FINAL PROJECT PROPOSAL
WITH PRIMARY SOURCE ANALYSIS
Due 2/3 by 5pm via CCLE Turnitin
Format: 1” margins, 12-inch font, your name and date at top of the page.
The purpose of this assignment is to help launch you on your research project and to start finding
primary sources that will help you complete it. If you ultimately pursue a different research
question/agenda than the one you lay out here, that is okay. Research often evolves in
unexpected ways. The primary source you analyze also might not be one that you include in your
final project, and that is okay. This assignment helps you to start exploring a topic that is of
interest to you. However, it is good to be as focused as possible given the time constraints of
conducting a project like this during a 10-week quarter.
This assignment is composed of two parts—project proposal and brief primary source
analysis.
PART I: Final project proposal
In 3 paragraphs, address the questions below. Make sure to address all questions below for
full credit.
1. Explain the feminist issue you will be exploring. Try to be specific in terms of the
regional/geographic and chronological scope—where will you focus? Will you be
studying the issue locally, regionally, nationally, or internationally? Will you be
studying the issue within a certain time period or decade?
Try to be specific. For instance, if you’re interested in histories of reproductive justice
or LGBTQ activism, think about focusing on a particular issue, in a specific time
period and place, home in on a key debate, or explore a key person and/or event.
Make sure to include what specific question(s) you are thinking of exploring through
your research.
2. Explain the sorts of primary and secondary sources you hope to find and where you
plan to look for them. Explain how these sources will help you determine the answers
to the question(s) you are asking.
3. Explain the potential form your final project might take (will you be writing a
research paper or doing a creative assignment, and if the latter, what kind of creative
assignment?). Explain any problems you expect to encounter in the project design,
form, research questions, availability of sources, etc.
PART II: Brief primary source analysis
You will compose a 1.5 - 2 page, double-spaced analysis of a primary source you have actually
located and studied that you think might be relevant to the final project you have proposed.
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Include a Chicago style bibliography or endnote citation for your primary source at the top of the
page. (If you have questions about Chicago format, see “HOW TO CITE SOURCES” under
HANDOUTS on our CCLE page.)
Here are the steps:
1) FIND A SOURCE: Choose one primary source that you would like to analyze and
that relates in some way to the topic you are interested in exploring. The source could
be a speech, diary entry, letter, conference proceeding, essay, memoir, newspaper
article, novel, poem, political cartoon, image, or other item. If it is a long work, like a
book or memoir, choose a relatively short passage (of around 5-10 pages) to analyze
closely. If it is an oral history, choose a period of about 15-20 minutes of that oral
history to analyze closely.
You can find primary sources by using an online database or a UCLA or L.A.
Archive. (For guidance on databases, see HANDOUTS on CCLE “ONLINE
DATABASES OF PRIMARY SOURCES” and “UCLA FEMINIST ARCHIVES”)
2) WRITE THE ANALYSIS: Analyze your source by putting it into historical context.
Utilize the questions below to probe your source, and make sure to address these
questions in your essay. Synthesize these questions as you address them in your
essay; do not just answer these questions in a row:
Authorship: Who is the author of the document? (Think about gender, race, class, nationality,
age, and other forms of identity.) What do you know, or what can you find out about the social
location of the author – where, quite literally, are they coming from? How do the author’s
gender, socioeconomic class, race, ethnicity, etc., compare to those of the people about whom
they are writing?
Time period and historical context: When was it composed/published? Why/how is the time
period significant to understanding its content? In what ways does the document describe,
grapple with, endorse, contest, or ignore contemporaneous events and attitudes?
Place and Audience: Where was the source produced and published? What can you understand
about the intended audience based on where it was published? Who is the intended audience?
Plot or argument: What is the purpose of the source? Many times, primary sources tell a story,
or perhaps several stories, or make an argument. What kind of argument is it, or what kind of
story is it (e.g. romance, comedy, tragedy, etc.)?
Material production: How was the text/source originally produced? Was it published?
Performed? If so, where and how? How was it disseminated? What sort of pressures –
technological, economic, practical, political – might have shaped the way it was produced and
disseminated?
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Narrative voice: Is the narrator or narrative voice in the document distinguishable from that of
the author? If not, how might you explain the gap? What sort of language is being used –
personal or impersonal? Formal and complex, or simple and concrete? Is it active and direct, or
passive and oblique?
Imagery: Look more closely at the figurative dimension of the document: the metaphors, similes
and other rhetorical devises the author uses to render his or her narrative or argument vivid,
compelling, or even commonplace. What is the effect of this imagery? What kind of work do
these images do in the text?
Genre: What is the genre that the author has chosen to express their message? Why do you
think the author has chosen this genre and not another one? Are there certain issues that the
genre allows the author to address, or to exclude? Or to address in a particular way? What would
have been gained or lost had the author chosen, or been required to choose, a different genre, a
different form of exposition?
