SOURCE: Garrels, Elizabeth. “Sarmiento and the Woman Question: From 1839 to the Facundo.” In Sarmiento, Author of a Nation, pp. 272-93. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Garrels analyzes Sarmiento's many writings that relate to women and the evolution of his opinion regarding women's rights.]

In 1839, with the founding of the Santa Rosa school for girls in San Juan, Argentina, Sarmiento inaugurated his lifelong public commitment to the education of women. A few texts of an institutional nature still survive from this early project: the Prospecto de un establecimiento de educación para señoritas (Prospectus for an Educational Establishment for Young Ladies); the Constitución del Colegio de Señoritas de la Advocación de Santa Rosa de América (Constitution for the School for Young Ladies of the Appellation of Saint Rose of America); and five speeches delivered by the director (Sarmiento) and four of his colleagues at the opening ceremony on July 9.¹ Of the three texts attributable to Sarmiento, the first two are the most substantial with regard to the subject of women and their ideal education. Seen within the entire corpus of Sarmiento's writings on the female sex during the period from 1839 to 1845, these texts—the most pragmatic, in that they attempt to institutionalize a specific educational experience—are also among the most conservative, since they emphasize, above all, the limitations or restrictions that should characterize a woman's life and training. Curiously, this markedly repressive quality will reappear toward the end of the period under consideration, while certain of the intervening texts will create a more permissive space in which to reflect upon even such a daring proposal as the possible emancipation of women in some distant future.

The Prospecto already sets forth a number of themes that will remain constant throughout these years. For example, it states that a principal goal of women's education is “to predispose them to be tender and tolerant wives, enlightened and moral mothers, diligent and thrifty heads of households,” and it insists upon the influence that women exert upon men in the home and, more important still, the influence that they exert as mothers upon future generations: “Nothing is more evident than the way in which a man's character, his habits, likes and inclinations, show signs in adult life of the impressions he has received in his first years, in that age wherein education is confided to the tenderness of mothers.”² This influence is considered so profound as to hold young ladies responsible for the backwardness “of youth in general” and to blame bad mothers for the misconduct of their sons in adult life: “nothing is more pernicious, nothing brings more transcendent consequences than the pampering, weakness, and indulgence by certain mothers who are too tender, too affectionate.”³

What does in fact distinguish this text, though hardly rendering it unique among those studied, is its acceptance of the need to subjugate women, to deny them the same freedom of movement etc. that society allows men. “It is never too early,” one reads, “to give habits of order, cleanliness, thrift, docility, and submission to a sex which, because of its needs and weakness, as well as our customs and institutions, must always be subjugated.”⁴

Written by a man who would always show remarkable sensitivity to the ways in which social institutions and practices form the social subject, the Constitución proposes to materialize in an openly disciplinary manner the philosophy of subjugation that informs the Prospecto. Owing to its exceptional authoritarian rigor, the Constitución is a unique text among those consulted for this essay, and the reader should not lose sight of it when considering the less severe ideas that Sarmiento will express, always on a more abstract level, in later years.

The spirit of the Constitución is summed up in the following sentence:

Good order depends on subordination, and therefore it is of the utmost importance that the boarders respect and obey their superiors, without contradicting them or opposing their orders, this infraction being considered one of the greatest that can be committed and therefore meriting the most severe punishments that the school can administer.⁵

The boarders shall submit to a highly regimented schedule and will be granted very few days to visit their families. “Prohibited” activities include “Reading any book whatsoever without the knowledge of the Headmistress,” “All touching games,” and “Undressing in the presence of roommates.” In short, there is a concerted effort to control thought, body, and sexuality; however, prohibitions such as those against “All familiar forms of address” and “The use of nicknames,” besides inculcating obedience, aim also at infusing the boarders with the abstract and homogenizing concept of republican citizenship.⁶ Such a project reverberates throughout the speeches given at the school's inauguration ceremony, and all concur that the “republican mother” is the desired product of the new establishment. Idalecio Cortínez, for example, exhorts the students to “execute faithfully all they are ordered to do” because “then we will have enlightened matrons who produce grateful sons, solicitous fathers, industrious citizens, edifying preachers, men of great wisdom, and firm pillars of the nation's independence.”⁷

Interestingly enough, a speech by Manuel José Quiroga Rosas criticizes the excessive dependence of women on their husbands and recommends that they be educated not to live in a cloister but in society, that they be inculcated with an idea of the fatherland, and that they acquire “those talents of industry” needed to secure their own subsistence. Although this relative liberality anticipates the tone of some of Sarmiento's later articles, it is no less true that these will also echo Quiroga's warning that the emancipation of the American woman must be gradual and not sudden “as some modern systems have attempted.”⁸ In fact, reading these speeches from 1839, one realizes that many of the ideas about women that Sarmiento developed in his journalism between 1841 and 1845 were already present within that circle of provincial friends (some of whom had studied in Buenos Aires), who for two years met in the evenings to discuss recent French publications belonging to the personal library of the young Quiroga Rosas.⁹

SAINT-SIMONIANISM, WOMEN, AND THE GENERATION OF 1837

Both La Moda (Buenos Aires, 1837-1838) and El Iniciador (Montevideo, 1838-1839), the two most representative organs of the fledgling Argentine Generation of 1837, show a sustained interest in the dignification of women in their dual role as wife and mother. On this issue, their main inspiration derives from France, in particular from Saint-Simonianism. Esteban Echeverría, who was both a member and a mentor of this generation, returned from France in mid-1830 “ready to propagate the philosophy of the Saint-Simonians.” According to Juan Marichal, however, the two disciples of Saint-Simon who perhaps exercised the greatest influence on the young Argentines were Pierre Leroux and Jean Louis Eugène Lerminier, both dissidents who “abandoned Saint-Simonianism near the end of 1831.”¹⁰ Marichal does not specify the reason for this separation, but (at least in the case of Leroux and very possibly in that of Lerminier, since there were a number of defections for the same reason) it boils down to differing interpretations of the woman question.

