Conclusions: South America, Gender, Politics, Text

University Press Scholarship Online

Liverpool Scholarship Online

South American Independence: Gender, Politics,

Text
Catherine Davies, Claire Brewster, and Hilary Owen

Print publication date: 2006

Print ISBN-13: 9781846310270
Published to Liverpool Scholarship Online: June 2013
DOI: 10.5949/UPO9781846314117

Conclusions: South America, Gender, Politics, Text

DOI:10.5949/liverpool/9781846310270.003.0011

Abstract and Keywords

Gender polarity and power asymmetry continued to persist in Latin America during and after
independence, with half of the population being denied political rights on the basis of sexual
difference. There was a pronounced shift in gender parameters in the first half of the nineteenth
century, when women were depicted as feisty and combative, and masculinisation of the
feminine remained a recurring them in literary discourse at least until the 1850s. This is evident
in Esteban Echeverría's ‘La Cautiva’ (1837) and Juana Manso's soldier-heroine, Antonia Maza
(1852). With the conclusion of the independence wars and the emergence of new political
orders, however, the interrelation of gender and sexual difference changed again. Violence and
aggression were censured in both men and women, good masculinity entailed public virtue, and
good femininity was linked to private morality. Women had few opportunities to actively
contribute to politics. This chapter explores the concepts of caudillos and mother-queens in post-
independence Spanish America, and women's partial entry into the literary cliques of letrados.

Keywords: Spanish America, women, gender polarity, political rights, independence, caudillos, mother-queens,
letrados, masculinity, femininity

The nations who succeed are not the feminine nations, but the masculine.

H. Fielding Hall1

La domination masculine est assez assurée pour ce passer de justification.

Bourdieu 1990: 5

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

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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 (inflation, poor administration, obstacles to progress) were often represented as feminine
or effeminate. Derision of the effeminate man (dandy or petimetre) was symptomatic of this
disquiet; the danger was that masculinity might be feminised (feminine attributes applied to
those sexually differentiated as men) and dominant masculinity displaced. Similarly, ridicule of
the virago or manly woman indicated fear of feminine encroachment and gender fluidity. As
society became increasingly militarised during the 1810s and 1820s, dominant masculinity,
more firmly associated with virility, courage and physical strength, recovered ground to the
extent that it threatened to engulf the feminine; the manly woman was no longer ridiculed to the
same extent, but rather encouraged for the collective good. Virility was not assumed to be a
natural, feminine attribute, but a higher value that women might buy into in anomalous
circumstances. The term ‘viril’ (from Latin vir or ‘man’) naturalised the identification of strength
and courage with hegemonic masculinity; exceptional women might aspire to these heights. This
positive representation of the feisty, combative woman signalled a major shift in gender doxa
and was reinforced by analogies with the Spanish American tradition of the warrior women, the
Amazons, which were usefully mobilised for the patriot cause. Masculinisation of the feminine
persisted in literary discourse at least (p.269) until the 1950s as is evidenced in Echeverria's
‘La Cautiva’ (1837) and Manso's soldier-heroine, Antonia Maza (1852).

But as the independence wars came to an end and the new political orders took shape, the
interrelation of gender and sexual difference shifted again. Violence and aggression were
censured in men and women alike. New political frameworks needed to be erected and social
and cultural institutions consolidated. Dominant masculinity came to be identified with the
public world of political reconstruction and the feminine with what remained outside; in
classical republicanism, the ‘rhetorically invoked negative other who defined and centred the
male republican subject’ (Smith-Rosenberg 2000: 275). Both men and women might subscribe to
liberal and republican citizenship, but in separately engendered spheres: the men in public
governance (politics), the women as reproducers and as managers (though not the ultimate
authority) of private life (the domestic economy). Good masculinity entailed public virtue; good
femininity, private morality.