Content: What is the document saying? Taking all the formal strategies of the text into
consideration – voice, imagery, genre, plot, etc. - what is the author telling their audience(s)
about the world they inhabit? What are the most prominent themes in the document? How are
they connected to one another, and with what effect? What unspoken assumptions does the text
contain? What biases are detectable in the source? How do the document’s explicit and implicit
statements about the world square with what you have learned from other sources: lectures,
readings, etc.? If the document departs from what you otherwise know of the world it describes,
how would you account for this?
Larger Take-Aways: At the broadest level of interpretation, how does this source (as you read
it) square with other documents and information you know about the period from lectures, other
classes, other readings?
Utilizing the Source: If you were to write a research paper and include this primary source in
that paper, what might some of your research questions be? What other primary sources would
you want to consult in order to write such a paper?
Again, do not answer these questions in a row. First, think through these questions yourself,
free-writing, and taking notes. Your goal is to write a brief analysis of the source that logically
flows. You may not answer all of these questions in the paper because not all of them might be
relevant to your source and/or answering all of them in detail might not fit into a brief 1.5-2 page
paper. Make sure to convey the basic who, what, where, when, and why of the document, and
then integrate the most relevant and important details as concisely as you can. Tell us the most
meaningful information about your source.
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VICKI L. RUIZ
AHA Presidential Address
Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900–1930
VICKI L. RUIZ
I thank Valerie Matsumoto and Asunci
on Lavrin for their incisive comments. I also appreciate the editorial care given this manuscript by Alex Lichtenstein and Jane Lyle. I refer readers to Lavrin’s foundational
work Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (University of
Nebraska Press, 1995). Note: I use the term “Latina” as distinct from “Latin American” to denote nativity
or long-term residence in the United States and its commonwealth, Puerto Rico.
1 Luisa Capetillo, A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out/Mi opini
on sobre las libertades,
derechos y deberes de la mujer (My Opinion on the Liberties, Rights, and Duties of Woman, as Companion,
Mother and Independent Being), ed. Félix V. Matos Rodrı́guez, trans. Alan West-Duran (Houston, Tex.,
2004; original Spanish ed. 1911), 103.
2 Rosa Rodrı́guez L
opez, “La necesidad del feminismo en el orientaciones para la mujer guatemalteca,” El Imparcial, November 21, 1925. (El Imparcial is Guatemala’s national newspaper, published in Guatemala City.)
C The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical
V
Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com.
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“[W]OMEN ARE CAPABLE OF everything and anything,” declared labor radical Luisa
Capetillo in her landmark feminist treatise, Mi opini
on sobre las libertades, derechos y
deberes de la mujer (My Opinion on the Liberties, Rights, and Duties of Woman).1 Published in 1911, this manifesto articulated a radical vision that promoted a variant of
republican motherhood alongside free love and proletarian revolution. Capetillo
emerged as a passionate labor leader in Puerto Rico at the turn of the twentieth century. She would later extend her reach into the Caribbean and the United States.
Less bold in her pronouncements, Guatemala-born feminist Rosa Rodrı́guez
L
opez in 1925 stressed the importance of education across class: “the woman continues to be attached to ignorance; her emancipation is necessary. Feminism will
make her become Conscious . . . , and . . . by obtaining an adequate education, she
will be prepared [for] . . . a much more ambitious future.” Mirroring her generation,
pez stressed the importance of reaching the “proletarian woman who
Rodrı́guez Lo
continues to live miserably in darkness with no other light than a vague reflection of
love”—a striking statement from a young woman who twenty years later would be an
influential leader in the California labor movement.2 Known by that time as Luisa
Moreno, having changed her name after her move to the United States, she was the
first Latina vice president of a major Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)
union and applied her considerable skills to spearheading the 1939 el Congreso del
Pueblo de Habla Española (the Spanish-Speaking People’s Congress), the first national U.S. pan-Latino civil rights conference.
The genealogy of Latina feminist traditions has typically focused on Mexican
women, beginning with the seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and
then fast-forwarding to Chicana feminists of the 1960s and 1970s (with maybe a nod to
2
Vicki L. Ruiz
3 Patricia Faith Harms, “Imagining a Place for Themselves: The Political and Social Roles of Guatemalan Women, 1871–1954” (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 2007); Marta Elena Casaús Arzú,
“Las redes teos
oficas de mujeres en Guatemala: La Sociedad Gabriela Mistral, 1920–1940,” Revista
Complutense de Historia de América 27 (2001): 219–255. I owe an enormous debt to Patricia Harms for
sharing with me her primary materials on la Sociedad Gabriela Mistral.
