The emancipation of women! What! Can that bolt of furniture, that kitchen utensil, that procreative machine, that golden zero, that frivolous toy, that fashion doll possibly be a rational being?
Juana Paula Manso de Noronha.Footnote 1Mourning lost minds as a zealous missionary might lost souls, Juana Manso (1819–1875) looked to the transformative power of education to eradicate the colonial legacies of Argentina. The awakening of the masses, she believed, would lay the foundation for a democratic nation, position her country for entry into the ranks of the leading western countries, and, above all, allow Argentine men and women to develop unrestrainedly their God-given faculties. She viewed her age as one of universal change and felt privileged to play a role in the challenge of pulling her country ‘from the claws of barbarism’.Footnote 2 Sometimes, however, she despaired at Argentines' resistance (as she saw it) to awaken from their long Spanish-induced torpor, one reinforced by the autocratic rule of Juan Manuel de Rosas. ‘Oh! Spain, Spain. What worthy successors of yours we are!’ she exclaimed even as she worked relentlessly to impose her vision of modernity.
In this paper I wish to reconsider the figure of Juana Manso as a crucial nation maker in Argentina in the decades after Rosas' fall from power in 1852. In recent years Manso has been one of a group of nineteenth-century women ‘retrieved’ in Argentine history thanks to a handful of – mostly literary – scholars who have traced the women's trajectories as journalists, novelists and poets; and analysed their ‘wily’ strategies to break through the confinements of female respectability.Footnote 3 Among this group of early writers, several of them founders of women's journals which – though ephemeral – were crucial in breaking a male monopoly upon literary works, none had a more commanding voice than Juana Manso, a woman who has received surprisingly meagre attention, particularly in the English speaking world.Footnote 4 The first woman to be appointed to an official government position and arguably the most radical feminist in nineteenth-century Argentina, Manso was school teacher, inspector and principal; the first female member of the Board of Public Instruction (the lead institution in education reform); and author of the first textbook on Argentine history, editor of three feminist journals and an educational journal, as well as novelist and poet.Footnote 5 She entered national debates airing her views in the main newspapers, started the first public libraries in the country, translated pedagogical and legal books, and became the first woman to take up public speaking.
Unlike other notable nineteenth-century Argentine women, such as Juana Manuela Gorriti or Eduarda Mansilla whose creative writing was at the centre of their lives, Manso was primarily a social activist who subordinated her writing to the struggle for social change. Indeed, once she found the path of activism, she lamented the time wasted on novels and verses and, henceforth, used her formidable flow of writing as a tool to bring about the changes she wanted to see in her country, particularly the end of men and women's lives of tutelage as a result of ignorance.Footnote 6 To only consider Manso as a literary figure and to cluster her with contemporary female writers, as recent studies on her have done, is to miss what is perhaps most important about this woman. This is her astonishingly active performance on the nineteenth-century political stage, an activism that would not be matched by Argentine women for at least a generation.
In Manso's ideal nation, women, as much as men, were central to a nation's functioning, and thus it was crucial that they be moulded into educated and responsible citizens. To arrive at her conception, Manso drew creatively on a tangled skein from which she drew on two strands in particular, making her thinking especially innovative in the Argentine context. The first, strengthened by her North American experience, led her to emphasise ideas embodied in a new domesticity, especially the notion of the home as a site of women's empowerment, even a springboard for action beyond the home, an emancipatory impulse that Manso saw as an antidote to the colonial enclosure of Argentine women.Footnote 7 A second strand led her to highlight the importance of private rights, particularly in the lives of women for whom, Manso argued, the assumption of the domestic as a sheltering oasis in an agitated world was false. It was the braiding of these two strands that made hers one of the most trenchant of voices for change in her time.
The interest of the Manso story, however, lies beyond what it can tell us about nascent Argentine feminism and education. The peregrinations of this well-travelled woman, who at various times lived in Uruguay, Brazil, the United States and Cuba, illuminates, too, the dynamics of the flow of ideas in the larger trans-Atlantic and trans-American worlds.Footnote 8 By considering Manso in a thickly textured manner, commingling biography, writing, performance, travel, feminism and education, we can begin to get both a layered appreciation of a still opaque woman and a sense of the complexities involved in the crossings of ideas that, torn from their core, were ingested and used for local political purposes, parochial fights and, above all, to push the boundaries of imaginings in the making of a new republican nation.
Youth
Manso came of age in the turbulent era of post-independence Argentina, a dangerously unsettled political world where the future shape of the nation was at stake. Her enlightened family, close to the centre of this effervescence, believed in the importance of women's education, and her Spanish father, who was a friend and supporter of the liberal President Rivadavia (in power 1821–1827), contributed to his daughter's strong sense of self-worth when he paraded her intellectual precocity in front of his friends in the cafés of Buenos Aires and published her teenage dabbles in writing. Privately, she witnessed another site of turbulence: that of her parents, who though officially married, lived separate lives. Furthermore, the rise to power of the ruthless Rosas meant exile in Montevideo for her family. Here, in 1840, Manso became part of a stream of political exiles that included writers Esteban Echeverría and José Mármol, the latter to whom she was especially close and who later introduced her to educator and statesman, Domingo F. Sarmiento. Here too she participated in the (mostly male) group's debates over the meanings of nationhood, including discussions about the role of women in a new republic.Footnote 9
Forced from Montevideo in 1841 by the rise of a pro-Rosas government in Uruguay, her family moved to Brazil, first Rio Grande do Sul, then to Rio de Janeiro. This itinerant life picked up pace after 1844 when she suddenly married a Portuguese violinist, Francisco de Saá Noronha. In support of her husband's career, she accompanied him on tours of Brazil and then in 1846, excited by the stories of fame and fortune Noronha could expect in North America, the two of them travelled to the United States.Footnote 10 Based in Philadelphia, she helped him in what turned out to be dismally unsuccessful music tours until, poor and pregnant when she could no longer accompany him, and in what must have been one of the bleakest moments in her life, she reportedly gave birth to her first child alone.Footnote 11 From the United States they moved to Cuba and, by 1850, they were back in Brazil where materially things improved until Noronha's abrupt departure in 1852, leaving Manso penniless with two small children. This bitter and humiliating experience (Noronha ran off with a rich, younger woman) made Manso intensely aware of a woman's vulnerability, and from this time on, she placed women's issues at the centre of her reforming endeavours.
Even before her husband's abandonment, Manso's ideas on women had been moving in progressive directions. Thus, for example, while it lasted, her marriage had elements of a partnership that was not traditional. One can detect this progression played out in the woman's journal, O Jornal das Senhoras, which she founded in January 1852 and in which she vowed to work for ‘the emancipation of women’, while (as her husband's agent and manager) she also boosted Noronha's career prospects by publishing his compositions.Footnote 12 But now, thrust suddenly into the role of single parent, she had to think seriously about survival. She eked out a living by teaching and writing, and looked around for something more lucrative. She decided to become a licensed midwife. At a time of almost no helpful role models for working women, it is likely that she was inspired to do so by the example of a well-known local figure, Madame Durocher, a trained midwife from the Rio School of Medicine, who had established a thriving practice among upper class Brazilians.Footnote 13 In preparation for entry into the Medical School, Manso became a Brazilian citizen. She discontinued her plan only because of appeals from Porteño friends that she return to Argentina: Rosas had fallen; former exiles were in charge; there was a call for all talented people to put their energies behind an unmatched opportunity to create a new nation. The temptation was too great to resist.
