Mujeres de ayer y de hoy (1909), de Zoila Aurora Cáceres: redes, genealogías y trazas para la articulación de un archivo feminista divergente del Perú de entre siglos

Zoila Aurora Cáceres (1872-1958)’ essay Mujeres de ayer y de hoy (1909) reorganizes the history of humanity by foregrounding women’s agency and visibility. It also engages with early twentieth-century current affairs, including feminist movements, women’s suffrage, women’s congresses, and women’s participation in literature, the arts, and politics. Cáceres’s essay articulates an archive and illuminates a tradition of transatlantic feminisms that is neither unidimensional nor continuous, attending instead to its folds and constellations. At the same time, it traces a cartography with which the author—writing from a situated locus of enunciation marked by a double otherness as a Latin American woman in Europe—establishes a contentious relationship. The essay enables an examination of historical writing from a feminist perspective that breaks with the monolithic narratives and accompanying cultural hierarchies upheld by Latin American male intellectuals of the period. Moreover, it complicates imaginaries of networks, genealogies, and legacies, as well as their implicit power dynamics, which Cáceres explicitly challenges. Read in dialogue with both the transatlantic archive assembled in the text and Cáceres’s broader literary production, Mujeres de ayer y de hoy offers a framework for addressing the epistemic instability that has contributed to the simplification of an intellectual, aesthetic, and political body of work that is uncompromising yet central to the (re)construction of Peru’s fragmented early twentieth-century feminist archive.