The French Revolution had given rise to a brief but important flourishing of feminist activism, quickly suppressed by the Jacobins themselves. Shortly thereafter, the Napoleonic Code (1800-1804) served to institutionalize this antifeminist reaction, and in 1816 the law permitting divorce (passed in 1792) was finally repealed. According to Claire Goldberg Moses, who has written on French feminism in the nineteenth century, one would have to look to the novels of Madame de Staël (Delphine, 1802; Corinne, 1807) to find an expression of feminist aspirations during the first three decades of the new century in France.¹¹ It was not until around 1830 that feminism reemerged in the public sphere, and this was principally owing to the Saint-Simonians, now grouped under the leadership of Prosper Enfantin.¹²

The philosopher Saint-Simon, who died in 1825, had written extremely little on the female sex, but by 1831 the woman question had become a central preoccupation among his followers. Unlike Mary Wollstonecraft of England and other eighteenth-century feminists imbued with Enlightenment rationalism, Enfantin was a romantic. Also unlike Wollstonecraft, yet like the majority of his romantic contemporaries as well as most writers of the previous century, Enfantin believed that emotion and sensuality (matter and flesh) constituted the essence of woman, while reason (spirit and intelligence) defined the essence of man.¹³ He was, however, distinct among his contemporaries in supporting the rehabilitation of sensuality and the flesh. A pacifist, he extolled the role of women in an imagined future where universal love and harmony would reign. Inspired by a phrase attributed to Saint-Simon—“l'homme et la femme voilà l'individu social”—Enfantin believed that the social nucleus of the future would be the couple, not the individual, and that within this ideal couple man and woman would fulfill different, sexually specific functions, though equal in value. Such complementarity rested on a belief in the equality of the sexes.¹⁴ What prompted other Saint-Simonians to oppose Enfantin was his insistence that this equality would demand a new sexual morality, seen by many as a call to promiscuity. This proposal for sexual liberalization is what motivated Pierre Leroux and others to withdraw from the group at the end of 1831. A year later Enfantin, along with an associate, was jailed on charges of corrupting public morality.

The pages of La Moda and El Iniciador, full of ideas and attitudes consistent with Saint-Simonianism, cite the group and its members frequently. However, the young Miguel Cané begins one of his essays in El Iniciador by insisting on his differences with them:

The disciples of Saint-Simon have said man and woman are the social individual; we declare that this opinion does not conform to our own. We do indeed think that woman needs an emancipation lifting her from the lamentable condition in which uses and customs less republican than those necessary for our society have placed her, but we are far from espousing that the female occupy the space that among us the male himself does not know how to fill.¹⁵

Perhaps even more revealing is the comment made by Sarmiento in El Mercurio of Valparaíso, Chile, in 1841. In a series of four articles in which the young Argentine tries to elaborate something like a philosophy of history by summarizing woman's condition throughout all of history and prehistory, he inserts the following observation about Saint-Simonianism: “With Saint-Simon, philosophy and the restless spirit of progress attempt to break with all the moral traditions and to emancipate woman all at once from any dependence on man.”¹⁶ Some paragraphs later he adds: “Woman will have to respect and submit herself to the ideas of the historical period in which she lives; our age has watched the comedy that Enfantin and the Saint-Simonians wished to represent fall apart amidst the public's hisses, and it should not expose itself recklessly to new mockeries.”¹⁷

An identification with many Saint-Simonian positions, including some but not all of those concerning women, and a clear disavowal of the new sexual morality espoused by Enfantin: such appears to have been the posture assumed by the young Generation of 1837 and by Sarmiento in particular, at least until his trip to Europe in 1845. The four El Mercurio articles mentioned above are in fact a gold mine for evaluating the young Sarmiento's ideas about women. His opinions on this subject, despite their contradictions and even opportunistic shifts in emphasis, do not seem to evolve during the four-year period that culminates in the publication of the Facundo and Sarmiento's departure for Europe.

SARMIENTO ON WOMEN: EL MERCURIO, AUGUST 20, 1841

In the first of the four articles, Sarmiento defines his purpose as follows: “We propose to dedicate some pages to the vindication of woman's right to a serious cultivation of her mind, pointing out the objective toward which her education should be directed, as well as the false path down which it is presently led.”¹⁸ In the second article, he will state three other purposes, one of which comes to dominate the rest of the series:

To properly determine the moral rules that ought to guide the conduct of women in modern societies, it would be necessary, in addition to undertaking the study of the nature and instincts of her sex, to gauge precisely the degree of importance that she holds in the opinion of men and the role that this opinion has assigned her in civil society.¹⁹

The first of these objectives is prescriptive: to determine the moral rules that ought to guide the conduct of the modern woman. The second relates to an eagerness, already characteristic of a good many writers in the eighteenth century, to define the nature and instincts of the female sex.²⁰ Both these objectives reveal a singular confidence on the part of the male writer to define and classify women and then to make prescriptions regarding their conduct. The third objective, which determines the greater part of the remaining articles, also follows a convention rooted in the eighteenth century: that of reflecting on the role assigned to women in different types of societies. Sarmiento is encouraged to review the situation of women in what he calls the savage, the barbaric, and the civilized states, since the “opinion that man has formed of women has not been the same in all the various degrees of civilization among peoples.”²¹

But let us look separately at each of the four articles. The first, as has already been noted, defends a woman's right to an education that will prepare her for “her high mission in contemporary society.”²² This mission is defined as “fulfilling the duties of motherhood … these being of such great importance since from the lap of the mother comes the man fully formed, with inclinations, character and habits which his first education molds.”²³ Such primacy conferred upon motherhood in no way distinguishes Sarmiento from the immense majority of those writing about women in Europe and the Americas during these years. On the contrary, there seems to have been a consensus among conservatives and feminists alike that woman's primary social mission was precisely that of motherhood.²⁴

Within this consensus, however, there were differences in emphasis, and it is undeniable that Sarmiento did not identify with the more progressive formulations. During these years, Sarmiento makes no distinction like that found in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): “speaking of women at large, their first duty is to themselves as rational creatures, and the next, in point of importance, as citizens, is that, which includes so many, of a mother.”²⁵ And he falls quite short of his North American contemporary Margaret Fuller, who, in her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), hardly mentions motherhood at all when speaking of a woman's right to education.²⁶ In like manner, it is fair to note that although Sarmiento and the others of his generation make reference to the Saint-Simonians, they remain silent about the female disciples of the movement, many of whom were published writers. One of the most radical, Claire Démar, went so far as to declare the end of motherhood as a career. She said that in order to emancipate herself, woman had to work, and that it was not possible for her to successfully combine work with child rearing. It was therefore necessary that the state, by hiring wet nurses, assume responsibility for child care.²⁷ Obviously this position, characteristic at best of a tiny minority, would have seemed scandalous to the youthful Generation of 1837.