But her return did not live up to expectations. In Buenos Aires, Manso's first venture was a journal, Álbum de Señoritas, modeled on the one she had founded in Brazil. Like the latter, the new journal took a radical stand on the advancement of women and a critical stance on the Catholic Church. It lasted only eight weeks. Manso's emotional tacking between high hope and deep pessimism, a constant in her, is evident in the contrast between the first issue of Álbum which appeared in January 1854 announcing ambitiously, ‘I intend to prove that women's intelligence, far from being absurd, or a defect, or crime, or folly, is her finest adornment’, and the last issue which closed on the caustic note of, ‘With this issue I end my work and, like a mother who loses a dear child, I write its epitaph: “He lived and died unrecognized just as his mother was always unrecognized in the La Plata region”.’Footnote 14 Desperately in need of money, she advertised her teaching services, returning to Brazil for four years.
Manso and Sarmiento
In 1859 she met Sarmiento. This was a watershed in her life. She was not, as historians have too often assumed, a clone of Sarmiento.Footnote 15 Forty years old, strong, opinionated and self-reliant, she had her own ideas about education, women and nationhood; thus while she became his staunchest ally, she was always her own persona. Sarmiento recognised her worth immediately. Manso, he wrote admiringly, ‘was the only man among the three or four million people in Chile and Argentina who understood my work in education’.Footnote 16 As outsiders to the Porteño power elite, and exiles and travellers who had heard America's ‘singing’, they found much that drew them together. Sarmiento, then head of the Elementary Schools Department which oversaw Buenos Aires provincial schools, appointed her principal of the first public co-educational school in Buenos Aires and editor of the Anales de la educación común, an education journal he had founded in 1856. Henceforth, her writing focused primarily on education, the underpinning, as she saw it, of a successful nation. Her views on the intertwining of education and nation-making dovetailed with Sarmiento's in three crucial areas, although in subtle ways her positioning was more radical.
First, Manso and Sarmiento were adamant about the importance of educating the lower classes, particularly the rural population. In the Argentine countryside, they believed, vast distances, a culture of endemic violence, racial mixing, and long isolation had resulted in ignorant and easily manipulated masses, who would never, through their own effort, achieve anything close to democracy.Footnote 17 On his return from exile in 1855, Sarmiento begun putting his considerable energies into public education, particularly into neglected elementary schooling, and Manso joined his education drive. With Sarmiento, she argued that the rich would always take care of their children's education, and that it was the common people who must be educated as a bulwark against the elite's dangerous tendency to amass national resources.
While both fought to equip the downtrodden to enter the body politic, Manso never doubted the transformative power of education, as Sarmiento occasionally did. This can be seen in their different approaches towards Amerindians. In his endeavour to ‘civilize’, Sarmiento sometimes justified exterminating Indians, whom he viewed as an essentially ‘savage’ people.Footnote 18 Manso rejected such reasoning. ‘The conquest enslaved [Indians] …, tore them to pieces and, … after Independence, we have only continued what the Conquest started. … [T]he Indian is intelligent, … capable of a thousand noble and generous sentiments. … It is just that [he …] is perverted by ignorance’.Footnote 19 Manso's ideas about the malleability of human beings extended to blacks and here she was influenced by a key strand in Brazilian racial thinking at mid-century. Like many elite Brazilians, she emphasised racial improvement through better adaptation to environmental factors, including food, hygiene, exercise, good laws, and especially education.Footnote 20 The practical repercussions of Manso's racial thought can be seen in her response to an incident in Argentina concerning complaints about a teacher who was mulatto. When some parents used his colour as an excuse not to send their children to school, Manso published a piece arguing that what was most important about the teacher was not his race but his culture: ‘Professor Salguero is a gentleman, honourable, of exemplary behaviour and a good instructor’.Footnote 21 She also she rejected the idea that the United States prospered because of its Saxon racial origins. ‘The United States’ prosperity and strength are a result of lawmakers having, very early on, considered education … as their first duty', she wrote.Footnote 22 If enlightened humans intervened to provide the armies of the wretched with better environmental conditions, including instruction, the result would be a healthy population, the clay for moulding a civilised, moral people and a progressive nation. In other words, moral conduct was learned, and virtuous citizens were made through correct education.
Second, both Manso and Sarmiento believed that educating women was crucial. Invoking Enlightenment ideas and republican reasoning, they argued that an educated woman was a better mother and wife and thus a more effective moulder of solid citizens (‘It is whimsy to try and create a family with women who are stupid and ignorant’).Footnote 23 Their role within the family was thus the cornerstone of a successful nation. Moreover, adhering to Pestalozzian thinking concerning women's natural teaching proclivity, they held that the best educators were female, especially for younger children. That they were cheaper to employ was an added boon for Sarmiento, but less so for Manso, who never trumpeted this ‘advantage’ as he did.Footnote 24 Both supported co-educational schools. Manso, a fervent advocate of the idea that intelligence has no gender, believed boys and girls should follow the same school programme, and that girls should not waste precious school-time learning sewing and embroidery, skills they could pick up at home. Venturing further than Sarmiento, Manso attacked what we might call the binary thinking of gender stereotypes. She argued that the parcelling out of gender attributes (‘For [men] progress, freedom, the flight of grand ideas; for women, quietude, … ignorance’Footnote 25) infantilised women, denied them individual rights, and forced them into a dependency on men that could become desperate. Even worse, it made them into a wasted national resource. It is true Manso retained essentialist notions concerning women. For example, as a Pestalozzian, she believed they were intuitive teachers. But she did not stop at a static essentialism, as I argue below.
Third, Manso and Sarmiento looked to North America for their educational philosophy and goals, particularly Horace Mann's articulation of a network of secular, publicly-funded, common schools. They also drew upon the United States for school-building plans, programmes, pedagogy and textbooks. Sounding remarkably like Horace Mann, they rejected insinuations that their country must become prosperous before it invested in education; on the contrary, education was the basis of prosperity. This was because an educated agriculturalist or miner, for example, would be better informed about his business; but also, and more importantly, because an educated worker who had learned self-restraint and the habits of regularity would be a better worker, less prone to crime, and on the way to becoming a citizen who could be trusted with the exercise of democracy. In other words he would be ‘civilized’.
