Argentinian feminists in the early 1900s

To give a little extra context for the poem "Feminismo" by Alfredo Arteaga, here's some of what women were doing in Argentina at the time.

"On May 10, 1910, the date of the centennial celebration of Argentine independence, the first Congreso Feminino Internacional convened in Buenos Aires, with more than two hundred women from Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Paraguay, and Chile in attendance. Dr. Cecilia Grierson presided. Grierson had attendend the Second International Council of Women (I.C.W.) meeting in London in 1899 and had returned to Argentina intending to found an Argentine branch of the I.C.W.... organized by the University Women of Argentina (Universitarias Argentinas) included among its sponsoring groups the National Argentine Association against the White Slave Trade, the Socialist Women's Center, the Association of Normal School teachers, the Women's Union and Labor Group, and the National League of Women Freethinkers."

- from Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice, by Francesca Miller, 1991.

Here's a link to a brief overview in English, by Marilyn Mercer, of feminism in Argentina in the 1800s and early 1900s.

In contrast to essentialist sexists like Arteaga, some of the great politicians of Argentina like Domingo Sarmiento fought for women to have access to education. Sarmiento thought women needed education to become involved in local politics. Through experience in local politics they would gradually acquire the skills to participate in national politics, voting, running for office, and being part of public life.

But high schools meant for college prep didn't open in Argentina until 1905.



Here are some of the women Arteaga was likely complaining about:

* Juana Manuela Gorriti, a best selling author. Feminist, teacher, and battlefield nurse.
* Dr. Cecilia Grierson. Graduated from University of Buenos Aires medical school in 1889.
* Dr. Alicia Moreau de Justo. A founder of the Socialist Feminist Center. Social worker, writer, human rights activist, and doctor. Graduated from University of Buenos Aires.
* Carolina Muzzili. Reported on factory working conditions for women in the early 1900s.
* Elvira Rawson de Dellepiane, another doctor and feminist activist
* Ernestina Lopez de Nelson. Socialist feminist activist, teacher.
* Sara Justo. Another socialist feminist teacher.
* Julieta Lanteri de Renshaw A psychiatrist who graduated in 1906 from University of Buenos Aires.

Reunion ho! In which I reminisce, with real names

my friends under the stairs
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry

It's my 20th high school reunion coming up. I can't bear to give $39 to THAT WEB SITE OF EVIL which seems to control all information from the past. So, I figured I'd blog the names of people I might actually want to talk to from that time.

I went to a huge high school in northwest Houston, Cypress Creek. The graduating class must have been at least 500 people. The junior high, Campbell, was also pretty huge and I remember its weird 70s architecture with some fondness; the open ramps with the library in the center were kind of cool looking.

I was clued into this 20 year reunion thing by Thad Davis, who lived in my subdivision, Champions West. Bear with me for a moment while I provide context. Houston in the early 80s was expanding like a vast horrible pustulent tumor, or like gangrene. Malls, freeways, strip malls, and "subdivisions" which were housing developments of hideous sameness and no city-like infrastructure, were flowing like lava over the scraggly, piney woods and fire-ant-infested cow pastures. There was Huntwick, which was fancy and rich with a fancy country club, and there was Champions, which was marginally less fancy with a less fancy golf club. I lived in basically the scungiest one, Champions West, and by scungy I mean that not all the houses were two-story, I guess. Oh also you could measure scunginess by whether ditches were in the front yard or whether people had paid to put in a culvert and soil over the ditch. We had a ditch, which I played in, and we did not belong to the golf club.


It seems so exotic and strange, looking back...


Back to our story! Thad and I rode the bus together, played D&D together, and were in a lot of the same classes. Also in the early 80s, tracking was "in" but was ever so slightly masked. So, if you were regular you were in "L' level classes. If you were somewhat smarter you could be in "K-level". And if you were considered "gifted" then you were in "H-level" or "Horizons" classes as well, one extra every year. So in 5th grade I think the Horizons class was... Oh well I don't even remember. In 6th it was Study Skills (joy...) and in 7th maybe it was English. In Horizons classes you got to be kind of flaky and genius-like and creative, but the main benefit of it for me was that I could tell who the other super smart people were. At any one time there were around 30 of us in this program.