4 Examples of this transnational turn include Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington, Ind., 1999); Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and
U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley, Calif., 2002); Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries:
Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York, 2008); Patricia A. Schechter, Exploring
the Decolonial Imaginary: Four Transnational Lives (New York, 2012).
5 For biographical information on Capetillo, see Yamila Azize, La mujer en la lucha (Rı́o Piedras,
P.R., 1985); Norma Valle Ferrer, Luisa Capetillo: Historia de una mujer proscrita (San Juan, P.R., 1985);
Nancy A. Hewitt, “Luisa Capetillo: Feminist of the Working Class,” in Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia
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Tejanas Sara Estela Ramı́rez and Jovita Gonzalez). Remembered in Latino history for
their prowess in organizing farm and factory workers, Capetillo and Moreno were also
pathbreaking feminist intellectuals whose writings expand our understanding of transnational feminist ideas emanating from Latin America. Literally and figuratively, they
acted as bridges across the Américas, representing rich historical connections between
women in Latin America and U.S. Latinas. Despite a florescence of Latino American
historiography over the past forty years, Latino narratives remain on the periphery of
U.S. history. Capetillo and Moreno are no exception. The lack of familiarity with available secondary, archival, and community sources accounts for some of the silences. For
example, not until 2004 did Luisa Capetillo’s Mi opini
on become accessible for an English-language audience; and beyond a single dissertation and one journal article, the
writings of Luisa Moreno have languished in the Biblioteca Nacional in Guatemala,
where they are housed.3 Though these two iconic figures in Latino labor history never
met (Capetillo died when Moreno was fifteen), their legacies intersect in multiple ways,
especially in terms of their unwavering commitment to a radical labor politics predicated on the dignity and self-determination of the working class. Starkly divergent but
at times hauntingly similar, their feminist writings reveal threads of a Latina transnational consciousness that reaches across nationalities and generations.4
On October 28, 1879, Luisa Margarita Perone and Luis Capetillo Escheverrı́a, a
common-law couple, welcomed their only child, a daughter they named Luisa. Both
parents were relative newcomers to Puerto Rico; Margarita had arrived from France,
Luis from northern Spain. Their European heritage and education, however, provided
no guarantees of social mobility, as Luis did odd jobs and Margarita took in laundry.
Though she grew up in modest circumstances, Luisa was surrounded at an early age
by great books. Margarita, in fact, had elbowed her way into a local tertulia (literary salon), setting a path for her daughter to follow. As an adolescent, Luisa became romantically involved with Manuel Ledesma, a member of an elite, politically powerful
family. By the age of twenty she had given birth to two children with him. But two
years later, in 1901, the relationship ended when Ledesma bowed to maternal pressure
and assumed the patrimonial roles expected of him, which included a suitable marriage. While he provided financial support for their children, Manuela and Gregorio,
Luisa placed them in the care of her mother and went to work. Given her rich homeschool education, she secured a coveted job as a reader in cigar-making factories in
the city of Arecibo. She would use this position throughout her career, and in several
locales within and beyond the island, in order to cultivate and reinforce workers’ consciousness of trade unions, socialism, anarchism, and women’s rights.5
Class Acts
3
Sanchez Korrol, eds., Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community (New York, 2005), 120–134;
and Ivette Marie Rivera-Giusti, “Gender, Labor and Working Class Activism in the Tobacco Industry in
Puerto Rico, 1898–1924” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2004).
6 Hewitt, “Luisa Capetillo,” 128–132; Schechter, Exploring the Decolonial Imaginary, 3–5; Shirley
Aldebol, “Luisa Capetillo Was Early Puerto Rican Labor Leader[;] She Lived Life on Her Own Terms,”
The Lucy Parsons Project, http://flag.blackened.net/lpp/anarchism/aldebol_luisa_capetillo.html, including
quote. For politicization of young women in the 1940s, see Catherine S. Ramı́rez, The Woman in the
Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Durham, N.C., 2009); and Elizabeth
R. Escobedo, From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican American Women on the World War II
Home Front (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2013).
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In the midst of the social and economic upheaval that followed the Spanish-Filipino-Cuban-American War, a militant trade union movement emerged in Puerto
n
Rico, one with strong anarchist leanings. Its standard-bearer was the Federaci o
Libre de Trabajadores (Free Federation of Workers), whose principal organizers included Luisa Capetillo. For a decade she traveled across the island mobilizing workers in agriculture and cigar factories, as well as writing essays on proletarian and
feminist issues. Capetillo’s homilies were unconventional, especially those on free
n had adopted women’s suflove (a pillar of anarchism), but by 1908 the Federacio
frage as part of its platform. Three years later, Capetillo published Mi opini
on, a collection of her itinerant essays. Ironically, the book’s appearance coincided with the
birth of her third child, Luis, by a married lover.