There was another, less obvious, page from the North American experience that attracted Manso and Sarmiento: the bustle in the United States was astonishing. Everyone, it seemed, was on the move, and all regions were connecting. ‘The multitude of travellers that [daily] cross the United States in all directions is extraordinary’, wrote Manso, and it was because of ‘fast and inexpensive travel that distant populations were in contact with one another’.Footnote 26 Sarmiento delighted in the scurrying and the hurrying; particularly because, untidy and tumultuous as it might seem on the ground, he perceived it in its broader terms, that is, as a tidal wave of progress that Europeans and their descendents were imposing upon what was primitive, barbaric, and backward. ‘Indianapolis’, Sarmiento told Manso, ‘which twenty years ago was an Indian wigwam, is today a great city with its own Broadway filled with palaces and stores and hotels and clubs, and wide streets … and railroads’.Footnote 27 ‘What is most surprising here is that as you travel away from the coasts … and encounter the newest settlements, you find the greatest degree of civilization’.Footnote 28 This was the opposite of Argentina, and a key objective for Manso and Sarmiento was to change Porteños' contempt for the enervating ‘interior’ in contrast to the energetic coastal region, and to transform far-flung regions, such as Patagonia and Catamarca, into the Californias and Oregons of Argentina.Footnote 29 Sarmiento therefore planned his network of normal schools to spread across a wide swath of the nation. He also wanted naturalists to catalogue flora and fauna far and wide, and astronomers to map the southern skies, and for products like the wine of San Juan, the guano of Patagonia, and the textiles of Jujuy to be widely commercialised.
Similarly, Manso enthused over what she called the ‘silent revolution’ of South America as steamboats charted distant inland rivers and railroads linked nations.Footnote 30 She stressed that there must be a convergence between planning for technological advances and education. ‘Of what use are railroads’, she asked, ‘if, as well as developing trade and industry, they do not also lead to the dissemination of ideas and the interchange of intellectual advances’; and why was it, she complained, that in San Juan, one of the most progressive states with regards to education, no one was studying mineralogy?Footnote 31 Like frontiersmen in North America, whose urgency she admired, she was in a hurry: ‘We must establish schools anywhere we can: in hovels, alongside train stations, rural areas and inland, according to whatever resources are available’.Footnote 32 Together with schools, she wanted to see the development of small land-holding groups interested in civic action. ‘Otherwise, instead of educated, freedom-loving citizens inheriting the nation there would be hordes of barbarians’ or, the other side of the coin, overlarge landowners who perpetuated the double curse of inequality and ignorance.Footnote 33
Manso's and Sarmiento's sweeping ideas on education encountered a wall of opposition. To be successful they had to persuade legislators to establish requirements for the training of teachers, foot the bill for the cost of free primary school attendance and, most difficult of all, centralise schools under the single authority of the state.Footnote 34 School authorities and their jurisdictions were confusingly overlapped and, in the state of Buenos Aires alone, were made up by the city municipal body, the government of the state of Buenos Aires, and the Sociedad de Beneficencia, in charge of poor girls' public schools.Footnote 35 There were also numerous private schools, each with its own rules and regulations, which Sarmiento and Manso wanted to bring under state aegis; and to further complicate matters, the Catholic Church, which in an attempt to regain some of its old influence and in frank opposition to Sarmiento's and Manso's secular vision, entered into alliances with any who were willing to brake the momentum of secular reform.
Another problem they faced was a lack of qualified teachers, the shoal upon which previous attempts at educational reform had foundered and one over which there was little agreement about how to solve. Sarmiento believed that a big part of the failure of the earlier normal schools was the appointees' local avarice and ambition for their own individual advancement, and so proposed to set up normal schools with foreign teachers.Footnote 36 The most innovative aspect of his policy was that he wanted most of the teachers to be women, Protestant and chosen not from Europe, as was the case for higher education, but from the United States. Eventually, nearly one hundred teachers answered his call, all but four of them women. The first woman arrived in 1869. Manso welcomed his idea of importing ‘trained brains’ from the United States, and she ranted against the Buenos Aires government when it refused to pay for the teachers and yet was willing to fund foreign nuns to oversee health care.Footnote 37
When Manso accepted Sarmiento's challenge to work for educational change, she probably had not counted on Sarmiento, her main ally, leaving the arena so soon. In 1862 he became governor of San Juan. From there he went to Chile, Peru, and then the United States as roving ambassador (probably because his rivals wanted him out of the way) and did not return to Buenos Aires until 1868. With his departure, the national drive for public education stalled and if it kept going at all, this was largely a result of Manso's efforts.
Manso as Editor of Anales de la Educación Común
Her main platform to extend education was the journal, Anales de la educación común, which she made hers, often taking more uncompromising stands than Sarmiento had advocated.Footnote 38 Thus, for example, while he wanted to see corporal punishment moderated but not abolished, Manso used the journal's pages to fight for its abolition. Sarmiento, too, was willing to compromise on the influence of the Catholic Church in public education allowing priests to provide religious instruction, something which Manso adamantly opposed. In 1867 she entered into an acrimonious public debate with the deeply Roman Catholic politician Félix Frías – whom Sarmiento managed to keep as his uneasy ally – in a loud defence of the Santa Fé governor, Nicasio Oroña, who advocated civil marriage and tried to turn a monastery into an agricultural school, raising an outcry among Catholic circles.Footnote 39 She also used the journal's pages as a tool in her struggles against those members on the Board of Public Instruction – to which she was appointed in 1868 – who opposed her. Hers was the first appointment of a woman to a government position, and it shocked misogynists, a number of whom sat on the Board with her. With little sense of diplomacy, Manso asseverated against the latter, calling them uninformed about the new pedagogy, in contrast to herself. The infighting that ensued turned vitriolic as Manso's opponents started their own (ephemeral) educational publication to attack her.Footnote 40 When her main opponent, Luis de la Peña, died, she did not retreat, declaring that her opposition to the man had not been personal but a result of his unenlightened ideas on education.Footnote 41 She showed similar contempt for his replacement, Carlos Sastre, who like De la Peña, was a well-regarded local educator, describing him as the ‘author of texts written in double-Dutch’ (educación china). Sarmiento, who welcomed her soldiering for reforms he held dear, was ambivalent about her stridency. On the one hand, he wrote encouragingly with comments like, ‘Do you know of any other Argentine woman who has ever written, lectured, published, worked towards a useful end [as you have]?’ At the same time, however, he advised, ‘Lower your tone’.Footnote 42
In other areas, the Anales under Manso's direction remained true to Sarmiento's vision. It was still a journal aimed at educators and legislators that tried to create a critical mass of thoughtful persons concerned about the future of the nation, and it sought to reach out beyond Buenos Aires to the rest of the nation.Footnote 43 Thus it encouraged local progressive educators, publishing their writings, speeches and correspondence, such as those of Lindor B. Sotomayor in Catamarca, who drew up a legal framework for the operation of public schools, which became a model for other states.Footnote 44 It applauded instructors who adopted methods to make education pleasurable (a fundamental Pestalozzian tenet) and communities who had the foresight to invest in school buildings. It informed public officials, teachers and concerned citizens about pedagogical thinking in Europe and, especially, in the United States. Not only were the writings of educators such as Henry Barnard, David Page and Horace Mann translated (often by Manso herself) and published, so were educators' speeches at United States congresses. Manso ran a long piece on the history of public education in Pennsylvania.Footnote 45 A champion of the theory of object teaching, she translated the U.S. educator, Norman A. Calkins's Primary Object Lessons and published it in instalments. She condemned officials who ignored North American educational models and looked instead to France, a country, she noted contemptuously, ‘that hadn't even begun to put into practice policies that the North Americans had perfected’.Footnote 46 She suggested practical steps instructors could take in their classrooms. For example, they could divide children into groups according to age and level of instruction and end the ineffective Lancastrian system many schools still used. They could introduce callisthenics (viewed as morally dubious) and make it a required part of school programmes. She provided lists of the minimum teaching aids and pieces of furniture a school needed to carry out its mission, all of which should be of the best quality for ‘with poor elements, nothing good has ever been achieved’.Footnote 47 She called for the setting up of kindergartens (a very novel idea) and for having breaks between lessons. She upbraided schools that did not collect statistical data. To the legislators, she suggested they use land taxes, home sale taxes, and court fines as sources of money for education. At the same time, she instructed them on the meaning of a government that led change, as opposed to one that got mixed up in its minutiae and acted tyrannically.