In junior high, I would check out 2 books a day from the library, read them, and return them by the end of the day. And I do fondly remember seeing Thad's name in many of the books I would read, and wondering what he thought about them and what he was "really like", but I never found that out. Anyway, the two of us must have read through the entire junior high library.

The elementary school, Yeager, I only went to for one year. It was major culture shock. People called me a damn Yankee a lot, because I had moved to Texas from "the North" -- from Michigan. I found out that the Civil War was not over. Being a damn Yankee basically meant you were accused by white kids of not being racist enough. I was also besieged with demands that I be more properly gendered. Apparently I was doing something right, because they called me "Liz the Lez". My friend Julie, who was 9 years old, helpfully explained what that meant. One time a howling mob of other 10 year olds chased me around demanding to know all the details of how I had gotten a sex change. What can I say? Don't raise your kids in Texas!

What a nasty place! And yet I am curious to go back and to see these people!

Onward, to list the other people I would be interested in seeing at the reunion!

Some people, I'd like to see just to see how they turned out, because they were really jerks! Like Trent Wallace! What was up with you, dude? You were a little misogynist and homophobe, always screaming at me that I was a nasty little twat and shoving me around in gym class in 6th grade! I didn't even know what that meant, but I had a good guess. In retrospect, I wonder how you got that way, so mean, so young. Have you mellowed? Did you go on to work at Enron?

But most of the people I would like to see were sweet. Or, they always seemed quite decent and yet I never really knew them. Elaine Lamm, Jennifer Lupa, Christy Clark, Sandy Alvarez, Karen Tesch, Kurt Muehlner, Heidi Neumann, Jill Blankenberg, Scott Harris, Jill Adams, Melissa Jones, Peter Duggan, Elisa Dingsdale, Greg Dean, Greg Magyar, Kent Kornett, Lara Rupf, Jeff Darin, Holly Volek, Jeff Gallamore, Tereese Mangaroo, Jeff Smith (who I have heard from, lives in Seattle), and Jack Yee (lives in NYC, was fairly close to ground zero of the WTC on 9/11). Jack and Chris Deeves and Christi Redilla and I were often in competition... who would fail to get a 110 on the math exams... That was fun. Robert Dubose, who I've been in touch with, and who was always super nice, and who introduced me to Herman Hesse books at the proper age - 13 or so.

And then the people I played with when we were younger and yet lost touch with. Pam Berry, Charleen Handzel (we all 3 used to play Breyer model horses, obsessively), Susan Rickey, Julie Carter, and Samantha Medlock.

That's it for my list; I'm sure there are more. Now, if any of these people had ever cared to google me, I'm out there, but maybe they will vanity google and find themselves here and drop me a line!

liz - at - bookmaniac.net

Excellent feminist rant on being "of a time"

I really enjoyed Ide Cyan's "Timeless" on the Feminist SF blog; it's a polemic on Time and social change, and was sparked by Ide's notice of the ubiquity of the defense that a sexist or racist or otherwise annoyingly biased person was a product of their time. This sets up a framework in which "now" is seen as a product of progressive linear evolution with Now and Us ethically on top. I agree with Ide Cyan that this is a false construction, a construction in which Time stands in by a trick of rhetoric for individual responsibility and agency; a construction that is deeply harmful.

The part has become the whole.

It’s very, very convenient. It’s very, very easy. And it means the oppressed vanish in a puff of rhetoric.

Her concluding paragraphs using synechdoche and the body (namely, assholes) was hard-hitting, outrageous, and deeply funny!

Technorati Tags: feminism, gender, history, ranting

Women of the Left Bank

I'm still thinking about Paris Was a Woman and at the moment am listening to Ed Sanders reading "Hail to the Rebel Cafe". I know a lot of Latin American women were in Paris or visited in the teens and 1920s, and I'll look through my notes to figure out who. All my biographical information on these writers is going into a wiki, which for now is private while I set up the structure and the skeleton, but will soon be public and editable by anyone.


I need to get a copy of Women of the Left Bank and add them too.