Driven out of Puerto Rico by a government crackdown on anarchists, Capetillo
departed for New York City in 1912. She would spend the rest of her days as a truly
transnational labor radical and feminist intellectual: she moved a number of times,
organizing workers in Florida, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. In
Tampa, Florida, in 1913, she was welcomed to the multiethnic cigar community of
Ybor City, which was heavily Latino, but as historian Nancy Hewitt points out, Capetillo stood out not only for her feminist and anarchist beliefs, but also for her appearance. Whether out of expediency (to blend in with male workers), comfort, safety, or
a deliberate political statement (like the “Lady Zooters” of the 1940s), she dressed in
men’s clothing, complete with a vest and necktie. In Cuba she was arrested for “causing a public disturbance” by wearing manly attire, but a judge acquitted her of all
charges. Charismatic and passionate, Capetillo proved to be a fearless labor organizer, helping tens of thousands of workers secure significant wage increases, including during Puerto Rico’s Great Sugar Cane Strike of 1916. Before her final return to
the island, she ran a New York City boarding house and adjoining restaurant, dishing
up revolution and vegetarian fare. At some point during her many journeys, she contracted tuberculosis, to which she succumbed in 1922, at the age of forty-two. A radical intellectual who challenged the ramifications of empire in the day-to-day, Luisa
Capetillo was far more than a Spanish-speaking Emma Goldman, though the parallels seem obvious. More importantly, she embodied a “decolonial imaginary,” as a
transnational feminist unmoored from nation, race, or gendered convention.6
pez, by contrast, advocated a more conventional path
Blanca Rosa Rodrı́guez Lo
to women’s emancipation. Like other middle-class and elite Latin American feminists, she anchored her hopes on education as the key to securing equal rights for
women. Born on August 30, 1907, she had a most unlikely childhood for a future
trade union leader. She grew up surrounded by wealth and privilege in her native
4
Vicki L. Ruiz
7 Vicki L. Ruiz, “Of Poetics and Politics: The Border Journeys of Luisa Moreno,” in Sharon Harley,
ed., Women’s Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices (New Brunswick, N.J., 2007), 28–
45, here 29–34.
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Guatemala, the daughter of a powerful coffee grower, Ernesto Rodrı́guez Robles,
and his socialite wife, Alicia L
opez Sarana. Educated by nuns in a California boarding school and by private tutors at home, she desired a university education in Guatemala, but discovered that women need not apply. So she organized her elite peers
into la Sociedad Gabriela Mistral (the Gabriela Mistral Society, named after a famous Chilean education reformer and poet) to push for greater educational opportupez was
nities for women. Despite some success in that effort, however, Rodrı́guez Lo
gone by age nineteen, having left for Mexico City. Enrolling as a student at the Uninoma de México (UNAM) and working as a journalist for a
versidad Nacional Auto
Guatemalan daily, she participated in a burgeoning cultural renaissance taking place
in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, enjoying the heady avant-garde atmosphere and consorting with the likes of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. In 1927 she
published a poetry collection, El vendedor de cocuyos (Seller of Fireflies), and married
n, an artist sixteen years her senior. The next year would find
Miguel Angel de Leo
the artistic couple in New York City, searching for their own version of the American
dream. It was not a particularly propitious time for such a move, given the looming
economic calamity. When their daughter Mytyl arrived in 1929, their fortunes had
declined to the extent that they were living in a crowded tenement in Spanish Harlem, where Rosa found employment as a seamstress. The death of a work friend’s infant from rat bites compelled her to do something to change the material conditions
of her fellow workers. She organized a small garment union local and joined leftist
community groups, and by 1930 she was a member of the Communist Party.
n accepted a job
In 1935, leaving a tattered marriage, Rosa Rodrı́guez de Leo
with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to organize cigar workers in Florida.
Arriving with Mytyl, she chose yet another transformation—she changed her name,
becoming “Luisa Moreno.” Deliberately distancing herself from her privileged past,
she adopted the alias “Moreno” (Dark) as a surname, one diametrically opposite her
given name, “Blanca Rosa” (White Rose). For her new first name she selected
“Luisa,” perhaps to honor Capetillo, who had preceded her to Florida two decades
earlier and whose legacy she undoubtedly knew and built upon in her daily work as a
trade union organizer. Moreno placed her daughter with a pro-labor family, a practice that would continue until Mytyl was a teenager.7
In Florida Moreno honed her skills, negotiating a contract covering 13,000 cigar
workers. Given her organizing experience in New York and especially Florida, the
newly formed United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), an arm of the CIO, hired her in 1938. Moreno quickly asserted
leadership in the new union, taking charge of the Pecan Shellers’ Strike in San Antonio, Texas. She also became a driving force behind el Congreso del Pueblo de Habla
Española, a civil rights assembly attended by more than 1,000 delegates. They hammered out a comprehensive platform that called for an end to racial segregation in
public facilities, housing, education, and employment. During World War II, Moreno
mobilized cannery workers in southern California, many of whom were Mexican and
Jewish women, earning the nickname “the California Whirlwind.” Union members
Class Acts
5
FOR A FULLER UNDERSTANDING of the transformation of Blanca Rosa Rodrı́guez de
n into Luisa Moreno, we must look to her early life. The 1920s marked the first
Leo
period of reform in Guatemala, and a group of young urban elites took advantage of
this opening to advocate for women’s rights and educational uplift. La Sociedad
Gabriela Mistral was formed in November 1925, with Rosa, who was only eighteen
years old at the time, at the helm. During its short life, according to Latin American
historian Patricia Harms, la Sociedad would represent “the most recognizable women’s group” of its era in Guatemala.11 Laden with noblesse oblige, the pronouncements of these adolescent feminists cut both ways, taking aim at women of their own
8 Luisa Moreno, interview by author, August 3, 1984; Luisa Moreno, interview by Albert Camarillo,
August 5, 1976. From that time forward, she became Rosa Rodrı́guez de Bemis.
