Teaching Modern Womanhood in Late Nineteenth-Century Argentina

• In Event: Modern Professions for the Modern Latin American Women

Abstract

My study focuses on the role women teachers played within Argentina’s national project in the second half of the nineteenth-century. To do so, this paper traces the role that educational and political leaders placed on women teacher training. Contrary to what most of the literature proposes, teachers used public education to define modern definitions of womanhood in Argentina. By looking at the daily activities of women administrators and teachers my work proposes a nuance look into the lives of women in late nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. I argue that the nation-building process in Argentina promoted a moment of change seized upon the language of tradition.

The history of the creation and development of the normal schools in Argentina show gender as an integral component to its national project. Education and political leaders envisioned and promoted the creation of a public education system led by women. As a consequence, hundreds of women overcame restrictions on professional employment to become teachers and public administrators in record numbers. This participation transcended contemporary conceptions of gender roles and political involvement, even ones touted by liberal intellectuals. Taking an evermore central role in normal schools, these women became key links between the home and the state. In Buenos Aires, women’s relationship with the state changed with the creation of the normal schools as they entered the public sphere as “second mothers,” moral exemplars to their communities, and as teachers of the next generations of citizens. National leaders and local authorities legitimated the authority given of these women teachers using a language familiar to society. They constantly referred to the teacher as a “second mother” and to the school as a “second home.” reached to the colonial past —using terms like Queens, Monarchy, and second motherhood— to justify that girls and women would be sometimes subsidized and usually hired by the republican state to teach the young.

Author

• Maria Carolina Zumaglini, Florida International University