From the 1830s on, generic woman was increasingly identified as mother or prospective mother
of the patria, and the feminine with family values, order and nurturance. Women could play their
part in building new societies from within the family, the pillar of the state; they are defined in
relation to men, not as freestanding individuals. For this reason, all the textual representations
studied here of actual women in real time (that is, not as trope or in myth) locate women firmly
within the family as wives, mothers and sisters. As we have seen, the social networks in which
women are protagonists are family relations. This family might extend to family friends and
distant relations, to the family of the Church, with its associated functions promoting child-
raising and care (education, charity), to the families of patrons and benefactors (such as the
aristocratic elite) and, above all, to the patria family. Patriotism, allegiance to one's patrimony,

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is closely allied to family bonds and loyalties. Natural patriotism, as defined by John Schaar,
signifies:

territoriality, along with the family, has always been a primary associative bond. We
become devoted to the people, places and ways that nurture us, and what is familiar and
nurturing seems also natural and right. (Schaar 1981: 287)2

San Martín recognised this when he commended women for their courage; they acted not as
virile women but as feminine women, that is, as women whose sexual difference (mothering
potential) was instrumental in creating and strengthening the affective family bonds necessary
for social cohesion. Republican motherhood symbolised social order and stability. Men, on the
other hand, played their parts in the new societies as individuals, irrespective of family ties.
They might act according to their conscience and in their own interests whether or not they
were fathers and husbands. Few women dared to act in this way. Manso attempted to intervene
culturally, socially and politically as an individual (though assisted by her two daughters) by
cultivating a network of potentially powerful friends. Ultimately, she was unsuccessful, except in
the (p.270) socially acceptable field of education, and largely due to Sarmiento's support.

Nevertheless, the social role mapped out for women in the bourgeois polity and civil society
gave women prestige and they commanded respect. In certain political circumstances, notably
civil conflict, the family domain might extend to political groups or parties that were largely
organised according to local ties and family loyalties. Women could be incorporated into
regional power struggles as the authorised voice, scribe or memory of that political/patriotic
community (for example, those who supported Portales, Santander, or the Legalistas, or
opposed Rosas). In this respect, women's cultural intervention was political, legitimated by their
status as family members. The space allotted to them, the family institution (like the Church)
was not considered public or political. Post-independence educated men, meanwhile, had better
things to do. Thoroughly immersed in politics, legislation, the economy and public culture as
never before, the creole elite shaped their new nation states to suit themselves. Any suggestion
that women might actively contribute to in the public world of politics was met with incredulity,
resistance and even vilification. The solidification of the fledgling republics into bourgeois nation
states ossified this gender order. However, secularisation and state appropriation of the
Church's social responsibilities, especially in education and welfare, enabled women to enter the
state machinery in their capacity as carers and educators (as, for example, in the River Plate
region, from Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson to Manso and beyond).

Caudillos and mother-queens

In Spanish America, in attempting to symbolise a new political entity – a postcolonial continent
of emerging republican nation states – the creole imaginary shows a predilection bordering on
obsession with the restitution of the father figure or patriarch as symbol of authority and
continental liberation (Earle 2002a). The space was partially filled by the ubiquitous figure of the
militaryuniformed soldier-statesman, famously celebrated in iconography and literature, and
individually named.3 As Hernán Vidal points out in his study of the ‘mitificación del padre’ in
José Joaquín Olmedo's canonical ode ‘La Victoria de Junín. Canto a Bolívar’ (1925), ‘el padre de
la familia americana, surgido de la burocracia tecnocrática, se transforma en padre
militar’ (Vidal 2004: 200). Post-independence Spanish America became ‘the primeval home of

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the golpe and the caudillo’ (Lynch 1986: 353), the military leader wielding maximum power. The
caudillo, entirely a product of the Wars of Independence (Lynch 1986: 353), stood for dominant
masculinity, force and, at times, the restoration of civil and political society. Yet, as in France,
feminine images also filled the symbolic space once occupied by the absolutist king to signify
liberty, the republic and so on (Wenke 2000: 69). These were female personifications, not actual
women in real time. In the writings of the Spanish American letrados studied here, the feminine,
including the mother-trope, is historically and politically incapacitated: idealised perhaps, as in
Bello's young America, wife of the (p.271) sun, but also demonised, as in Bolívar's monster-
mother (Spain) and the pueblo-slime of ‘El Matadero’.