9 See, for example, Schechter, Exploring the Decolonial Imaginary; and Katherine M. Merino, “Martha Vergara, Popular-Front Pan-American Feminism and the Transnational Struggle for Working Women’s Rights in the 1930s,” Gender and History 26, no. 3 (2014): 642–660.
10 Vicki L. Ruiz, “Una Mujer Sin Fronteras: Luisa Moreno and Latina Labor Activism,” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 1 (2004): 1–20, here 10–19; Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women,
Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1987), xiii,
78–79, 103–113; Luisa Moreno, interview by author, September 6, 1979. For more detail on El Congreso
del Pueblo de Habla Española, see David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican
Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley, Calif., 1995).
11 Harms, “Imagining a Place for Themselves,” 97.
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achieved significant improvements in their working conditions, wages, and benefits,
and Moreno became the first Latina to serve on a state CIO council. In 1945 she
faced her biggest professional challenge, going head to head with the International
Brotherhood of Teamsters in organizing northern California canneries. After a campaign of sweetheart contracts, red-baiting, and physical assaults, the Teamsters
emerged victorious. Though she retired from union life in early 1947, Moreno could
not escape the Cold War’s chill. A year later she found herself facing deportation
proceedings on the grounds of her former membership in the Communist Party.
Together with her third husband, Gray Bemis—a fellow radical whom she had met
during her years in New York as a self-described “junior organizer”—she left the
United States in 1950 and returned to her native Guatemala, signaling in her words
“the death of Luisa Moreno.”8
While Moreno and Capetillo both made their mark on the U.S. labor movement,
they came to their meaning of feminism within a Latin American context. However,
they were not part of the Pan-American networks that fostered exchanges between
U.S. feminist leaders and their Latin American and Caribbean counterparts.9 Their
capacious education and intellectual appetites seem to have fed their transnational
feminist imaginaries, for they drew upon European, U.S., and Latin American examples in their essays outlining the paths to women’s equality. While Luisa Capetillo
combined the grinding work of labor organizing with her unconventional feminist
pez,
and anarchist essays, there was a distinct separation between Rosa Rodrı́guez Lo
the sheltered adolescent intellectual, and Luisa Moreno, the fearless labor leader.
Though writing feminist essays ended with her adolescence, Moreno always cultivated women’s grassroots leadership and made sure their issues were at the forefront
in collective bargaining.10
6
Vicki L. Ruiz
12 R. Rodrı́guez L
opez, “La necesidad del feminismo en el orientaciones para la mujer guatemalteca”; Graciela Rodrı́guez L
opez, “La mujer y la ciencia,” Vida, January 23, 1926. Incomplete copies of El Imparcial and Vida are housed at the Biblioteca Nacional de Guatemala. Importantly, while the
1920s mark the “doldrums” for women’s rights in the United States, on a global stage, women from Latin
America, India, and the Middle East were at the forefront of truly transnational exchanges facilitated by
the League of Nations. See Ellen Carol DuBois, There Are No Waves: International Feminist Flows from
1923 through 1950 (forthcoming).
13 Graciela Rodrı́guez L
opez, “La falta de cultura intelectual entre la gente bien de Guatemala,”
Vida, January 30, 1926.
14 Marta Josefina Herrera, “Civilicemonos,” Vida, December 19, 1925.
15 R. Rodrı́guez L
opez, “La necesidad del feminismo en el orientaciones para la mujer guatemalteca”; Luisa Moreno, interview by author, July 27, 1978. Their barbs against their mothers’ generation clearly differentiate them from their counterparts in other Latin American nations and the world.
16 G. Rodrı́guez L
opez, “La falta de cultura intelectual entre la gente bien de Guatemala.”
