Masculinity and the Angel of the House: Men Who Nurture and Early Feminism

• In Event: Positivismo y biotecnologías en Cuba, Perú y México. Exclusión social, genocidio y el desarrollo de un temprano feminismo en el Siglo XIX

Abstract

A 2010 collection of essays on masculinity in Latin American literature, Entre hombres (Ed. Ana Peluffo and Ignacio Sánchez Prado) documents the fear, marginalization, stigma, and abjection associated with the feminized male subject, particularly in nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature. The section of the compilation titled “Masculinidades sentimentales e impotentes” points to the lack of power and productivity associated with feminized men. The authors of the essays find that the sensitive male subjects in the literary texts under consideration are associated with symbolic castration, infantilization, and other attitudes that undermined the potential of the nation. These scholars’ work on literature and gender aptly captures the homophobia and nationalistic fear of feminine weakness inherent in the social codes of the period. Yet, within the nascent women’s movement we find indicators that well-educated ambitious women put a high value on male subjects who exhibited maternal and nurturing characteristics, considering these to be more virile and sexually attractive than traditional masculinity. To explore this topic we will examine essays and fiction by the nineteenth-century Cuban writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (“La mujer.” Album cubano de lo bueno y lo bello. Havana: January, February, April, 1860. Tres amores, 1858) and the early twentieth-century Peruvian writer Aurora Cáceres (“La emancipación de la mujer.” 1896. In Vestales del templo azul: Notas sobre el feminismo en la época modernista. Ed. Robert Jay Glickman. Toronto: Canadian Academy of the Arts, 1996; La rosa muerta. 1914. Ed. Thomas Ward; and Mi vida con Enrique Gómez Carrillo. Madrid: Renacimiento, 1929). This angle in masculinity studies is one that merits further investigation in order to bring to light the vocal minority of early feminists who realized that the disturbance of traditional notions of the feminine and the masculine were necessary for the emancipation of women, and for liberating men from these barriers as well.

Author

• Nancy A LaGreca, University of Oklahoma