In other countries, however, the mother-nation, symbol of the point of origin and social
cohesion, was figured by a flesh and blood woman and put to good political use. Examples are
Victorian Britain and also Isabeline Spain, which, though devastated by war, was relatively
unaffected by republicanism. Post- Empire Spain identified not with patriarchal absolutism
(Fernando) but with liberal constitutionalism. The liberal order was gendered female, not
primarily in allegory and myth, but in the real figure of a mother upholding the rule of law with
historical precedent and full political authority: the Queen Mother, María Cristina, who granted
amnesty to the liberal political exiles even as Fernando (her husband and uncle) lay in his
deathbed, and who, after his death, governed Spain for almost a decade (1833–40). The
accession of her daughter, Isabel II, to the throne in 1843 further confirmed the maternal line as
symbolic of progress and modernity. Isabel II was titled, like her illustrious forebear, the
Catholic Queen, suggesting both imperial closure and continuity. The supreme ruler was ‘Reina
de las Españas’,4 and her accession was a deliberate political choice involving the revocation of
the Salic Law forbidding women to inherit the crown.5 Mother and daughter were kept on the
throne by the liberal army, opposed by absolutists who supported Carlos, Fernando's brother
(resulting in the Carlist Wars). The risk paid off. Isabel (a contemporary of Queen Victoria)
reigned until she was deposed in 1868 and the constitutional monarchy has survived until today,
despite two republican interludes and two military dictatorships.

In Spanish America, where early moves to replace the deposed Fernando by his sister Carlota
(who had fled to Rio with her husband, the Prince Regent of Portugal) came to nothing, there
was to be no such woman head of state. Nor did Portuguese America fare any better. In Brazil,
Emperor Pedro I's daughter, born in Rio in 1819, returned to Portugal, where she became
Queen Maria II, leaving Brazil to her younger brother, Pedro II. In a situation mirroring that of
Spain, her accession in Portugal was only possible because her father, Pedro I, was willing to
engage in a civil war against his usurping brother in defence of the liberal constitution and of
his own branch of the Bragança family. Indeed, Brazil's eventual transition to a republic in 1889
occurred partly because the male national elites, most notably the military, would not accept as
monarch a female heir to the throne: Pedro II's daughter, Isabella.

How might a Mother-Head of State affect the conditions making possible women's inclusion in
the public cultural sphere and their access to social and symbolic capital? As explained in
Chapter 9, Cunha benefited from protection in the imperial court in Brazil and wrote eulogies to
Empress Carolina, though arguably, her blindness made her a special case. This book draws to
an end with one further observation. It is that, ironically, the most celebrated Spanish American
woman writer of the mid-nineteenth century was born and raised in a part of Spanish American

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that was not independent from Spain and published her work without restrictions in the
metropolitan capital, Madrid.

(p.272) The success of Cuban poet, dramatist and novelist Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
offers a curious contrast to the women writers studied so far. Avellaneda left Cuba with her
family in 1836 at the age of 22 and, in 1841, published her writings, begun in Cuba, in Madrid.
These were: Poesías (fortyfive poems dated 1836–1841); and the abolitionist novel, Sab. She was
encouraged by the Spanish liberals, Nicomedes Pastor Díaz and Juan Nicasio Gallego. Pastor
Díaz published lengthy, favourable reviews of her work in the press. Avellaneda's writings
privileged themes that fitted the progressive liberal agenda: abolitionism, liberty, individualism
and love of country. The first edition included translations of the contemporary French poets
Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) and Victor Hugo (1802–85), both fervent republicans.
Avellaneda was soon incorporated into the Spanish American cultural sphere. She and Mercedes
Marín were the only two women poets included in the popular anthology America poética (1846–
47), published in Chile by Santos Tornero, Juan María Gutiérrez and others (Auza 1992: 149).6
Yet it was the second (1850) edition of her Poesías that catapulted her to fame. This edition
comprised a further fifty-two poems written through the 1840s and was reprinted two years
later in Mexico as part of the collection ‘Biblioteca de la Semana de las Señoritas’. It circulated
widely in the Americas and was largely responsible for Avellaneda's international recognition. As
is mentioned in Chapter 7, Marín dedicated a sonnet to Avellaneda, written in 1857, though not
published until 1878, in which she compared Avellaneda to Sappho and de Staël's Corinne.7

