goniti provided a forum for all of those voices, as if she realized that open discussion on matters of interest and concern to women would promote - and not stifle - the quest for female emancipation.
65. R. Anthony Castagnaro, The Early Spanish American Novel (1971), p. 91.
66. Oasis en la vida, p. 6
67. Scholars mention this cross-dressing only briefly. See Nina M. Scott, "Juana Manuela Goniti's Cocina ecléctica: Recipes as Feminist Discourse," Hispania 5.2 (May 1992): 310-14. See p. 311. Meehan writes that her cross-dressing began in the 1850s, when she organized the veladas literarias at her home in Lima. See Meehan, p. 7.
68. See Michael Warner on "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject" in Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, p. 384.
69. See his Hand Coloured Fashion Plates, 1770-1899 (Boston, Massachusetts: Boston Book and Art Shop, 1955), p. 21. Holland was a prominent fashion lithograph collector best known for being the son of Oscar Wilde, one of the period's most dramatic dressers.
70. See Ann Hollander's Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978), p. 321.
71. La Ondina del Plata (Buenos Aires: 1876-9), p. 622.
72. La Ondina del Plata, Ibid, p. 6.
73. Bonnie Frederick depicts her as a "leading promoter of the domestic angel" concept. Masiello sees her as a feminist in Between Civilization and Barbarism, but notes her ultra-conservative tendencies in La mujer y el espacio público. María Cristina Unuela provides a new historical perspective in her essay on "Becoming 'Angelic' : María Pilar Sinués and the Woman Question," Recovering Spain's Feminist Tradition, edited by Lisa Vollendorf (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2001).
74. and "El 'varonil realismo' y la cultura oficial de la Restauracion en el fin de siglo peninsular: el caso de María del Pilar Sinués de Marco (1835-1893)," Letras peninsulares 12.1 (Spring 1999): 37-64.
75. Sánchez-Llama, "María del Pilar Sinués de Marco y la cultural oficial peninsular del siglo XIX: del neocatolicismo a la estética realista," pp. 277-8.
76. In their exploration of the roots of fashion anxiety, Alison Clarke and Daniel Miller affirm that "Individuals are frequently too anxious about the choices to be made to proceed without various forms of support and reassurance. Where possible, support involves close friends and family who are trusted to give advice reflecting care and concern." See "Fashion and Anxiety," Fashion Theory 6.2 (June 2002): 191-213, p. 209.