Fighting Women
Because of her ‘unnatural’ transgressions into the male domain, it is no surprise to find Manso at the centre of controversies, especially those concerning women's place in a new nation. Some were waged with women. Indeed, among the rewards of returning to the Manso story is encountering long-forgotten female actors who circle the Manso planet, sometimes in support, sometimes in defiance, as she herself moves back and forth across the boundary between a hegemonic camp and an oppositional one.
One such battle came in 1865 with members of the Sociedad de Beneficencia, a welfare institution that the anti-clerical President Rivadavia created in 1823 and charged with tasks previously carried out by nuns, including the schooling of poor girls. Its personnel was made up of upper class women whom Manso described to Mary Mann as ‘women of the elite and, alas, it is impossible to make them understand that … it is not enough to be the wife or mother of a governor or minister to become knowledgeable’.Footnote 48 She particularly disliked the group's strong pro-Catholic sentiment. Her bitterest clash with the organisation came over the issue of co-education and Manso's view that girls should learn the same things as boys, even demanding that frowned-upon callisthenics be made a part of the programme of all schools. The Sociedad countered that mixed schools were immoral and, taking advantage of the fact that Sarmiento, Manso's powerful ally, was away, the women targeted the school Manso headed. This was the first public co-ed school in the country and, as such, a landmark. The women were successful in forcing Manso's resignation, and with her removal, the Sociedad dismissed the boys and took over what now became an all-girls school.Footnote 49 This defeat cost the never-well-off Manso financially but, far more, it cost her emotionally.
Aside from issues of ‘immorality’ and its sense that co-education was North American and foreign, what most worried the Sociedad about Manso's and Sarmiento's advocacy for co-ed schools was that they would be put out of business. The Sociedad had only just managed to keep afloat during the lean Rosas years, and since the return of liberal governments and the sudden interest in, and availability of, funds for education, it had been adroit in increasing its visibility and directing official largesse into its coffers. In 1854, for example, it received 66 per cent of the funds made available to elementary schools.Footnote 50 For the Sociedad, its control over girls education meant it could ensure the latter with a good Catholic upbringing and also provide jobs for their ‘less fortunate friends and relatives’.Footnote 51 But the battle between Manso and the Sociedad de Beneficencia was about more. At a deeper level this was a fight over how one viewed modernity: was it a dangerous surge to be checked with the brakes of tradition (a strong Catholic Church, silent women), or a liberating force to be embraced because it promised to unfetter human and social potential? Manso never forgave the women for this beating, and after 1865 she shed all pretence at compromise and launched into the most bellicose stage of her career which, in part, explains her next fracas.Footnote 52
This came over the issue of women's roles in the rural town of Chivilcoy and was particularly dispiriting because it occurred among people she considered her allies. As a prologue to the incident, some background is in order. In 1866, inspired by Sarmiento's description of public libraries in the United States (and after her debacle with the Beneficencia women ever more determined to broaden her struggle), Manso decided that Chivilcoy, one of the earliest towns to support educational reform, was the ideal site for the first public library in the country. To promote this idea, she planned a series of public lectures that, with her usual sense of the grander scheme of things, she timed to coincide with the opening of the railroad in Chivilcoy. Manso had only recently started speaking publicly and she was the first woman in Argentina to dare do so.Footnote 53 She started cautiously with readings from Sarmiento's accounts of his 1840s trip to the United States when he met Horace and Mary Mann; but soon she began reading from the works of known feminists, such as Juana Manuela Gorriti, and also from her own fiction. Then she took a more daring step. She decided to give a public lecture on the history of the Reformation. This was a challenge on two counts: first, because for a woman to lecture on a historical topic was to trespass on male intellectual preserve, and second, because the previous year she had deeply shocked Buenos Aires society by becoming a Protestant.Footnote 54 Manso's Reformation lecture evoked anonymous threats, heckling, asafoetida (a stinking substance) and a cruel newspaper letter in which the writer, posturing as a concerned ally, told Manso, ‘Doña Juanita … take some tranquilizers … to try and combat the hydrophobia tormenting you’.Footnote 55
Amid this contentious atmosphere, Manso travelled to Chivilcoy in November to talk about her idea of a public library and, to her delight, she received from the town (which had probably not yet heard the full details about the scandal surrounding Manso) a warm welcome. Turning up with a personal donation of over a hundred books, she gave several lectures on the role of libraries and the importance of women taking up reading and instruction. The event raised a goodly sum toward the construction of the library, and Manso was so pleased that she decided to return for a repeat performance six months later.Footnote 56 On this occasion, however, she was taunted, stones were thrown at the hall's tin roof in order to drown out her voice, and as she left the hall, she was pelted, again, with asafoetida.Footnote 57 How are we to explain the vehemence against Manso?