If Mary Wollstonecraft's book represented a more extensive debate between Rousseau and those who defended woman's capacity for reason, Sarmiento tended to take sides with Rousseau. The first article in the 1841 series has a fairly eighteenth-century and conservative flavor with respect to what Sarmiento says about “the nature and instincts” of woman and “the false path down which [her education] is presently led.” His condemnation of the latter echoes many of the complaints that appear in La Moda and El Iniciador, which in turn sound rather like those found in La Quijotita y su prima (1818) by the Mexican José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, or in Rousseau's Emile: namely, the denunciation of feminine attachment to luxury and fashion and of the danger posed by poorly educated women.²⁸

SARMIENTO AND LOUIS AIMé MARTIN

The second article of the series begins with an epigraph from Louis Aimé Martin's book De l'education des mères de famille, originally published in France in 1834.²⁹ This book is of central importance in shaping Sarmiento's views on women during these years. Although the epigraph is the only explicit reference in the 1841 articles to Aimé Martin's book, Sarmiento borrows a good deal from the French moralist, including ideas and quotes from other authors. In his writings on women up through 1845, Sarmiento will return to Aimé Martin's book repeatedly, and in December 1842 he will publish translated passages from it in his Chilean newspaper El Progreso.³⁰

Aimé Martin appears to have had much in common with the Saint-Simonians: he believed in uninterrupted progress; he was a pacifist and sought to regenerate humanity through the promotion of religious sentiment; he attacked materialism and egoism. The first part of Aimé Martin's book maintains that a woman's role as mother, and thus as transmitter of moral and religious sentiment to future generations, is the most important and sacred of missions. He claims that woman has the power to regenerate the world. His book is an apotheosis, so to speak, of woman as wife and mother. His two most evident masters are Fénelon and Rousseau, whom he considers pioneers for having recognized the need to educate women and for having understood the social importance of the family. However, unlike Rousseau and his “livre divin” (the fifth book of Emile), Aimé Martin does not mention women's defects, nor does he permit himself the misogynist sorties of his master. In sum, he suggests that his purpose is to modernize Rousseau for the nineteenth century.

THE SECOND ARTICLE: EL MERCURIO, AUGUST 22, 1841

As stated above, Sarmiento's second article opens with an epigraph by Aimé Martin:

Man cannot lower woman without himself falling into degradation; and by elevating her he improves himself. Societies are turned to brutes in her arms, or they are civilized at her feet. Let us take a look around the globe: we observe these two great divisions of the human race, the Orient and the West. Half of the ancient world remains motionless and without thought, under the weight of a barbarous civilization: women there are slaves. The other half marches toward equality and light: women are free and honored.³¹

In Aimé Martin, Sarmiento finds a congenial Orientalist mentality. Yet, the greater part of this article does not deal with the Orient, but rather with America and Africa. Sarmiento wants to present a panorama of the condition of woman throughout the evolutionary stages of the human species. His thesis, which finds ample support in the writings of Aimé Martin and a number of eighteenth-century writers is that “the level of importance that women enjoy among a given people always results from the level of that people's civilization; without fear of error, each measure of progress in the condition of the weaker sex can be attributed to an advance in civilization.”³² Such a thesis is consistent with the belief in uninterrupted progress so firmly rooted in the young Sarmiento, and it tends to foster a certain satisfaction with the present order of things. This complacency, which will be clearly expressed in the fourth article of the series, is at heart conservative in that it reduces the urgency of the need for change. Moreover, it undermines—and possibly contradicts—the protests in the first article against the deplorable education of contemporary women.

In this second article, Sarmiento focuses on the condition of women in what he considers to be the most primitive stage of the human race. He sums up this condition as follows: “[In savage life] woman is seen by man as a degenerate member of his species.”³³ Sarmiento starts from the idea, circulated in eighteenth-century travel writing, that the discovery of America revealed for the first time to the civilized world the nature of the primitive life of the species, since the American Indian supposedly continued to exist at the earliest stage of human evolution. For his discussion of the American Indian and the condition of women in the primitive state, Sarmiento quotes extensively from the Scottish writer William Robertson, in particular from the fourth book of his History of America (1777).³⁴ In fact, Sarmiento lifts about thirty lines from Robertson's text, or roughly half of section 52 of book 4. We read:

In America, their [women's] condition is so miserable, and so cruel the tyranny exercised over them, that the word “slavery” is not sufficiently expressive to give a just idea of their lamentable status. In some tribes woman is considered a beast of burden, destined to all labors and all hardships; while man spends the day in dissipation or idleness, woman is condemned to continual work.³⁵

This vision, adapted to the supposed barbarism of the Argentine countryside, will be activated four years later when Sarmiento describes the life of the gaucho woman at the end of the first chapter of the Facundo. Before going on to consider woman in the state of barbarism, Sarmiento looks at Africa, where he finds “pitiful displays of the degradation of women,” including a practice incomprehensible to Europeans: “He [a Eurotraveler] saw [the African queens] join together to form an impressive bodyguard, and their majesties performed the office of messengers throughout the whole monarchy.”³⁶ Sarmiento concludes this section by establishing a hierarchy that will function in his writing at least throughout the 1840s: “The black person of central Africa is not in every respect as savage as the American Indian.”³⁷ This is because he does not “still wander through forests. … [H]e has a fixed domicile, and he has distributed and taken control of the land.”³⁸