The phenomenal success of Avellaneda's second edition was due, in part at least, to royal
patronage. The most important event to take place in Spain in the 1840s was Isabel's accession
to the throne in 1843 at the age of thirteen. The young woman embodied in her royal person the
liberty and hope of the new constitutional Spain. As Fernando Soldevila writes, ‘por ella había
luchado el país; había hecho de ella el símbolo de la inocencia perseguida, de la libertad
amenazada’ (Soldevila 1959: 169). The 1850 edition of Poesías is dedicated to the Queen.
Avellaneda considered it a duty to offer the book ‘a los Reales Pies de V.M., puesto que muchas
de las composiciones contenidas en él habían sido dedicadas a ensalzar rasgos generosos del
magnánimo corazón de V.M. a faustos sucesos de su reinado.’ In the Preface to the book she
refers to the fact that ‘la augusta señora … se ha dignado acogerlo bajo sus auspicios’ as an
‘honorífica distinción’. The edition now included four long political compositions celebrating
Isabel's rule. The four poems: ‘A S.M. La Reina Doña Isabel II. Con motivo de la declaración de
su mayoría’ (Noviembre 1843); ‘Oda en loor de la magnánima piedad de S.M. La Reina Doña
Isabel Segunda’ (June 1845); ‘La Clemencia’ (June 1845); and ‘A.S.M. La Reina Doña Isabel II,
en sus días’ (November 1845) each reiterates the concept of the just monarch dispensing liberty,
charity and beneficence. They involved Avellaneda in public recitals and performances, usually
in the presence of the royal family. ‘La Clemencia’ and ‘Oda en loor’ were written for a poetry
competition at the Liceo Artístico y Literario in Madrid to celebrate the mercy of the Queen, who
had (p.273) lifted the death penalty for several political prisoners. Avellaneda entered both
poems, one signed with her own name and one with her brother's, winning first and second
prize. She was publicly acclaimed and crowned with laurel by the Crown Prince, Francisco de
Paula. The poem celebrating the Queen's fifteenth birthday (November 1845) was requested by
the editor of the newspaper El Heraldo, and the poem written for the Queen's majority of age

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(November 1843) was written for the Album, prepared by the Liceo and presented and read to
the Queen at a public ceremony. These public activities consolidated Avellaneda's reputation.
There is no doubt that the Queen contributed to her social capital in a very real sense. As a
corollary, there is no trace in these poems of desire for Cuban independence, quite the contrary.
The final strophe of ‘A S.M. La Reina Doña Isabel Segunda. Con motivo de la declaración de su
mayoría’ reads as follows:

¡Salud regia beldad! ¡Virgen divina!

Su magnánima frente
A tu planta inocente
La nación fiera de Pelayo inclina:
Y allá en el Occidente
La perla de los mares mejicanos,
Al escuchar de nuestros aplausos el grito
Entre el hervor de sus inquietas olas
En las alas del viento
Con eco fiel devolverá el acento
Que atruena ya las playas españolas
(Gómez de Avellaneda 1850: 196, my emphasis)

By the time the third and much revised final edition of these poems was published in the Obras
completas of 1869, Isabel had been deposed and Avellaneda largely forgotten. But adherence to
a liberal constitutionalism embodied in the real figure of a powerful woman, and complicity in
colonial politics, was apparently a more empowering strategy for literary women and more
conducive to gender equality than writing on behalf of national liberation in the patriarchal
republics of independent Spanish America. However, the institutions of liberalism also had their
limitations: in 1853, despite substantial support from several eminent academicians, Avellaneda
was disqualified from taking a seat in the Spanish Royal Academy. The sole criterion for her
exclusion was gender.

