Nineteenth-century women writers and the nation

This chapter provides an account of the robust emergence of women writers in nineteenth-century Latin America and of the narratives they produced, focusing on the complex relationship between national and gender ideology, the literary field and the consolidation of the new republics, especially in the second half of the century. Rather than focusing on aestheticist frameworks for the myriad novels, novellas, and short stories; poems, essays, and plays; and diaries, letters, and press articles produced by them, it examines their interaction with the dominant male discourse and the strategies that women of letters developed in order to move beyond the age-old patriarchal mandate of “not saying what they knew, or saying that they didn’t know, or saying the opposite of what they knew” (Ludmer 48).1 If intellectuals of the so-called national period had an impossibly idealized concept of the literary woman, later critics’ and writers’ respect for them, from modernistas and throughout the twentieth century, was negligible. This rich and diverse corpus of writing published in the periodical press and in book form, from Chile to Mexico, had all but disappeared from literary memory and from the canon until it was rediscovered more than a century later by feminist activists in Latin American, (USA) North American, and European academia from the late 1990s and beyond.