The final part of the second article along with the first section of the third article treat the subject of woman in the state of barbarism. Here barbarism is Asia; Asia is the entire Orient; and the Orient is little more than the harem. Like his mentor Aimé Martin, Sarmiento develops a vision of the seraglio that vacillates between fascination and censure—censure because monogamy does not exist in the harem and because woman continues to have “a relative existence.” Thus: “Let us not forget that she is a simple ornament of man's life; the sort of happiness she will enjoy will not be, then, in relation to the moral necessities of an intelligent being working by itself for itself, but only relative to the man who has found her good for his pleasures and has appropriated her.”³⁹

THE THIRD ARTICLE: EL MERCURIO, AUGUST 23, 1841

The third article of the series briefly continues the discussion of Asia.⁴⁰ It momentarily shifts its gaze from the harem to India, expressing horror that for “the noble wife of a Hindu” it is not “honorable to survive her dead husband.”⁴¹ Then the text turns to consider certain “capital events” in the history of women within European civilization. The third article gets only as far as “the chivalric spirit” of the Middle Ages, but Sarmiento promises that these “capital events, judged in terms of their influence on woman, will suffice to lead us to her present condition, which in itself contains the elements of the future that awaits her.”⁴²

Sarmiento starts his journey through European history with a rather unenthusiastic vision of Greece and Rome: “The history of Greece and that of Rome, its successor in civilization, does not present sufficient facts for appreciating the social position of woman in detail; indeed, in those societies, she participated, insofar as it was compatible with civilized life, in the disadvantages of a more primitive stage of development.”⁴³ However, he praises the Roman woman's vocation for republican motherhood and suggests that it was this female strength that “alone perhaps, laid the groundwork for Rome's greatness, inspiring its daughters with maternal virtues, like the mother of the Gracchi, who instead of jewels, proudly displayed the two sons she was rearing to be tribunes of the people.”⁴⁴

In those remote times, “a great step” was taken toward woman's ennoblement—the establishment of monogamy: “this fact, which distinguishes European civilization, henceforth assigned woman the high rank of man's companion, and called her at last to occupy the place to which nature had destined her.”⁴⁵ In describing this seemingly natural place, Sarmiento articulates an entire political theory about the family, which is in fact the one he considers appropriate for his own century:

In charge of the domestic hearth, adapting her occupations to her strengths and ability, and guiding the first steps of her progeny, she will give birth to the family, that is, that compact body, that embryo of society which reciprocally links its members by mutual affections and gives rise to ideas of authority, obligation, rights, along with the affections of the heart which are its strongest tie.⁴⁶

From here, Sarmiento turns to Christianity's role in determining the position of women. Consistent with the Generation of 1837, Sarmiento defends a Christ of the masses—of the poor, the weak, the oppressed and, therefore, of women, whose equality with men Christ came to reveal. Sarmiento also eulogizes Mary, whom Christianity converted into an exalted symbol of the characteristics and emotions that he considers most admirable in women: “the young girl's love, love in marriage, mother's love, pity, intercession, tears, and supplications.”⁴⁷ The eulogy ends with an emphasis on woman as bearer of the future: “Mary is the greatest mystery of Christianity, because within her is enclosed the future of the world.”⁴⁸

Sarmiento maintains that Christ's repudiation of the Jewish practice of divorce contained one of his most important teachings on the equality of the sexes; it represented a major step forward, one that Europe was able to take only centuries later. Sarmiento presents the indissolubility of marriage as progressive because he sees it as protecting women against abandonment. Many writers in the first half of the nineteenth century held a similar view, including a good number of feminists and in particular many women. However, there were those who defended divorce as a means of freeing women from abusive marriages. In France, divorce had been legalized by the Revolution in 1792, and it had survived the establishment of the Napoleonic Code until 1816. Between 1832 and 1834, Saint-Simonian women who wrote for the Tribune des Femmes called for the reinstitution of divorce. In 1837 Flora Tristán submitted a petition for a return to the 1792 law; and the trial in 1835-1836 in which George Sand tried to gain a legal separation from her husband, had drawn international attention to the issue of matrimonial reform. In Sarmiento's Chile, in 1844, the young Francisco Bilbao, adopting a position that would earn him excommunication and disgrace, exalted George Sand as the “priestess” of “matrimonial democracy” and called for the reform of marriage laws, without discounting divorce as a viable legal solution.⁴⁹ It is worth noting that given the historical possibility of various reactions to the question of divorce, Sarmiento seems to have adopted a position which, however much it belonged to the majority, was in fact conservative.

THE FINAL ARTICLE: EL MERCURIO, AUGUST 24, 1841

The first paragraph of the fourth article, like the last paragraph of the third, deals with the advances women made during the Middle Ages. According to Sarmiento, woman's situation benefited substantially from the practices of chivalry and courtly love, but also from the “reconcentration of the family.”⁵⁰ With a characteristically nineteenth-century bourgeois vision, Sarmiento once again promotes female domesticity.

In the passage from the Middle Ages to the modern period, Sarmiento reasons, if woman remains inferior to man, that is because she has not participated, like him, in “the rapid development of the intellectual faculties. … [T]he man of our day has become all intelligence,” and only with difficulty can he respect a woman incapable of comprehending his intellectual restlessness: “Woman, then, needs to have ears to hear the thoughts that ferment in the soul of man, who even in the domestic sanctuary, needs witnesses for his intellectual labors, for his musings and opinions.”⁵¹

Disregarding the contradictions in his argument, Sarmiento now recognizes that women have indeed participated in the intellectual ferment of the day. With this, he embarks on a discussion of two women writers whom he clearly admires: Madame Roland, whose Mémoires were posthumously published in 1820, and Madame de Staël, who published novels and essays until her death in 1817. In Madame Roland, whose memory will inspire him to frequent effusions of praise during the decade of the forties, he celebrates “the seductive womanly graces, the maternal tenderness and conjugal fidelity” as well as a “most astounding genius and [a] … most pure and lofty love of freedom.”⁵² His first words about her recall her political activity “at the head of the Girondist party.”⁵³ Similarly, he stresses Madame de Staël's political influence, crediting her with a good deal of “the sad glory” of having overthrown Napoleon. For the first and last time between the years 1839 and 1845, Sarmiento acknowledges politics as a legitimate terrain for women.