Her own detailed account of the incident provides a number of clues that point to the latent tensions she was stirring up in Chivilcoy, and elsewhere. As alarming as her Protestantism were her views on women. In her push for the library, Manso enjoined women to take the lead, enter civic life, organise schools, read and become informed. Her talks here were part of a series she gave in provincial towns around Buenos Aires. In Quilmes, for example, she implored the community to ‘form school associations without excluding women. Accept that as mothers, [they] can be the most active and invested agents’.Footnote 58 In marked contrast to sermons on meekness and forbearance that such women were accustomed to hearing from the pulpit (the main site for public discourse), she told them about the possibilities that could be open to them, and then that they should demand them. The contemporary notion of an ideal woman was an impossible myth to live up to, she argued, and those who tried to do so were doomed to be frustrated and disappointed. ‘Women of Chivilcoy’, she expounded, ‘[you] have no more loyal friend than a book. … A woman who … loves to read will be stronger in the face of misfortune’.Footnote 59 After two young women in the audience stood up to speak in support of her words, she singled them out for praise, telling her audience, ‘Tonight the women of this humble town are the first to acknowledge the female's [true] intellectual capacity’.Footnote 60
Manso was no innocent to the unsettling effect of her words. Describing the event to Sarmiento, she wrote, ‘Hooligans (populacho grosero) shouted obscenities at the women who came to hear me, because they believed it was a crime for women to learn, and even worse … that they make use of their intelligence’.Footnote 61 For the traditional-minded Chivilcoy folk, not merely was Manso suspect for being a Protestant woman who spoke publicly, travelled freely, and held public posts; even worse, she was galvanising local women into articulating latent discontents, instigating them into action, and urging them to read which at least threatened to distract them from their households duties. Altogether, she was encouraging women to make the sort of demands that would discomfort many men and disturb subtly wrought family relations. Chivilcoy wasn't the first place where Manso suffered catcalls, heckling and even asafoetida, but it was one of her most bitter experiences because it came from such an unexpected quarter. A dispirited Manso cried out to her long-absent ally, Sarmiento, ‘I will wait until you return … some day, … [for] I have stood alone in the struggle … for five years’.Footnote 62
In 1868 Sarmiento returned from the United States to Argentina after having won a presidential election in which he had not campaigned (although Manso had, on his behalf). His presidency ushered in an era of unprecedented changes. Making educational reform one of its top priorities, Sarmiento's government began to carry out reforms for which both he and Manso had long clamoured, and a few that must have improved Manso's daily life in terms of her ability to make ends meet. For example, the government funded the Anales. Manso was also appointed to the Board of Public Instruction, a body that oversaw a re-constituted Elementary Schools Department, an appointment that, though it gave her more of a power base from which to continue her reform work, intensified the controversy around her figure. She was also nominated to a commission charged to draw up federal law on education.Footnote 63
With her characteristic mixture of vision, energy and suffer-no-fools attitude, Manso threw herself into the work. In an official carriage provided especially for her use, she roamed Buenos Aires province inspecting schools, giving lectures, and descending upon hapless teachers causing dread and arousing antagonism among people for whom the idea of inspection was new and the notion of a woman with public authority unthinkable. In the course of a month she visited 34 schools; on a single day she gave six lectures. She followed up with (mostly) scathing reports.Footnote 64 Nevertheless, she acknowledged the tide was turning. When, at the end of 1871 – despite a devastating yellow fever epidemic in Buenos Aires city – she looked at the progress in the country as a whole she was satisfied that in some ways it had been a good year: the national government had agreed to subsidise state education, a telegraph line had connected Buenos Aires to Chile, a railroad had opened communications between Rosario and Córdoba, and in distant states like San Juan and Catamarca, the authorties, heeding policies that Manso and Sarmiento long advocated, had taken important strides to build schools and increase the numbers of children attending them. She was pleased that such a learned and innovative teacher as José María Torres was now in charge of school inspections around the country, and that elementary school principals were to compete for their posts in accordance with a process used in Boston schools.Footnote 65 Above all, she was gratified that the perennial problem of the lack of qualified teachers was finally being addressed. After many obstacles, the American, George Stearns, had opened a normal school for men in Entre Ríos and there was talk of opening one for women.
But Manso's battles did not end with Sarmiento's rise to power and her passionate struggle against what she saw as ineptitude and ignorance continued unabated. If previously she saw herself as fighting to maintain a near moribund reforming impetus, now that the government was serious about educational reform, she was impatient to see correct policies implemented and intransigent with her intellectual adversaries. The opposition she encountered, as much about educational philosophies as about turf, was reflected at the grassroots level. Here, a large numbers of female teachers, threatened by Manso's demands for professional standards and what many called her ‘Yankee mania’, found allies among her enemies in the upper educational echelons, and dared to stand up to her.Footnote 66 In this way, Manso became involved in yet another struggle with women, this time, as her organised opponents.
In an attempt to improve the quality of teaching, the Board of Public Instruction (largely instigated by Manso) organised Saturday afternoon workshops for teachers and principals. Manso presided over the sessions held for women. She lectured them on educators like Pestalozzi, and introduced them to American methodologies. She pressed upon them the importance of an integrated approach to education, which looked to nourish body, soul and mind.Footnote 67 From the start the sessions were unpopular. Ridiculing Manso's enthusiasm for innovative methodologies, the women complained they had to forgo free time and walk long distances to learn such fatuous things as how to teach children to walk like just-hatched chicks, the latter a reference to Pestalozzian-inspired object lessons.Footnote 68 Manso, moreover, designed exacting classes as much, no doubt, because her demand for rigorous normal schools would be strengthened if she could show how bad existing teachers were, as because she wanted this to be a genuine learning experience. The women, long used to lax ways, must have been taken aback when they found that Manso expected them to put in serious class work and home preparation. The tensions between her and the women are palpable in her descriptions of the sessions. They come through in the women's insolent responses when Manso called them to account for poor homework. One, Andrea Rivas, questioned Manso's pedagogical methods, and when Manso informed her that these were the latest ones being used in the United States, retorted flippantly, ‘That's there!’ In a wonderful image that captures the tense contest of wills, a furious Manso noted that, as she lectured, one group of women sat chatting and laughing all the way through without paying her the least attention.Footnote 69
The teachers circulated a petition to collect signatures in order to terminate the conferences. They accused Manso of indecency because she favoured co-educational schools, and her municipal enemies made statements about the uselessness of the conferences.Footnote 70 Manso refused to end her Saturday sessions, but now they were attended by only a handful of supporters. Among them was Mary Elizabeth Gorman, the first American female teacher to arrive in response to Sarmiento's official invitation.Footnote 71
Manso's long term goal may have been to elevate the position of women through opening up their access to jobs, but in immediate terms she threatened the livelihood of those few women who had managed to gain employment, and they were not about to give in without a fight. The women's plight becomes clearer when we consider that in 1869, the first national census reported that of 140,000 working women, most worked as seamstresses, laundresses, and street and small store sellers. The two respectable jobs for women were teaching and charity, the latter mainly limited to elite women and channelled through the Sociedad de Beneficencia. Teaching had long been a source of employment for women in both private and public schools. Paid a good deal less than male instructors, women were in greater demand; in 1872 female teachers in Buenos Aires in both types of schools numbered 670 as opposed to 615 male teachers.Footnote 72 For middle class, literate women, who as a result of widowhood or other unfortunate circumstances found themselves living on the margins of their class, this was one of the very few respectable sources of employment. Moreover, as the state was expanding its spending on education, the private education sector (strong under Rosas) was shifting into the public sphere.Footnote 73 In the ensuing opening up of opportunities and perturbation of old stabilities, women were anxiously trying to position themselves favourably, and those already in the profession were vehement in their opposition to requirements for new training and accountability.Footnote 74 Above all they felt threatened by competition from better prepared foreign teachers. In fact, even before Mary Gorman and the other American teachers started arriving, a number of voices noted their opposition to the policy of importing teachers, and local school teachers fought tooth and nail to preserve their jobs.Footnote 75 The fabric for a modern Argentina, Manso found, was to be woven from the weft of visionary ideas spun from afar and the warp of local realities which included financially strapped females.
