The history of women experienced exponential development in recent decades. It is a study aspect that emerged in the sixties of the twentieth century, in tune with Feminist movements that refuted the historiography that exalted the role of the State and of the imagined politics and practiced by men, or that prioritized the examination of historical processes or structures. A type of narrative that gave women (and other subaltern actors), A marginal place in which its prominence was registered in some footnoteor served to illustrate outstanding trajectories that merited jump to the body of the text. This way of studying women has changed almost completely following new perspectives and approaches that have allowed improving the understanding of the historical experience of women of flesh and blood, and the motivations that marked individual and collective actions over time through intense archive work.
The book “The Women of the Revolution” It constitutes an example of the new historiographic climate that is also political, not only because of the reflux or paralysis of rights enshrined in the current national and global context. It is also because it brings together a masterful cast of historians and anthropologists willing to scrutinize and narrate the avatars lived by women, in the trembling of promises and tragedies fired with the revolutions of South American Independence.
That the book assumes that challenge not only honor to texts or Seminal works like the one that Jules Michelet dedicated to the French revolutionaries and that served as an inspiring muse to the narrators of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to especially extol the prominence of women born in Patricios homes, from which they were rescued from oblivion by writers, chroniclers, poets or artists to place them in the annals of the revolution. The catalog of pioneer publications is also echoed that put capital issues and problems under three main methodological collections: The necessary warning to examine the social and political experience of women in their own terms without putting teleological visions and subsequent feminist activisms; The control of claiming perspectives or revolutionary past for its implications in national mythologies, and the fragmentary nature of the documentary traces to restore, test and interpret the forms of politicization and social mobilization of the subaltern groups or sectors of that convulsive time.
An outstanding finding is the one that requires the beat of the daily language of The growing mobilization and politicization of distinguished or common womenthat frightened the officials on duty leading them to regulate their private or public behaviors. Other experiences make the way in which peasant and urban women took care of their homes, businesses or family businesses in the face of the permanent or seasonal absence of their husbands, parents or brothers who were recruited to form the armies of the homeland, or were sanctioned by the revolutionary government for not demonstrating sufficient loyalty to the “sacred system of freedom” that the cures propagated in the sermons. There are also those who suffered from the banishment of their husbands enrolled in rival factions to the government circle, and those that were forced to travel the bleak life of exile making them love or conspiracy supports of their proscripts. There stand out the elevated supplications and petitions by SATURNINA OTÁLORA, Cornelio’s wife Saavedra, and Ángela Baudrix, Manuel’s wife Dorregooutraged by the absence of their husbands and restless for the fate of their homes and family unity. Also the letters of Guadalupe Cuenca, Mariano Moreno’s suffering wifethat without knowing that he had died on Altamar, he kept intact the loving bond and loyalty to the Morenista faction persecuted by his political adversaries. In turn, the epistles written by the Chileans appear Javiera Carrera and her sisters -in -law, Ana Cotapos and Mercedes Fontecilladesperate for the fate of their relatives prisoners, thickened or shot for challenging the author’s authority, O’Higgins and San Martín.
Meanwhile, these investigations do not overlook female lives in the whirlwind of the war or the public debate that divided waters between the defenders of the cause of America and the firm defenders of the Spanish king and the social hierarchies that had been put in check for the ideals of freedom and justice promised. There stand the women who marched with the revolutionary armies to the Altoperuana provinces, including the Remedios del Valle battle, whose portrait looks along with Belgrano’s in a recent ticket. There are also exceptional female routes that include The Pehuenches cacicas, Ignacia Guentenao, María Yanqueipi and Josefa Rocowho first agreed with the officials of the Spanish king on the border and who renewed their actions with the patriotic authorities. In the other social and dynastic end, the Bourbon princesses that emigrated to the Janeiro River also appear; Carlota Joaquina de Borbón, María Isabel de Braganza and Leopoldina de Habsburg; who tried without luck to convince the South Americans to erect a regency in order to stop independence and become key pieces of real diplomacy in the midst of the debacle of the Spanish Empire.
How could it be otherwise, “The women of the revolution” echoes the women who did not play in favor of the nascent homelandbut they did it in favor of the counterrevolution or supporters of the Spanish monarchy. There are silhouettes of illustrious midwives, such as Clara Núñez Chavarría, the sister -in -law of Miguel de Azcuénaga, the vowel of the First Government Board of May 25, 1810, who protected realistic prisoners. And there are also the Montevideanas who officiated for spies in favor of the Portuguese, or dedicated verses to Fernando VII, all refractory of the Buenos Aires of Buenos Aires, who are responsible for the social disorder and the plebeian character that had become evident in the celebration of May 25, 1815 in Montevideo.
In the middle, several heroines converted into devotion figures from the national liturgies of yesterday and today look: among them Macacha Güemes stands out, a woman who lived between two worlds, that of the brother overturned to the revolution and that of her husband who played in favor of the royal banner. Similarly, in Paraguay, the prominence of Juana María Lara, a daughter of the Asunceña elite turned into an intermediary of the separatist movement of Buenos Aires and the imperial metropolis turned into a hero of the nation in recent years.
In sum, a compound volume in the light of the present tense, with the rigor and sensitivity that women submerged in the revolutionary whirlwind that changed their lives forever.
Beatriz Bragoni She is a doctor in History from the University of Buenos Aires, Regular Professor at the Faculty of Law of the National University of Cuyo, principal researcher of CONICET and number of the National Academy of History (RA). He conducted postdoctoral studies at the École des Hautes etudes in social sciences of Paris. She has been a guest professor from several European and Latin American universities. She is author, among other books, “José Miguel Carrera. A Chilean revolutionary in the Río de la Plata ” (Edhasa, 2012) and “San Martín. A political biography of the Liberator ” (Edhasa, 2019). She is an editor of “The Women of the Revolution” (Edhasa).
By Beatriz Bragoni
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