Before initiating his overview of human history, Sarmiento had alluded to woman's future. Indeed, he considers it possible that this future will offer her a radical alternative to the present. Sarmiento sees in Corinne, the fictional heroine of Madame de Staël, a possible promise of things to come:

Corinne, traveling neither with companions nor guardians, passing triumphantly through the streets of the ancient capital of the world, crowned with her literary talents like Tasso and Petrarch; following the instincts of her heart, without concern for the forms and conventions of the world which seem not to exist for her; Corinne, superior to the man whom she has distinguished with her affection, and creating alone her happiness or misfortune; might she not be a prophesy of the future position afforded to woman by centuries more ordered, more perfect, more egalitarian for the weak and the strong, for men and women, than ours? Regarding the illustrious author of this sublime female creation, has she not with her penetration and talents, guessed the future of her sex? And … without revealing her thought in its entirety, has she not wanted to laugh at the disbelief with which her century views a woman who is as free as man? … Would she have dreamed for her sex the fourth and final step left to be taken in society, the aspiration to equality and freedom, to emancipation and rights?⁵⁴

At this point, Sarmiento contains his evident enthusiasm and writes:

Aside from this, let us refrain from trying to pull aside the veil of the future. Woman has already made enough conquests for the present, and assuming with dignity the place that society offers her, she herself will be able to open the road to new forms of progress.⁵⁵

On the one hand, a conservative satisfaction with the present but, on the other, a recognition that woman herself—and not man working paternalistically on her behalf—can open the road to her future.⁵⁶ Indeed, in an attempt to defend the present, Sarmiento adds that “freedom is not everywhere an empty word for her” and explains that in the United States women enjoy freedom of movement.

The fourth article ends by resounding the conservative and somewhat eighteenth-century note of the first article. “Woman will have to respect and submit herself to the ideas of the moment in which she lives,” Sarmiento writes, going on to recall the public outcry at the unfortunate experiments of Enfantin and the Saint-Simonians. Again, he emphasizes woman's mission as daughter, wife and, above all, mother. And once again he chastises ignorant women who fail to recognize the weighty responsibilities of motherhood.

FROM 1842 TO FACUNDO

References to brilliant or exceptional women, including women writers, grow scarce between the years 1842 and 1845. Now it is Aimé Martin's saccharine female who predominates: an eminently bourgeois image of woman as mistress of the household and guardian angel, comforter of the afflicted, safekeeper of religion, and symbol and consumer of aesthetic refinements in a world where men, ever more exclusively, dedicate themselves to pragmatism or, as Sarmiento clearly states in an article from 1844, to wealth and power.⁵⁷ Consistent with this image is Sarmiento's increased insistence upon naturally determined feminine instincts and conservatism:

Piety is woman's inherent gift; faith, her reason; and religion, the sacred repository confided to the purity of her heart. Woman is charged with the conservation and transmission of sanctioned traditions and beliefs. Man thinks, doubts, discusses, alters and reforms; ideas change and institutions and laws are successively modified. But custom moves at a slower pace, and in the traditions that woman maintains through the mild dominion she exerts over the family is one of the principles of order that slow the movement of ideas, which without this healthy counterbalance, could be too sudden and harsh.⁵⁸

In a series of articles that he publishes in December 1844 and February 1845 (when he is already working on the Facundo), Sarmiento is much more explicit about the importance of woman's faith and her incapacity for abstract thought. In these articles, grouped under the title Polémica con la Revista Católica sobre la obra de Aimé Martin (Polemic with the Catholic Review regarding the Work of Aimé Martin), Sarmiento makes his most conservative statements about women since his arrival in Chile in 1840. For example:

… being those who form customs and maintain them, they should receive ideas that have already been translated into facts and that are outside the realm of discussion. Woman was born to believe, and not to doubt or inquire, and it would be a sad gift, indeed, to place uncertainty and doubt in her head, impotent as it is to embrace abstract truths. … [S]he does not think, but practices, and her faith in received ideas serves her instead of reason.⁵⁹

It is possible, and I suggest it is probable, that the conservatism of such statements is a defensive tactic used by Sarmiento to protect himself against his powerful adversaries in this polemic (the Chilean clergy) as well as to distance himself from the recent scandal that had erupted around Francisco Bilbao's “Sociabilidad chilena.”⁶⁰

Irrespective of his motives for doubting woman's capacity for abstract thought, the education Sarmiento recommends for them during this period is quite limited and certainly distinct from that which he would have recommended for men. For the women of the popular classes, whom he hoped to see transformed into laborers, he advocates a training that will enable them to produce “artistic handiwork.”⁶¹ Such training is expected to inculcate “carefully calculated and rationalized work habits,” which will contribute to “the creation of domestic customs of a new type, customs that we regretfully lack, founded on work, on positive interests; that is, on monetary gain, as in North America.”⁶² This sort of education has two objectives: to make women capable of “securing their own well-being,” thus keeping them from poverty or prostitution, and to socialize them according to the particular model of national capitalist development that Sarmiento envisioned during these years.⁶³

For the upper-class woman, he considers “reading, writing, arithmetic, religion, grammar, geography, French” and “exercises in epistolary style and other [unspecified] branches of learning” to be sufficient.⁶⁴ To these he adds the “ornamental arts, which are so important for the gentle sex, and the pretty manual labors that serve to cover with flowers the voids left in her life by comfort and the lack of serious obligations.”⁶⁵