American Models
In 1866, Manso told the American educator, Mary Mann: ‘My work [here] … is arduous and difficult because I am “alone” … There is no interest in public education … and, as a result of our … customs, a woman here has no intellectual personality’.Footnote 76 In a subsequent letter, Manso referred to her religious isolation: ‘For a heretic like me, there is nothing but hate and war without truce’.Footnote 77 Given her sense of living besieged, it is no surprise that in response to the arrival of Mary Gorman on the doorstep of Manso in 1869 wanting her help to find a suitable teaching post, Manso took her in at once. They had many interests in common, including books, time spent in Philadelphia and being Protestants in a Catholic country. The fact that Mary was close in age to Manso's own daughters, must have also worked in her favour. Indeed, Mary entered into something like a fictive kin relationship and called Manso her ‘little mother’, which clearly endeared her to the older woman. But above all, Manso saw in Gorman, and the other handful of American women who arrived soon after, the very qualities of intellectually emancipated women that she had observed in the United States and that, she told Sarmiento, she could not find in her own country.Footnote 78 In America, she noted, education had already begun preparing women for equality with men. There they worked in treasury and accounting departments, in post offices and telegraph offices, others entered medical schools and would soon enter law schools and join the ranks of attorneys. This was her dream for Argentina.
When in 1870 the first American women had started teaching, Manso observed their classes.Footnote 79 She was ecstatic. In Gorman's class she heard young women who had set out knowing nothing respond with clarity and precision; in a kindergarten class she heard children sing both in English and in Spanish; she saw a demonstration of callisthenics accompanied by music; she saw obedience so well handled ‘that it seemed like a dream that those [were the same] children that I had seen enter the school looking like wooden pieces’. ‘My God! What a contrast between [this] school and those repulsive jails that up to now have been taken for schools … [This one] is … an enchanted Eden’.Footnote 80 Here was a small replica of American education where, as she put it, each child was tended to in the way a good gardener tends his plants so that they grew strong and orderly and beautiful. She couldn't help but cry when she thought of the contrast between American and Argentine education. It is no wonder some accused her of ‘Yankee mania’, an accusation she did not dampen when she wrote, shocking her contemporaries, that ‘anyone who coldly analyses our own Declaration of Independence [in contrast to the American] cannot but fold his arms and bow his head in the face of its conceptual poverty regarding natural rights and the guarantees needed to protect them’.Footnote 81
Manso's adoption of such pro-North American sentiments is not unproblematic. Indeed, her travel recollections of the United States, written shortly after she had left that country, are extraordinarily negative. Aside from brief comments on the industrial marvels of the United States and on a peculiarly American ‘can-do attitude’ she begrudgingly admired, she mostly exuded intense dislike. ‘I can find no other animal to compare [Americans] with than the pig! Except that the pig's exterior filth and dirt, the Americans carry in their soul, if in fact they have a soul. … Nothing interests an American beyond business and … money!’ Footnote 82 Her observations on women were similarly negative: ‘The women are vain, fussy and cold; their love is divided between love of money and love of display; they are fanatics and they meddle in church issues in order to make up for their idleness’. She found the Catholic churches deeply disappointing. ‘The few altars are poor without any ornaments or flowers; in fact, they look nothing like our great and beautiful Catholic churches in Europe and South America’. Her negativity may be seen as the result of the unreal expectations she and her husband had had of the country, expectations that, upon arrival, were quickly and painfully shattered.Footnote 83 It may also be understood as a sign of Manso's own defensiveness at a time when she probably found it less distressing to blame a country and its supposedly insensitive people for Noronha's fiasco, than admit to his mediocre talent; or, even worse, admit to herself that he was not the person she had imagined and that her marriage was a terrible mistake.
A decade later, however, a now-abandoned Manso was singing a very different tune. ‘We don't believe’, she wrote, ‘that there exists neither a more balanced society [anywhere], nor one in which the people, [including] the poor, have better material conditions’.Footnote 84 She longed for the day when Argentina might have such a ‘moral, industrious and self-controlled class of poor as the United States’.Footnote 85 She recalled her eye-opening visits to an orphanage and a prison in Pennsylvania.Footnote 86 She especially admired what women there were achieving. ‘If I were North American instead of Argentine’, she told Sarmiento, ‘[just think] what I could have achieved … with my intelligence and my will! Instead of this penury to which I am condemned, my work could have been rewarded in kind and glory!’Footnote 87 By 1865 she had converted to Protestantism. How can we explain this turnaround?
Her extensive travel is certainly a part of the answer. Always interested in social change, Manso soaked up new ideas and experiences. In Cape May, a fashionable summer resort on the Jersey shore where she and Noronha spent five weeks (presumably because musicians were in high demand and he hoped to find work) she describes how the ‘bad seed’ of her Iberian upbringing at first held her back from the whirlwind of novel activities and entertainments until she began to shed the false inhibitions ‘imbibed at the fountain of ignorance’.Footnote 88 Both Brazil and Cuba had also exposed her to novelty and discussions about the most promising directions for Latin American nations.Footnote 89 When she returned to Argentina, she was not merely older and more experienced but more learned and worldly. She had observed the workings of a whole array of different social and cultural and gender arrangements. Her meeting with Sarmiento was important, too, because at a time when she was looking for ways to bring about change, he firmed up her pro-American tilt. But this encounter should not be overstressed. Sarmiento took to Manso because he could relate to her firebrand ethos and to her ideas about change and education and modernity, not because she was an empty vessel he filled with his own notions.
A more satisfying explanation for Manso's about-turn lies deeper: it is to be found in the way she yoked the private lives of women with the public lives of men, and blended her personal, individual penuries with her public ambitions. That is, in having to face up to the truth about a rotten marriage and the crushing years that followed, the deeply intellectual Manso was not content with simply blaming her husband (which she did), or her own poor choice of a blackguard for a husband, or her personal bad luck. Rather, her bitter private experience spurred her to conclude that the mosaic of social institutions and laws were made and dominated by men, and that the prescribed spacing between the private and the public spheres, ostensibly reflecting a natural separation between male and female, was engineered by men for their benefit. In fact, it went against what was natural, namely, that God had endowed equally men and women with intelligence for them to use. The present structure of gender relations which defined a woman as an appendage of her husband and not as a fully capable and responsible individual, worked to keep her intelligence cropped, her space confined, and resulted in her blighted life, either through suffering or, at best, frivolity. Manso's understanding that gender relations were cultural and that at their core lay a question of power is, arguably, the most radical aspect of her thinking. As she put it, ‘Society is man. He alone has written the laws of nations. Therefore, he has reserved for himself all supremacy’.Footnote 90 She welcomed the American teachers precisely because she saw them as models of independent-minded women with blossoming God-given faculties.