17 Ibid.; Rosa Rodrı́guez L
opez, “La mujer culta,” Vida, December 2, 1925; Herrera, “Civilicemonos.”
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class as well as the plight of the downtrodden. In essays published in Guatemala’s national newspaper, El Imparcial, and the literary journal Vida, they decried the intellectual poverty prevalent among their peers. Their articles featured role models of
womanly achievement who reflected their own expansive education—from the Greek
philosopher Hypatia to the French novelist George Sand to the Uruguayan physician
Paulina Luisi to the famed Polish scientist Marie Curie.12 Moreover, they railed
against the impact of Hollywood and popular fiction on their generation’s cultural
tastes. “What sort of future awaits Guatemalan youth, especially the women, for today they are nothing but puppets who care only about their friends, their boyfriends,
the movie stars, fashion, and dancing. We still have time to be educated, to be worthy
pez,
of something better than just looking pretty,” wrote Graciela Rodrı́guez L o
Rosa’s sister. Indeed, she would go so far as to characterize such cheap amusements
as “Westerners’ opium.”13
The members of la Sociedad Gabriela Mistral also targeted their mothers’ generation, those “useless women” caught up in society soirees and petty intrigue: “women
gossip with our mouths . . . with our thoughts, with our eyelashes, with our hands,
pez leveled even harsher criticism in
and even with our feet.”14 Rosa Rodrı́guez Lo
the pages of El Imparcial for all to read: “These are mothers by name only, for they
have no conscience of their maternal condition. How many of them abandon their
children to stupid servants for a life of frivolity or laziness?” For the Rodrı́guez
pez sisters, these observations struck home. In an interview later in life, Rosa
Lo
remembered her father as “a real person,” but her mother as “a peacock” who never
emerged from her boudoir until eleven o’clock in the morning.15
To promote “The Educated Woman,” the members of la Sociedad opened a
small library filled with classic literary texts that would instruct and inspire. “La
Sociedad Gabriela Mistral aims to educate the woman, to train her so that she can
take part in the great game of life. Why should there exist an educational difference
between women and men?”16 To prepare themselves for “the world and the household,” women should have knowledge of proper grammar, literature, and foreign languages, as well as child development and “hygiene” (an umbrella term that included
sex education). On a more abstract level, education would “purify” women and make
them companions, not objects or property, of men.17
As young adult women, they understood the potential impact of their transgres-
Class Acts
7
18 Josefina Saravia E., “>Puede la mujer participar en los nuevos campos del trabajo social sin dejar
de conservar por ello la esperitualidad y attractivos peculiares de su sexo?,” Vida, January 9, 1926.
19 Herrera, “Civilicemonos,” including quote; Casaús Arzú, “Las redes teos
oficas de mujeres en
Guatemala,” 232–233.The influences of Southern Cone feminists seem striking in these writings, especially the work of Uruguayan feminist and health reformer Paulina Luisi. Asunci
on Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1995).
20 For the larger context, see Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (Hanover, N.H., 1991), especially chap. 4, “Feminism and Social Motherhood, 1890–1938.” K. Lynn
Stoner, From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Women’s Movement for Legal Reform, 1898–1940 (Durham, N.C., 1991); Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Greg
Grandin, Deborah T. Levenson, and Elizabeth Oglesby coined the term “caffeinated modernism” in The
Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, and Politics (Durham, N.C., 2011), 107. It is not inconceivable that a
few of the members of la Sociedad had participated as children in the academic competitions associated
with the Minerva festivals of the 1900s. See Catherine Rend
on, “Magical Modernism,” ibid., 162–166.
The term ladino means an individual not of indigenous background or a Hispanicized native.
21 Magda Mabarak, “Por la mujer del pueblo,” Vida, January 2, 1926.
22 Ibid.; “Escuela feminina de artes y oficios empeño de la Sociedad G. Mistral,” El Imparcial, April
12, 1926; Harms, “Imagining a Place for Themselves,” 102. Quotes from Mabarak, “Por la mujer del
pueblo,” and Harms, “Imagining a Place for Themselves,” 102.
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sive writings and responded to criticism that their activities might decrease their
value on the marriage market. In the words of Josefina Saravia, “I firmly believe that
a man will never attain relative happiness . . . unless he is next to a well-educated
woman of very strong moral convictions.” And with confidence, she predicted that
“every special woman, morally and intellectually, will find her corresponding kind of
man.”18 Cloaking their efforts in a rebozo of enlightened motherhood, these young
feminists emphasized the value of education from literature to child development as
essential to creating “noble citizens for the homeland.”19
Fusing maternalism and feminism, Sociedad members claimed and valorized
their place and their obligations as well-educated women. Perhaps with a twist of
irony, daughters of ladino coffee planters, men who ushered in a “caffeinated modernism,” would themselves gravitate toward a tangible imaginary of a benevolent
modern state where properly educated women as citizen-mothers would exercise
considerable moral authority for their children’s welfare and for national progress.20
Such a vision was not new, but it reverberated throughout Latin America.
