´What do Women want?´ Women´s Citizenship and Private Writing in Argentina´s Early 20th Century

Abstract

The so-called “private writings” – autobiographies, letters, travel journals, diaries – allow us to analyze the possible interstices between the private and the public sphere in a historical moment in which legal rights were clearly pre-defined according to gender. In this sense, “private writings” permit us to reflect upon women´s strategies to speak their own minds in the public arena, in a context in which they were confined to the domestic sphere. My starting point is the insoluble conflict put forward by one of the first male voices to stand for women´s rights in Argentina – the Socialist Enrique Del Valle Iberlucea – in order to analyze the ways in which women´s citizenship is narrated – lived? Represented? – by women themselves. For that, I examine both the reports of female-writer´s travel journals and those of a schoolteacher: Ada María Elflein (1880-1919).