Women's actions, women’s words: female political and cultural responses to the Argentine state

Abstract

This thesis explores the interaction of gender and the construction of the Argentine state. It pays particular attention to the emergence of women’s movements as well as women’s writing and the way in which both reflect and express the history of the Argentine state after independence. Beginning with a brief account of Argentine independence and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento as founding-father of the Argentine nation, part one focuses on the historical periods of the Liberal State, Peronism, and the military dictatorships of the 1960s and early 1970s. It investigates how national discourse incorporated gender discourse without including women as citizens in their full right. It then explores how women’s movements articulated their ensuing discontent with the patriarchal system that attempted to ensure continuity of this exclusion. Part two identifies and analyzes selected texts by nineteenth and twentieth century Argentine female authors. Written from a specifically female standpoint, these novels and short stories articulate women’s grievances with the political developments addressed in part one.