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'What do women want?': women's citizenship and private writing in Argentina's early 20th Century

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).

Feminine Citizenship; Private Writings; Socialism; Travel Journals


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