There is yet a third category of women whose education Sarmiento does not specifically address: those middle- and upper-class women whose lives are not characterized by “comfort and the lack of serious obligations.” As a group, they will receive more attention in his 1849 book De la educación popular (On Popular Education) and in his 1853 article “Escuela normal de mujeres” (“Normal School for Women”), where he advocates a much more rigorous professional training than the one he had considered adequate for the woman of leisure eight years before.⁶⁶ However, already in 1843 he speaks of teachers as a social category when he writes that “a woman is the only competent teacher of her sex” and the best instructor in early childhood since, “simply by instinct and the admirable disposition of her nature, she knows how to bend to the condition of a child.”⁶⁷

In this text from 1843, Sarmiento presents instinct as the ally of education, although elsewhere the two are treated as adversaries, instinct being the very thing that education must control. This becomes particularly clear in the “Polémica con la Revista Católica” of 1844-1845:

Might one doubt that a woman ought to be educated so that she in turn can educate her children well? … Whoever doubts it, let him read the work of Aimé Martin, and you will see there that if the efforts taken to exterminate the vices and immorality of the multitudes have been impotent up to now, that is because the wound deep within the body of the family has not been probed: the inability of women, abandoned to their instincts and without the help of instruction and moral education, to form the heart and customs of men.⁶⁸

The connotation of danger that Sarmiento now gives to the instincts is even more noteworthy when one reflects on the dates of this so-called polemic: they correspond to the period during which Sarmiento was preparing the Facundo. Indeed, in the same article from which the last quote was taken, one also reads the following: “Only fifty years ago our matrons did not know how to read, and even today the immense majority of mothers who prepare the popular masses, on whom the industry and morality of the nation depend, live in the most complete barbarism.”⁶⁹ One begins to discern that, for Sarmiento, “women abandoned to their instincts” have a lot in common with the “popular masses.” These are two groups which in their present state constitute a danger, for they are both too close to nature and too far from civilization.

EPILOGUE: THE FACUNDO OF 1845

Although this is not the place for a detailed consideration of women in the Facundo, I should like to point out how that text recycles and affirms some of the notions about women that Sarmiento had expressed in his earlier writings. At first sight, the mere idea of discussing women in the Facundo may come as a surprise, for in this most masculine of books they are conspicuous by their near absence. The only woman in the text who could be called “memorable” is Severa Villafañe. Yet it is precisely this relative absence of women in a book which aspires to be both a political attack and a biography of an important historical figure that confirms the prejudice (already articulated in the article dated August 24, 1841) that woman does not “exert a visible … influence on life” or, rather, that “the mild dominion” she exercises is “over the family”—in short, within the domestic but decidedly not within the public sphere.⁷⁰ A book that seeks to illuminate historical change by focusing on battles, presidential administrations, and political alliances is likely to assign only a marginal or accessory role to one who has been relegated to the dark corners of tradition and the home. The result is that the overwhelming majority of women who pass so quickly through the text are figured in the roles of mother, spouse, daughter, sister, beloved, betrothed, or victim of male concupiscence. In other words, they are presented as appendages to men.

However, since woman provides the first moral education “to the tender child, who later will become a man who forms society,” the responsibility for what happens in history falls, in the final analysis, to her.⁷¹ Thus, the mother of Sarmiento's political enemy, Juan Manuel de Rosas, comes in for particularly harsh treatment in the text. Twice Sarmiento insinuates that the excesses of the tyrant are in part owing to the rigidity and Spanish fanaticism of his mother. This conviction that mothers determine the behavior of their sons also helps explain the reverential portrait that Sarmiento will paint of his own mother in his self-promoting autobiography Recuerdos de provincia (Provincial Recollections).

Woman, then, as adjunct to man, provides a standard by which to judge him: the good man has a good mother, and the civilized man treats women with respect. This last point is an analogue to the argument made by Sarmiento in 1841 that a society can be deemed civilized or barbarous by how it treats its women. In terms of individual conduct, both Rosas and Quiroga fare poorly in the Facundo. Rosas is accused of having precipitated his wife's death with a brutal joke, and the whole text wallows in Quiroga's repeated abuse of women.⁷² As for social systems, that of the gaucho and the rural pastureland is condemned, in part, owing to the position it assigns to the female sex. The first chapter concludes with a discussion of the division of labor between men and women in the Argentine countryside. Although the text generally identifies the gaucho with barbarism, the description we read here of the enormous inequality between the sexes, in which the rural woman does almost all the work and the man leads a free and idle existence, recalls William Robertson's discussion of savagery, which Sarmiento had reproduced in his article of 1841.

Finally, it remains to be asked whether women in the Facundo fall under the rubric of barbarism, along with the gaucho and his idols Rosas and Quiroga, the blacks who supported Rosas, and at times even the execrated Indians (that is, when these are not relegated to the category of savagery). Fundamentally, there are two types of women in the Facundo: the supposedly civilized ladies, both married and single, who tend to be figured as the prey of barbarism (e.g., the young girls from Tucumán), and the evil and/or humble women who somehow form a tie with—or are part of—barbarism itself (e.g., Rosas's mother, Santos Pérez's treacherous mistress, the black women who support Rosas).⁷³ But beyond this obvious dichotomy, which clearly betrays political, racial, and class prejudices, there is an identification (perhaps unconscious) with a long misogynist tradition that has taken shape in a metaphorical/mythological language associating women with the terrors of an uncontrolled nature. I refer to the Harpies, who are associated with both Quiroga and Rosas, and to the Medusa, whose snaky head is compared with Quiroga's curly locks. Above all I refer to the Sphinx, the symbol of Rosas, whose frightful shadow stretches across the whole of the book. The famous Argentine Sphinx in the first paragraph of the introduction—“half woman, owing to its cowardice; half tiger, owing to its thirst for blood”—inaugurates the book with a powerful image of how women, if unredeemed by civilization, can enter into a monstrous alliance with the most destructive forces of nature.