What role would “proletarian women” play in this bourgeois feminist future? Here
is where Sociedad members made their boldest statements. In addressing the deplorable conditions of the poor, they blamed the state: “It is the Government’s obligation,
the same moral and material obligation that a father has with regard to his sons, to
deal with the progress and culture of its people.”21 Moreover, workers should be paid
a living wage. These were strong claims coming from a very privileged group whose
words dripped with a sense of responsibility to the less fortunate. While urging the
government to provide instruction in nutrition and sanitation, they also called for
greater access to education for proletarian women and expressed a “passionate desire”
to do their part. Recognizing the importance of vocational training, la Sociedad Gabriela Mistral began a small-scale secretarial school that would prepare women “for business employment, the new cutting edge in Guatemala.” Classic books and clerical
work were two avenues for moral uplift, social equality, and national progress.22
Calling for “the destruction of all social prejudices, of all absurd fanaticism,”
pez understood that the fates of rich and poor women were inexRosa Rodrı́guez Lo
tricably related. Blaming “ignorance” for women’s slavery, she launched biting
Vicki L. Ruiz
8
R. Rodrı́guez L
opez, “La mujer culta.”
Rosa Rodrı́guez L
opez, “El problema de la mujer caida,” Vida, February 27, 1926.
25 R. Rodrı́guez L
opez, “La mujer culta.” Though a self-styled modern woman, Rosa Rodrı́guez
L
opez invokes a nineteenth-century cliché with the phrase “romantic race.”
26 Harms, “Imagining a Place for Themselves,” 104–107, chap. 6; Moreno interview, July 27, 1978;
Moreno interview, August 3, 1984; Patricia Harms, e-mail to author, April 5, 2004; Azul, September–
October 1949, as quoted in Harms, “Imagining a Place for Themselves,” 104.
27 R. Rodrı́guez L
opez, “La mujer culta,” including quote; Saravia E., “Puede la mujer”; Harms,
“Imagining a Place for Themselves,” 102–103. The influential intellectual Epaminondas Quintana bluntly
asked, “Now tell me, women, if you have a single reason to be jealous of men. Tell me if your unique
and sublime mission is not that of giving to mankind another Muhammad, another Jesus Christ, a
23
24
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critiques of the double standard and predatory men (“ravenous wolves”).23 In her essay “The Problem of the Fallen Woman,” she notes how “the glitter of jewelry” or
“the wonders of love” could seduce an “ordinary” woman, while “gold also works as
a discreet shield for the prostitution of elite women.” In calling for compassion, Rosa
viewed meaningful employment or “the temple of work” as critical to Guatemala’s
advancement. 24 In a rare display of essentialism, she dismissed “that so-called
practical feminism of the North American woman, which would be inappropriate to
our . . . romantic race.” She believed that Guatemalan women did not yet possess the
education required for suffrage. Yet, in the same breath, she called for “the abolition
of the woman’s ‘inferiority,’” asserting that women were as “worthy and capable” as
men, and they deserved “justice and political and social equality.”25 This tension between the ideal woman and the women they knew runs throughout the writings of
these feminists. As self-anointed leaders, la Sociedad’s young women drew upon
their rare capacious education to exhort, to uplift, and to dream.
La Sociedad Gabriela Mistral existed for at most two years, reaching its zenith of
activism within its first six months. When its charismatic president abruptly left for the
cultural and intellectual lights of Mexico City in 1926, the group began to flounder. As
Guatemala’s first explicitly feminist organization, la Sociedad had brought issues of
women’s rights, economic disparities, and racial prejudice to the pages of the national
newspaper. Through petitions and informal lobbying, members had played a part in
opening up, albeit ever so slightly, educational opportunities for women, with Rosa
herself scheduled to enter the university before her departure. More importantly,
some members of la Sociedad, including Rosa’s sister Graciela, would emerge after
the 1944 revolution to expand on what they had started as young adults. Indeed, two
years later, women in Guatemala gained the right to vote. In a 1949 interview, Graciela
reflected on the decline of la Sociedad Gabriela Mistral, explaining that after the initial
burst of enthusiasm, many of its young members lost interest and “the society simply
quietly faded away.”26 There are several layers of meaning one can read into that simple statement. First, as adolescents, they grew impatient for results, perhaps in their
privilege not recognizing that reform rarely occurs overnight. Also, they did not anticipate the level of criticism they would receive from educated elite men, who they had
assumed would be their allies. It was one thing for the men of “la generacion de 1920”
to encourage women to become more well read, but quite another to support their
budding aspirations of social and political equality. Indeed, these feminists, like their
counterparts in other parts of Latin America, went out of their way to assure their
readers that they were not (in Rosa’s words) “smug women of letters” or “mannish
suffragists.”27 Perhaps, too, their resolve buckled under familial or political pressures
Class Acts
9
Mahatma Gandhi . . . or an Einstein.” Epaminondas Quintana, “Trascendenica de la puericultura en la
educacion de la mujer guatemalteca,” El Imparcial, January 16, 1926.
