Modern Professions for the Modern Latin American Women

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it was pretty common to see women working as "maestras", "modistas" and "parteras" in several Latin American cities. As women increasingly entered into the ranks of industrial workshops and white-collar jobs, female professions soon became an important aspect of state’s national projects. As part of their quest to modernize the economy and create a modern citizenry, the national government’s in Argentina, Mexico, and Spain concentrated their efforts in normalizing, regulating, and reeducating women into trades. By doing so, state projects reinforced societal views of women’s work as related to their roles as mothers and wives.

The panelists of “Modern Professions for the Modern Latin American Women” focus on teachers, dressmakers and midwives in Argentina, Mexico and Spain to show the changing relationship the state and women established in the last part of the nineteenth-century and the first half of the twentieth-century. Carolina Zumaglini’s paper shows how state-sponsored institutions, under the name of normal schools, trained women as teachers. She further illustrates how women, idealized as nurturing, gentle, and maternal, rapidly became the most prevalent human resource in support of the public education system. Following, Ana Cristina Rosado Medina argues, that in post-revolutionary Mexico, governments sought to regulate the midwifery trade as part of their project to form modern mothers. Government officials and doctors increasingly passed norms and regulations to control midwifery. Finally, Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez shows how dressmaking became a feasible profession for women to become economically independent between 1920s-1940s. Along with the efforts of post revolutionary governments in Mexico to modernize dressmaking through public education, women also published their own dressmaking pattern books and opened their own private academias. As a whole, this panel also emphasizes transnationalism as an approach to study women’s work and the modernization of trades and working lives in Latin America and thus seek to place the history of Spain, Mexico and Argentina within a global context.

Sub Track

• Gender and Feminist Studies

Session Organizer

• Maria Carolina Zumaglini, Florida International University

Chair

• Jocelyn H Olcott, Duke University

Individual Presentations

• Teaching Modern Womanhood in Late Nineteenth-Century Argentina - Maria Carolina Zumaglini, Florida International University

• La partería en el Estado posrevolucionario: La creación del Reglamento General de Profesiones, Ciudad de México 1931-1945 - Ana Cristina Rosado, Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora

• Modern Sewing for Modern Women - Paula A De la Cruz Fernandez, Florida International University