Letradas
Women were permitted partial entry into the literary cliques of letrados as upholders of a
generally conservative social order, which might be of republican or liberal persuasion. From a
gender perspective, with some exceptions, their writing tended not to be radical. Yet the very
fact that they published at all, and in increasing numbers, thus contributing to public culture in
their own (p.274) right and in their own name, was significant in itself. Their literary discourse
was markedly different from that of men. With few exceptions, classical, neoclassical and
Romantic feminine stereotypes persisted throughout the period in dominant literary discourse
that encapsulated revolutionary change in the figure of the inspired young man (Vidal 2004:
203). In these works, the Romantic feminine symbolised the unreachable ideal, the other
defining the self, instrumental in male specularisation. The feminine, especially the mother, was
also often ridiculed or demonised as in the satirical tradition. The neoclassical feminine
represented abstractions or Arcadian ideals in allegories and myth (liberty, truth, justice, etc.).
But little space was given to the realistic portrayal of women in real time (see Vogeley 1996 for
Mexico).

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Women writers, however, seldom idealised or demonised the feminine in this way; in the writers
studied here, the feminine hardly figures as trope. Even Mercedes Marín, who modelled her
poetry on Bello's, avoided the feminine allegories he was so fond of. Women's poetry was either
patriotic poetry (eulogies of the extended family) or grounded in the real, in the everyday life of
the home; sometimes it might be love poetry. Women are represented in their letters,
journalism, diaries, poetry, narrative fiction and conduct manuals as actual women in real time,
circumscribed by the family, perhaps, but acting as individuals with a moral conscience and a
sense of purpose. They are attributed with agency and subjectivity. They are identified singly
with real or fictitious proper names; the apparently insignificant routines and dramas of the
domestic world are represented as politically and patriotically important; and the domestic
economy is inscribed as the centre of the political economy of the state. Literary women not only
cemented the conventional patria-family trope but turned it to their advantage; if the patria was
thought of as a family, so the family might be thought of as a patria chica, in which women
played a major part. Women's writings reshaped the patria to fit the family model. Purposefully
or not, their imaginative literature resisted and undermined the dominant gender order.

At issue was the fundamental question of women's self-representation. Throughout this period,
discussion continued as to the meanings of the words ‘mujer’, ‘madama’, ‘señora’, ‘dama’,
‘matrona’, ‘doña’ and ‘ciudadana’ and their Portuguese equivalents. Slave women were not
always considered female human beings, much less part of wider sorority, as indicated by the
famous abolitionist motto ‘Am I not a sister and a woman?’ (Midgley 1995: 99). This subject was
raised by Manso in La familia del Comendador. However, there were limitations to what South
American women writers could do. Although they and their heroines are seen to act as
individuals, they nevertheless do so on behalf of (and are supported by) their families. This is the
case of all the authors studied here, with the exception of Manso, including Manso's (semi)-
fictional heroines, Antonia Maza and Gabriela das Neves. How different are these family-
heroines from their lonely, unattached contemporaries: Jane Eyre (1847), Mary Barton (1848)
and Lucy Snowe (1853), who have to work for a living and try to forge their own futures as
independent women.8

(p.275) The greatest problem confronted by South American women writers throughout the
century was the reluctance of certain influential letrados to take their work seriously, to concede
them symbolic power. Examples abound of strategies to exclude women from the sacred inner
circles of public culture, status and prestige. In the introduction to his Ojeada histórico crítica
sobre la poesía ecuatoriana desde su época más remota hasta nuestros días (1868), Juan León
Mera refers to women poets in passing, but refuses to publicly divulge their names because they
are ‘damas’ of the ‘sexo delicado’. As Beatriz González- Stephan notes, the effect is threefold:
they are silenced, erased from the canon and imputed with immorality for writing in public
(González-Stephan 2002: 271). Another example is the following paragraph taken from Juan
María Gutiérrez's introduction to his famous anthology Poesía Americana: composiciones
selectas escritas por poetas sud-americanos de fama, tanto modernos como antiguos (1886), first
published in the Correo del Domingo, October 1865:

Hay pobres de espíritu que en servicio de lo que entienden por moral, levantan como a
manera de un cordón sanitario de libros indijestos, en torno a las mariposas de su cariño