At the same time, she did not deny the notion that men and women had different innate strengths, but she believed that, according to God's plan, these were meant to be equally valued and harnessed for the social good. Using the language of her times, she stressed a woman's special powers of self-denial and, indeed, often presented herself as a selfless, sacrificing woman, fighting for the good of others. She favoured the idea of companionate marriage where there was a fusion between the public and private as a result of a good wife becoming involved in and knowledgeable about the work of her husband, who in turn appreciated the value of his wife's interventions and thoughtful advice. She believed her friend, Antonia Maza de Alsina, had enjoyed such a marriage, and Manso admired the fact that she had lived for her husband, helping him in every way she could.Footnote 91 However, the pragmatic Manso also knew that her own marriage had been on the dark side of this ideal, and that the private lives of women were too often the quagmire of youthful hopes and ideals. In contrast to her Liberal (male) colleagues, who parked their reforming ideas at the domestic threshold, Manso drove right through into the hearth, shattering its hallowed myths. Her steely gaze into the domestic and its discontents, therefore, led her to call for public reform.
As always, Manso's solution was knowledge. Once women understood the man-made architecture of their narrow, and in many cases demeaning, lives, they could begin to demand change. Marriage, she argued, was a social contract and should be removed from Church domain.Footnote 92 Man and woman should enter it as legally responsible individuals. She dared to raise the question of divorce: a double standard in marriage should not be tolerated. Adultery was a ‘lack in morality which mutually authorizes the husband, like the woman, to petition for divorce’.Footnote 93 Women should be protected against domestic violence. They should have the freedom to work and to keep their earnings and property, and single or abandoned women should have the job opportunities to keep themselves and their children decently without falling into abject misery or, worse, prostitution.Footnote 94 Women were neither a machine for procreation nor an appendix of man. Thus, after the fall of Rosas, when Liberal governments turned to legal reform and codification – a process that stalled for almost a decade while Buenos Aires was at war with the provinces, Manso supported their efforts. Most urgent, in her view, was the writing of a civil code that inscribed enlightenment values of rationality, individualism and liberty into family law. The first crucial step in this direction, she believed, was the introduction of civil marriage ending the Catholic Church's grip on the institution, allowing for re-marriage, and weakening the tutelary relationship between men and women. She was dismayed, however, by the civil code that became law in 1871.
Written by Dalmacio Vélez Sarsfield, a close friend of Sarmiento's and a deeply conservative man, the code drew eclectically on Napoleonic, Brazilian and Chilean civil codes among others, and also included aspects of colonial civil and canon legislation.Footnote 95 Acknowledging a changing society, the code recognised the legality of marriage performed in other churches, a pleasing directive for a growing immigrant population; and it supported marriage based on the mutual consent of the partners. But its overarching intention was to retool patriarchal power. It retained canon law as the basis of marriage, and thus rejected divorce. It allowed for separation in limited cases, but not re-marriage. It retained the regime of patria potestad forcing women to get permission to work from husbands, who also controlled earnings and the wealth a woman brought into marriage (bar a pre-nuptial agreement), and kept children in the case of a separation. ‘What do we women possess?’ Manso asked. ‘Not even the inheritance of our fathers’, she answered bitterly.Footnote 96
Assessing Manso
While writers have acknowledged Manso as an outstanding figure in the story of the advancement of women in nineteenth-century Argentina, some observers have registered surprise at what they see as the gap between Manso's combativeness and her objectives for women.Footnote 97 They have noted that her use of the republican motherhood argument (good wives and mothers produce good citizens) was not particularly radical, and that her employment of such timeworn female strategies as false humility (‘I am nobody’ is how she launched into one of her public lectures), or hiding behind the figure of Sarmiento indicate her timorousness.Footnote 98 This critique fails to do her justice.
First, her humility was part of a ‘wily’ strategy.Footnote 99 Cloaking herself in Sarmiento's writings as she first ventured into public-speaking, showed shrewd thinking, not timorousness. Her purpose in publishing his American letters in the Anales was as much for their didactic value as because she recognised that Sarmiento, a power broker and a well-known intellectual, gave the journal a legitimacy that she alone could not. When he suggested that she and Mary Mann correspond, Manso was quick to take up his suggestion, and then inserted that correspondence, too, into the Anales. As an authoritative person in a country admired for its progress, Manso knew Mann could only give her stature.
Second, to view Manso as a timorous thinker is to ignore her intellectual evolution. On her return to Brazil from abroad, she already espoused ideas that shocked many of her contemporaries, and for this reason she is hailed as one of Brazil's earliest feminists.Footnote 100 However, at the time, in emphasising what was special about women, she still stressed the roles of mother and wife, and her intention was to enable women to experience full lives within those roles. ‘By “moral emancipation”,’ she wrote, ‘I do not mean to separate women from the mission the Creator intended for them, [namely] that of mother and wife. Nor do I want to see them become civil servants, or naval officers, or Ministers of State, or lawyers’.Footnote 101 (Although, by then she was already suggesting that, if needed, women should be allowed to work to subsidise the earnings of the male head of household, surely a reflection of her own situation.) But in 1852, on suddenly finding herself a single parent and with no one to whom she could turn for help (her father died that same year), Manso aspired to the highest professional level possible for a woman in Brazil, which was to study midwifery in the Rio de Janeiro medical school.Footnote 102 By the time she returned to Argentina, her aims were higher. Now she hoped to see the day when Argentine women, torn away from cooking and ironing and sewing, could become doctors and lawyers as they were doing in the United States.Footnote 103 Moreover, after having held official posts for some time and finding herself fighting male officials she considered fools, she came to think that women might be just as, if not more, effective in some positions of power and authority than many men. She implied as much to Mary Mann when she noted, ‘I am often consulted, but then I am passed over as [top positions] are given to men who … don't know much about schools … and are indifferent to the cause [of education]. But what can you expect? They are men and I am a woman’.Footnote 104
Third, to judge Manso solely by her words is to miss what was most impressive about this woman. More than her words, it was her performance that was revolutionary.Footnote 105 Indeed, she was unique even among a group of forceful, contemporary women, including writers Eduarda Mansilla, Enriqueta Thompson and Juana Manuela Gorriti, because no other woman managed to thrust herself into the process of political change quite as forcefully as Manso.Footnote 106 Sarmiento captured something of this force when he referred to her as a ‘man’ and we can see it in two famous photographs of Manso taken when she was in her fifties. One she autographed and gave to former President Bartolomé Mitre, the other she placed in the Anales; evidently, she approved of these images. Large and imposing, wrinkled by worry, there is a carelessness in her attire and unkempt hair which, shorn of any feminine attempt to please or seduce, calls to mind the iconoclast painter, Rosa Bonheur (a woman Manso admired).Footnote 107 It may be argued that with these images Manso was making yet another provocative and public statement: in a society that defined beauty and coquetry as essential female attributes, she was claiming that behind her plain appearance lay an educated intelligence, far worthier than the wasteful conception of woman as ornament. Ironically, these images of Manso are deeply seductive. Arresting in the way of a great photo or painting, they depict a formidable human strength that leaps out of the past into the present. Deeply sad and pensive, she appears preoccupied with weighty issues (Nation-building? The education of a people?), the sort of concern that lay typically within the preserve of men; and indeed, this is precisely what was unique about Juana Manso.