Notes

1. These speeches are reproduced, at least in part, in the first two issues of the short-lived San Juan newspaper El Zonda, available in facsimile reprint (Buenos Aires: Guillermo Kraft, 1939). In order of appearance, they are by Sarmiento, Manuel José Quiroga Rosas, Antonio Aberastain, Idalecio Cortínez, and Dionisio Rodríguez.

2. Prospecto, Memorias del Museo de Entre Ríos no. 18 (Paraná: Impresora Argentina: 1942), pp. 6, 2. For the location of this difficult-to-find text, I am grateful to Donna Guy. I should also mention the generosity of Alfredo Rodríguez and Marta Gutiérrez de Platero, both with the Library of the Central Bank of Argentina, who helped me consult the material (catalogued under Historia Argentina no. 821) which forms part of the Tornquist Library, at present closed to the public for lack of funds.

3. Prospecto, pp. 2, 3.

4. Ibid., p. 3.

5. Facsimile reprint: Museo Histórico Sarmiento 4, 1 (Buenos Aires: Guillermo Kraft, 1939), p. 17.

6. This imposition of uniform modes of respectful address recalls the protocol of the Rodríguez brothers' school that Sarmiento attended in his youth and that he would praise in the first edition of the Facundo: “Where today is this great source of morality, good manners, and solid instruction that were distributed to an entire people, without distinction between rich and poor, black and white, since all of us walked together and treated one another as gentlemen?” (ed. Alberto Palcos [Buenos Aires: Ediciones Culturales Argentinas, 1961], p. 77). This passage would be deleted from all subsequent editions. For another discussion of the Constitución, which makes the claim that this text is representative of the pedagogical philosophy of the entire youthful Generation of 1837, see Mark Szuchman, Order, Family, and Community in Buenos Aires 1819-1860 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 159-161.

7. El Zonda, July 27, 1839, p. 3.

8. El Zonda, July 20, 1839, pp. 4, 3.

9. Sarmiento speaks of these publications in his Recuerdos de provincia (Barcelona: Editorial Ramón Sopena, 1967), pp. 139-140.

10. Juan Marichal, Cuatro fases de la historia intelectual latinoamericana (1810-1970) (Madrid: Fundación Juan March and Ediciones Cátedra, 1978), pp. 51, 57.

11. Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), p. 14.

12. Ibid., p. 41. On Saint-Simonianism and women, I have followed Claire Goldberg, chaps. 3 and 4, as well as Maite Albistur and Daniel Armogather, Histoire du féminisme français du moyen âge à nos jours (Paris: Editions des Femmes, 1977), pp. 270-273, and Richard K. P. Pankhurst, The Saint Simonians, Mill and Carlyle: A Preface to Modern Thought (London: Lalibela Books, n.d.), chaps. 6 and 8.

13. On the eighteenth century in Europe, I have followed in part the first chapter of Jane Rendall's The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France, and the United States, 1780-1860 (New York: Schocken Books, 1984).

14. Enfantin stated that God was androgynous, and that women as well as men were made in God's image. The equality of the sexes followed logically from this thesis of God's androgyny. See Pankhurst, The Saint Simonians, p. 107.

15. Miguel Cané “Educación,” El Iniciador, July 15, 1838, in facsimile reprint (Buenos Aires: Guillermo Kraft, 1941), p. 182.

16. Sarmiento, “De la educación de la mujer,” August 24, 1841, in Obras (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Gutenberg, 1886), 4:242.

17. Ibid., 4:244. Another disavowal of aspects of Saint-Simonianism appears in a text published by Juan Bautista Alberdi (“Boletín cómico,” La Moda, March 17, 1838, in facsimile reprint [Buenos Aires: Guillermo Kraft, 1938], p. 175). There, writing under the pseudonym “Figarillo,” he adopts a satiric tone which to a certain degree, I think, should be taken literally: “I do not go along with Saint-Simon that woman needs to be emancipated. She is already much too emancipated, and would that she were not so much so.”

18. Sarmiento, “De la educación,” in Obras, 4:231.

19. Sarmiento, “La mujer y la civilización,” August 22, 1841, in Obras (Buenos Aires: Mariano Moreno, 1896), 12:195.

20. See Rendall, Origins of Modern Feminism, pp. 8-21.

21. Sarmiento, “La mujer,” in Obras, 12:195.

22. Sarmiento, “De la educación,” in Obras, 4:231.

23. Ibid., 4:233.

24. Rendall, Origins of Modern Feminism, pp. 9, 34.

25. (Middlesex: Penguin, 1978), p. 257.

26. When Fuller does mention motherhood, it is in the following context: “Earth knows no fairer, holier relation than that of a mother. It is one which, rightly understood, must both promote and require the highest attainments. But a being of infinite scope must not be treated with an exclusive view to any one relation. Give the soul free course, let the organization, both of body and mind, be freely developed and the being will be fit for any and every relation to which it may be called” (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1980), p. 84.

27. Goldberg, French Feminism, pp. 73-74.

28. Sarmiento, “De la educación,” in Obras, 4:232, 233. As far as I know, the young members of the Generation of 1837 never mention Lizardi. I name him because, as a liberal rationalist of the generation preceding Sarmiento, he is a good point of comparison. Particularly useful for this discussion are Jean Franco's “Women, Fashion and the Moralists in Early Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” in Homenaje a Ana María Barrenechea, ed. Lía Schwartz Lerner and Isaías Lerner (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1984), pp. 421-430, and Joan B. Landes's Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

29. Rendall has described Aimé Martin as “extraordinarily influential throughout Europe and the United States” in the mid-nineteenth century (Origins of Modern Feminism, p. 123). In 1843 Sarmiento will emphasize the book's international acclaim throughout the “civilized world.” See his “Colejio de las monjas francesas,” El Progreso, February 16, in Obras, 4:279.

30. Aimé Martin, “Lectura instructiva: Escuela y métodos. El verdadero maestro de los niños,” El Progreso, December 28, 1842, pp. 2-3.

31. Sarmiento, “La mujer,” in Obras, 12:195. This is the translation of a passage appearing in Aimé Martin, De l'éducation des mères de famille ou de la civilisation du genre humain par les femmes (Brussels: Meline, Cans et Comp., 1837), p. 55.

