South American Independence: Gender, Politics, Text

Abstract

For a long time, the independence of Latin America was regarded as an exclusively male affair, a military and political enterprise in which women neither played a major role nor profited from the newly won freedom. In the last few years, however, historians have started to inquire into the consequences of republicanism and liberalism for gender roles. The book by Davies, Brewster, and Owen follows this line. It addresses the different forms in which women took part in the independence movement in Latin America and the way this was reflected in texts written by men and women.In all political texts of the independence period, family and gender allegories are abundant, and most of them, be they by Simón Bolívar or Andrés Bello, uphold the positive image of the father figure while demonizing the mother, a strategy that could be employed to uphold male political hegemony. In some writings, however, especially Bolívar’s, the message is ambiguous, and this was a ground women could exploit to their benefit in later years. Not only traditional concepts of womanhood and appropriate female behavior but also ideas of manliness were challenged during the turbulent years of the wars of independence. Especially texts written in the Río de la Plata region by the “generation of 37,” namely Estéban Echeverría and Juana Manso, reveal the emergence of a dual masculinity during the political struggles between federalists and unitarians. These findings show that the thesis of the masculinization of citizenship and the militarization of masculinity during the nineteenth century is only partially valid in Latin America. Generally speaking, however, the texts of founding fathers of the new nations follow traditional lines in the way that their discourse restricts women to the mythological and “natural” realm and thus “make[s] possible the naturalisation of the new social and political order as inevitable and self-evident” (p. 73).The second part of the book is dedicated to the writings of women. It starts with the military contributions to independence of women such as the prominent figures Michaela Bastidas and Manuela Sáenz. Other women contributed mainly by informing, consoling, and networking in difficult situations, as can be seen in the letters by the women of the Carrera family in Chile analyzed in this book. During wartime, a positive image of the courageous Amazon coexisted with the negative one of the “unnatural” woman and mother. In the newly established republics, however, violence had to be censured for both genders, and public virtue became the ideal of male citizens, while the image of women was again defined by their private morality. The return to political order and stability, however, also gave women new opportunities to see their writings published and thus participate in public debates. For example, Josefa Acevedo from Colombia and Mercedes Marín from Chile wrote patriotic poems as well as essays on different topics. In the writings of Acevedo we can see how the widespread family allegory could be used by women to claim their part in the process of state and nation building.Somewhat different are the writings of Delfina Benigna da Cunha and Ana de Barandas from Brazil, who wrote during the Farroupilha Revolt in Rio Grande do Sul. Due to the revolt, both women were able to transcend the limits imposed on them by gender roles and actively participate in the discourse on national identity. The same holds true for Juana Manso, “the first intellectual of the River Plate provinces” (p. 245), who lived several years in Brazil and published in both countries. Her novels and journals address gender as well as political subjects and overtly challenge patriarchal power. Her critical position on gender roles and the Catholic Church, however, made her writings unacceptable to most of her contemporaries, and, in contrast to Cunha and Barandas, her writings were not sufficiently acknowledged in her home country.The analysis of the discourses and rhetoric employed by men and women bring to light great differences. While men continued to mystify the feminine and historicize the masculine in order to maintain gender hierarchies and social order, women writers “seldom idealised or demonised the feminine in this way. . . . [Women] are attributed with agency and subjectivity” (p. 274). The family rhetoric so prominent in the nineteenth century, especially, could be exploited by women to write themselves into the national narrative and — purposely or not — to undermine the gender order.The authors should be praised for uncovering several hitherto unknown or forgotten texts, mainly those written by women, as well as for a cautious analysis of these and the scholarly literature written on the subject. Readers, especially historians, might not agree in detail with all interpretations, and I, for one, would have liked to know more about the distribution and sociopolitical effects of the texts. But generally speaking this book is a valuable contribution to the study of gender roles and female agency in the first half of the nineteenth century in Latin America, and a fine example of the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to Latin American independence.