Here's some of the people I can list as literary women in Paris from the documentary: Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Sylvia Beach, Janet Flanner, Alice B. Toklas, Colette, Janet Flanner, painter Marie Laurencin Berenice Abbott, Gisele Freund, Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Gertrude Stein, Ada "Bricktop " Smith , Josephine Baker, Renee Vivian, Romaine Brooks, Marie Bonaparte, Elizabeth Bowen, Victoria Ocampo, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Bryher.

We could also add:

* Gabriela Mistral
* Emilia Bernal
* Léonie Julieta Fournier (Nirene Jofre Oliú.)
* Comtesse de Noilles - Anna de Noailles

Of course, what about now? Where are we? Are we documenting this? I'd like to expand my women poets/writers wiki to right this minute and my own hometown. Why not document the moment and ourselves? Think of the riot grrl history that is already lost or slipping away. Let it be recorded on heaven's unchangeable heart or at least the internets, failing heaven.

Technorati Tags: feminism, geography, history, poetry, documenting women's history, women

A few feminist seeds scattered to the wind and you

The documentary Paris Was a Woman, about just a few of the women in Paris in the early 1900s and especially the 20s; writers, painters, poets. I especially liked the interviews with photographer Gisele Freund. The tension between Stein and Beach as Beach suddenly turned to throw her weight of attention, of critical attention and great-man-making, behind Joyce and people like Hemingway who she decided was a big fat genius before he had written a single stitch.

Rant mode...

Consider the poisonous sexism of Joyce and how the poison is worse when it is in an elaborate feast. Think for a minute about how good Ulysses is, and it's damn good, and then about how he produced it while knowing SO many genius interesting articulate politically and artistically aware women and what women characters does he write? Not any who have a thought in their head - a dumb teenager who confusedly tolerates a masturbating creep on the beach and an illiterate slut taking a shit. I could slap him. (And also could slap every person who's ever pointed out Molly Bloom to me as an example of a female character I could love in great literature. (and no I said no I won't No) I can love the book and admire the talent but hate the dreadful vindictive poison -- as well as the thing in Joyce and so many other writers of dicklit that makes them gather masses of mediocre sycophants to make themselves look better - unable to tolerate other actual geniuses. It is just that sort of person who is consecrated later in history as a "great" writer, unfortunately - something to keep in mind as a sour-grapes comfort as the most of us head straight to being Minor Poets. Think how irritated I am as I continue to digest Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red and the magma builds up in my fevered thoughts. Oh! The more beautiful and excellent the art, the worse the poison is and the madder as hell I get.

It was funny to be watching this movie with my partner who didn't really know any of the writers or painters even the most famous ones. Joyce and Stein, their names, but not their work at all and he had never heard of Sylvia Beach. That puts it all in perspective, doesn't it? I plotzed when he said "H.D.??? Who?"

To get the taste of all that out of your brain try downloading some of this:

Free mp3s of Adrienne Rich reading from Diving into the Wreck and other works - from the Pennsound archives. On the very long file, the 38 minute one, it sounded a little like Di Prima introducing her but then I decided it wasn't and the accent was just a bit similar. It's nice to have the huge file of the entire reading in my iTunes. I love hearing her inter-poem comments, nerdy little snippets about greek drama and patriarchy.

Oh, and if anyone happens to have some recordings of Di Prima's early readings I'd love to have more of them. I have her doing a few of the Revolutionary Letters; they're so flamingly fiercely beautiful!

Elisa speaking up about biological determinism. Very lovely!

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, books, feminism, literature, poetry, ranting

fun idea meltdown

so I've had these ideas before but suddenly feel like my head will explode if I don't blog them and say t hem again.

With the video and vlogging discussion, again, I love that everyone will be making home movies of their kids. - which susan mernit described rightly as "documenting families". What will make it *different* from other times like when everyone had shoeboxes full of super8 home movies... is the metadata. You don't know who is going to become interesting or important. Whose home movies of childhood do you wish you could see & why? various reasons, right? fame? relation to you? other reasons?

About social networking, again... I'd love very much to see historical friendster. Like, social networks 1870. Social networks 1926. Step through years, and get a picture of changing relationships & personal & power networks over time. Who knew who? Wouldn't that be awesome to have? Get the NEH to fund it. And have it be very easy to contribute, be wiki-ish, so that anyone can log in and add people from history and add data and relationships.