32. Sarmiento, “La mujer,” in Obras, 12:196. In regard to the eighteenth-century writers with whom Sarmiento's thesis concurs, Rendall mentions Turgot and Helvetius in France and Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and John Millar in Scotland (Origins of Modern Feminism, pp. 21-28).

33. Sarmiento, “La mujer,” in Obras, 12:196.

34. William Robertson, The History of America (Albany: E. & E. Hosford, 1822), 4:255.

35. Sarmiento, “La mujer,” in Obras, 12:198.

36. Ibid., 12:199.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., 12:201.

40. For the third as well as for the fourth article in the 1841 series, there exist two slightly different versions in the Obras: one in vol. 4, under the title “De la educación de la mujer” (On the Education of Women), which includes articles 1, 3, and 4; and one in vol. 12, under the title “La mujer y la civilización” (Woman and Civilization), which includes articles 2, 3, and 4. In those cases where there is a discrepancy between the two versions, I have composed a third version that seems to make sense given the general context. This means that in some instances the version that I quote in translation is a combination of the two and does not correspond exactly to either of the originals. When this occurs, I indicate it in the notes.

41. Sarmiento, “De la educación,” in Obras, 4:235.

42. Ibid., 4:239, 236.

43. Combination of versions from Obras 4:236 and 12:203.

44. Sarmiento, “De la educación,” in Obras, 4:236.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., 4:237.

47. Ibid., 4:238.

48. Ibid., 4:239.

49. Francisco Bilbao, “Sociabilidad chilena,” in Obras completas, ed. Pedro Pablo Figueroa (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta de “El Correo,” 1897), 1:69-71. Although Sarmiento seems not to have identified himself publicly with George Sand's position on the dissolution of marriage, he does create a space for her in the feuilleton of his newspaper El Progreso. On December 16, 1842, he announced that during the next few days he was going to hand over the feuilleton to an aficionado of this “mother of two lovely children … who has written the loveliest things and who has engaged in fierce polemics with the top writers of France.” He also announced his intention to publish a novel by the notorious Frenchwoman entitled Matea (see Sarmiento, “Al oído de las lectoras,” in Obras [Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Gutenberg, 1885], 2:79-80). And, indeed, three anonymous articles soon appeared that applauded George Sand and her battles against male discrimination. These were followed by a translation of the novel Matea, which, though certainly not one of the author's most daring (e.g., it defended marriage), did speak for a woman's right to choose a husband as well as for equality and active economic collaboration between spouses. The very sexual moderation of this novel might indeed be a sign of the limits that Sarmiento set himself in his defense of the emancipation of the contemporary woman.

50. Sarmiento, “De la educación,” in Obras, 4:240.

51. Ibid., 4:242.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid., 4:242-243. In reality, the judgment that Corinne is “as free as a man” is questionable. The most notable forms that her social rebellion takes are her desire to have a public life as an artist and her insistence on living alone, far from the unbearable vigilance of her stepmother. In her confession to Oswald (which, given her superiority of character, can be assumed to be true), Corinne reveals a chaste past—that is to say, a considerably more controlled sexual conduct than would have been permitted a man of the same social class. This is particularly interesting when one considers the freer sexual behavior of some of George Sand's heroines. I have consulted a new rendition into English: Corinne; or, Italy, trans. Avriel H. Goldberger (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987).

55. Sarmiento, “De la educación,” in Obras, 4:243.

56. This recognition recalls a similar point made by Quiroga Rosas in his speech at the inauguration of the Santa Rosa School for Girls in 1839. See El Zonda, July 20, 1839, p. 4.

57. Sarmiento, “El trabajo de la mujer,” El Progreso, December 3, 1844, in Obras, 12:214.

58. Sarmiento, “Colejio de las monjas,” in Obras, 4:280.

59. Sarmiento, “Polémica,” El Progreso, December 3, 1844, in Obras, 2:230-231.

60. As a result of the publication of his essay in June 1844, Bilbao was tried and found guilty of blasphemy and immorality in the third degree. When the essay appeared, its author was employed as a teacher in the Liceo, or high school, founded a year earlier by Sarmiento and his friend Vicente Fidel López. Bilbao quit his job to avoid implicating the school's directors, but the gesture came too late: Sarmiento and López had to close the Liceo when scandalized parents withdrew their sons. In his article dated December 26, 1844, Sarmiento clearly tries to distance himself from Bilbao, calling the latter's essay an “undigested mixture of folly and heresy.” However, he also accuses the civil courts of engaging in “a mindless persecution” of the young author (“Polémica,” in Obras, 2:244).

61. Sarmiento, “El trabajo,” in Obras, 12:215.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid., 12:216.

64. Sarmiento, “El colejio de la señora Cabezón,” El Progreso, January 24, 1845, in Obras, 4:326.

65. Ibid.

66. See chap. 3, “De la educación de mujeres,” in De la educación popular, in Obras (Buenos Aires: Mariano Moreno, 1896), vol. 11, and “Escuela normal de mujeres,” Monitor de las Escuelas Primarias, February 15, 1853, in Obras, 4:420-425.

67. Sarmiento, “Colejio de las monjas,” in Obras, 4:278-279.

68. Sarmiento, “Polémica,” in Obras, 2:235.

69. Ibid., 2:236.

70. Sarmiento, “De la educación,” in Obras, 4:242.

71. Sarmiento, “Colejio de las monjas,” in Obras, 4:280.

72. For a more detailed discussion of some of these themes, approached from a slightly different perspective, see my article “Layo y Edipo: Padres, hijos y el problema de la autoridad en el Facundo,” La Torre, n.s. 7 (July-September 1988): 505-526.

73. There are exceptions to the equation “good women = victims.” For example: the ladies of the Sociedad de Beneficencia de Buenos Aires (The Buenos Aires Charitable Society), Madame de Roland, etc.

This essay was originally written in Spanish. It was translated for this volume by Gwen Kirkpatrick and the author.