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que constituyen la ventura de sus hogares. Pero que, no se aperciben que con esa táctica
paraguaya, las echan a volar por los desiertos, expuestos al pico voraz de mil aves de
pésima ralea. Dénles por el contrario un rumbo salvador en las correrías de la
imaginación. Su mejor piloto será un poeta, y la más segura barquilla de su aerostático un
libro de versos selectos. La mujer nacida en el Paraíso en medio de fantasías, seducciones
y deseos, fraguará a su modo, entre puntada y puntada de su costura, poemas
enmarañados e imposibles que le produzcan vértigo y caídas, si no se los dan hechos de
antemano por algunos de esos maestros de corazón, diestros en educarle y en conducirle
con riendas de seda. (Gutiérrez 1866: 4)

In this passage, balloon baskets and poetry books are figured as tethering devices to control
women, who are prone to flights of fancy and transports of desire. Books of selected verse, like
balloon baskets, keep women properly restrained. Women are to be protected above all from
writing their own poems, usually stitched together while they sew; their imaginations, if set
loose, will make them dizzy. Gutiérrez was a distinguished intellectual, the editor and compiler
of the works of Echeverría and founding member of the Generation of 1837. His patronising
condescension was typical, at least in the River Plate region, of the times. Yet, paradoxically, his
message (evidently with an eye on the market) was meant to encourage women to read; men
should avoid the counterproductive defensive ‘Paraguayan strategy’ of restricting women to
boring books. Women should be allowed to read poetry, but as long as it was written by men, ‘un
poeta’. Poetry (written by men, or possibly virile women such as Gómez de Avellaneda)9 is urged
as a controlling mechanism on women's minds and selfexpression, as an instrument to enforce
ideological and psychological repression. Volatile women, who are compared with fragile idiots,
children and butterflies (and, by analogy, effeminate men, ‘mariposas’), are self-destructive and
need to be tutored. Gutiérrez may well have been writing tongue in cheek, (p.276) but his
words are symptomatic of discursive representations of sexual difference throughout the
nineteenth century, particularly following Rousseau. As we have seen, his emphasis on feminine
irrationality and dependence did not bode well for women still aiming (in the 1860s) to present
themselves as rational individuals, patriots and citizens of the state.

The textual representation of the feminine in trope, its extrapolation to the generic category
woman in public discourse, and the ambiguous inclusion of women in political discourse,
rendered women's exclusion from the post-independence public-political sphere natural and
acceptable. To challenge this state of affairs, it was crucial that women should sign, publish and
claim ownership of their own writings, irrespective of political persuasion, means of publication
or genre (poetry, essays, novels, articles, school books, histories, and memoirs). By publishing,
women reminded the self-appointed producers of public culture that women, too, were culturally
productive. Women's intervention changed the shape of public culture in that it had to
acknowledge and respond to their presence. If women writers were mocked or criticised, so
much the better; this way, the mechanisms of exclusion, the power relations of sexual
difference, were made evident. Like the women studied here, the letradas had to test the limits
in order to expose the gender injustice of their times.

Notes

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Notes:
(1) Quoted by C.K. Ogden in Militarism versus Feminism (1915), in Marshall, Ogden and Sargant
Florence 1987: 77.

(2) Schaar contrasts the Natural Patriotism of older societies with the Covenanted Patriotism of
the United States.

(3) The list of caudillos/statesmen is long and includes: Alvear, Artigas, Belgrano, Bolívar,
Carrera, Dorrego, Francia, Lavalle, O'Higgins, Oribe, Quiroga, Rivera, Rosas, San Martín, Santa
Cruz, Santander, and Sucre.

(4) As stated in the 1837 Constitution (González-Doria 1986:350).

(5) The sixth-century Salic Law, which forbade women to inherit land, was used in fourteenth-
century France to bar them from the throne.

(6) The anthology was published in Valparaíso in instalments and included fifty-three authors.
Bello was impressed with Avellaneda's work and wrote to Gutiérrez referring to the anthology,
‘Siento mucho que me haya tocado estar tan cerca de esta señora’ (Auza 1992: 149).

(7) ‘A la poetisa cubana Doña J.G. de Avellaneda, Soneto’ (Marín 1874: 79).

(8) The protagonists of Charlotte Brönte's Jane Eyre and Villette, and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary
Barton.

(9) The anthology includes four poems by Cuban Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and one
religious poem by Silveria Espinosa de los Monteros (Nueva Granada).

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