For all her pedagogical interests, Manso's mission was not primarily about education or even about women's emancipation. It was about creating a nation. She opined on the big national issues: class, race and inequality, the importance of equitable land redistribution, how to wire a nation together through technology and education, the role of a national government in imposing change, the place of religion, law, and the family, freedom of the press; and also on lesser matters like homeopathy and allopathic medicine, sanitation and epidemics, animal rights, orphanages. Defining herself as a journalist and, as such, entrusted with the crucial task of ‘speaking up’ she made her arguments through the main newspapers and the journals she directed, she fought in a ‘manly’ way, and the very copiousness of her writings showed a ‘manly’ sense of her own historicity.Footnote 108 She marshalled her positions with statistics, discussions about tax policies, and an impressive grasp of legal matters.Footnote 109 She forced her way into national debates over bills as they went through the legislature and denounced institutional disorganisation and officials' incompetence. When Sarmiento became president, she published a five point programme in El Nacional for his government to follow.Footnote 110 She took on ministers as easily as lowly teachers.Footnote 111 Never happy to play a quiet role behind the scenes, she wanted real power. As she told Mary Mann, ‘If women in [South] America were not condemned to a vegetative life; [and] being born a woman did not disqualify me from public office … I think I could have got somewhere’.Footnote 112 Literary critics, after analysing her fiction, have, not unjustifiably, placed her alongside romantic writers, such as José Mármol and Esteban Echeverría. But it is in her attempt to become a key actor in the quintessential nineteenth-century romantic drama, the creation of a nation, which really earns her the label. As much as she loved Brazil (‘There is something in Brazil that I have found nowhere else’) and acknowledged that her reforming ideas were better received there than in Argentina, she knew she had no choice but to return to her own country.Footnote 113 That was where lay her mission and the very purpose of her life.
By the early 1870s, sick and despairing and sounding not a little like Bolivar on his death bed, she cried, ‘I never tire of working for the good of education, but my labour is but a drop falling on an ocean. It is to weary oneself uselessly and hopelessly’.Footnote 114 She died resisting the last-minute attempts of concerned persons to return her to the Catholic faith. As a Protestant, she could only be buried in the foreigners' section of the Chacarita cemetery. Nevertheless, a large crowd attended the funeral service which, although performed in Spanish, was officiated by Henry G. Jackson, pastor of the American Methodist Episcopal Church, which Manso had attended.Footnote 115 It is fitting that among the mourners stood that other remarkable nineteenth-century performer, the writer, Juana Manuela Gorriti.
During her life, Manso's greatest contribution was her participation, often loud and polemical, in discussions over the nature of modernity in Argentina; otherwise, most of her achievements were posthumous. In 1884, almost ten years after her death, a far-reaching piece of legislation decreed that all children must receive elementary education. The law contained many other planks for which Manso had fought. It forbade corporal punishment; it enshrined the notion that early education should be in the hands of a woman because she was a ‘natural’ teacher; it centralised education under the state, which was to provide permanent financing. Moreover, by the 1880s, the growth in numbers of normal schools, most of them the result of the work of the United States women and their students, led to a cadre of well-trained teachers, who displaced the non-professional teachers Manso had railed against. Whatever the new schools achieved in so far as bringing greater social and racial equality to the nation, a subject of some debate, they unequivocally benefited many women. The end of the decade saw the first of Argentina's university-trained women, who were directly linked to the emergence of what Asunción Lavrin has called the first feminist cohort. ‘Active between 1900 and 1930, … they had to face and fight the closed conservatism of a generation of men and women for whom the terms “women's emancipation” and “feminism” sounded … alien’, something Manso had known all too well and had never ceased to battle against, even when she was almost entirely alone.Footnote 116 By that time, too, a triumphant account of the history of Argentine education had taken hold. In the story, Sarmiento was lionised in a way Manso would surely have approved. The irony, of course, is that, for the most part, she was left out, and when she did appear it was as his saintly ‘loyal adjutant’, with all her powerful belligerence, stridency and ambition erased.Footnote 117
Conclusions
‘Prior to 1880, when a nationalist vision was finally set firmly in place’, one observer has noted, ‘Argentine political and social discourses circulated freely and without fixed form, reflecting a social order still shaken by the throes of revolution and caudillismo’.Footnote 118 It was this inchoate social order that Manso sought to shape and, like Sarmiento, she believed the shaping must be imposed from above. In Argentina, the conundrum, that the people must be forced to be free, has a long and dense lineage; some have seen it as a key to understanding the political action of nineteenth-century liberals.Footnote 119 In the words of Esteban Echeverría, a writer whom Manso was proud to know, ‘Spain left a legacy in Argentina of … the suicide of reason’.Footnote 120 This unreasoning habit, reinforced, according to liberal thought during the era of Rosas and the caudillos, lay at the heart of barbarism and animated dangerously pliable popular masses, and it had to be eradicated. To do so, Manso, like Sarmiento, turned to the United States as the preferred model. In a number of ways, Argentina appeared similar to the United States, but at an earlier stage. There was the familiar drama of independence; the quest for development and identity; the perilous frontier dynamism; the Indian enemy; the vast ‘emptiness’ to be developed, hopefully, through European immigration. The United States was also where, it seemed to Manso and Sarmiento, the Enlightenment ideal of progress, more than in European countries, had achieved its highest point. Americans, therefore, had a great deal to teach Argentines and, although Manso took longer than Sarmiento to espouse this view, ultimately she travelled further along this road, shedding her Catholic faith and adopting ideas about the roles of women that left even the liberal-minded Sarmiento behind.
Arguably, the most remarkable fighter for the advancement of women to emerge in nineteenth-century Argentina, Manso raised nearly all of the demands that activist women took up at the end of the century (education, work, legal rights, suffrage), and it is as women's prescient champion that we most admire her today. Ultimately, however, her struggle for women's rights was but a piece in her larger striving to build a new progressive nation in the image of the leading European nations and, especially, the United States. She did not shy away from confronting all the questions that this project raised, including what values and knowledge, what meanings and beliefs, what messages and orders were to be transmitted along the new railroads and telegraphs and in the expanding network of schools? How were new identities to be produced and old ones transformed? How much from without was to be taken inside, and how much from inside was to be shunted aside? Manso, with her huge intellectual arrogance, knew she had the answers.