28 Ruiz, “Of Poetics and Politics,” 30; letter from unknown sender to Rosa Rodrı́guez L
opez, October 23, 1927 (in author’s possession); Marco Augusto Recinos, “El vendedor de cocuyos,” Almamérica,
n.d. (in author’s possession); “Cumpleaños” (unidentified news clipping, ca. August 30, 1928).
29 Moreno interview, August 3, 1984; Moreno, interview, August 5, 1976; and interview with Luisa
Moreno, August 12–13, 1977, conducted by Albert Camarillo. This concept of conjugating identities derives from interviews with Luisa Moreno and her daughter Mytyl Glomboske, as well as my reading of
the scholarship of Rebecca Lester, Michael Kearney, Chela Sandoval, Stuart Hall, Paula Moya, and Ram
on Gutiérrez. I also thank my colleagues in the University of California Humanities Research Institute
“Reshaping the Americas” Residency Group (Spring 2002). Moreno’s transformation occurred in an environment that was marked by an element of danger. The Ku Klux Klan in Tampa had murdered a labor
sympathizer shortly before she arrived. And in “On the Road,” one of her few surviving poems in English, Moreno addressed the exploitation of African American workers in the American South. (Unpublished poem in author’s possession.) To close friends she remained “Rosa,” and by identifying myself as
a friend of Rosa’s (not Luisa’s), I created an almost instant rapport with her colleagues in the labor
movement whom I interviewed.
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given their pronouncements on poverty and government culpability. Catholic priests
no doubt looked askance at the not so lightly veiled anticlerical observations that
cropped up in their published essays. In addition, the organization did not appear to
replenish its membership, relying solely on a tight cadre of friends. Nevertheless, la
Sociedad Gabriela Mistral laid the foundation for future work.
pez leave, especially when her goal of a college eduWhy did Rosa Rodrı́guez Lo
cation in Guatemala was within her grasp? Despite her youthful activism, she understood her family’s place in Guatemalan society; its cultural and class expectations
weighed heavily on her own future. When one of her siblings married, her father had
the fountain in the family compound filled with expensive Veuve Clicquot champagne. For Rosa, there was no retreat, no returning to the life she had so passionately critiqued. But her departure was more than an act of rebellion; she sought to
pursue her gifts as an intellectual and poet in Mexico City. Motivation aside, traveling unchaperoned was a radical act that would mark her as a prodigal daughter for
the remainder of her life. One admirer considered her a bright light in women’s literature both in her home country and throughout Latin America, even comparing her
pez treasured her good rewith Gabriela Mistral. Like most writers, Rodrı́guez Lo
views, and throughout her many journeys, she kept a small bundle of news clippings
and correspondence. On the occasion of her twenty-first birthday, one newspaper article made reference to her beauty, poetry, and vanguard feminism.28
pez would
In the course of her transnational feminist journey, Rosa Rodrı́guez Lo
invent and then reinvent herself. A decade after leaving Guatemala, she would take
Luisa Moreno as her professional name as she fashioned a new persona. In doing so,
she conjugated her identity. Conjugating one’s identity entails a self-reflexive and
purposeful invention or inflection of one’s sense of self, taking into account such constructions as race, class, culture, language, and gender. Simply put, Rosa made strategic choices regarding her class and ethnic identification in order to facilitate her life’s
work as a trade union and civil rights advocate. With her light skin, education, and
flawless English, she could have “passed” as a white woman of ambiguous heritage.
Instead, she took a very risky job as a trade union organizer working with African
pez
Americans and Latinos in the anti-union Jim Crow South.29 Rosa Rodrı́guez Lo
was a woman of privilege; Luisa Moreno was a woman of the people.
10
Vicki L. Ruiz
30 Lisa S
anchez Gonzalez, “Luisa Capetillo: An Anarcho-Feminist Pionera in the Mainland Puerto
Rican Narrative/Political Tradition,” in Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and Chuck Tatum, eds., Recovering the
U. S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. II (Houston, Tex., 1996), 148–167.
31 Capetillo, Mi opini
on sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer, 25.
32 Ibid., 39.
33 Hewitt, “Luisa Capetillo,” 122.
34 Capetillo, Mi opini
on sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer, 8, quote from 124.
35 Ibid.,11.
36 Ibid., 17.
37 Ibid., 28. Capetillo’s sentiments about same-sex love mirrored such prejudice across Latin
America.
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WHILE MORENO’S WORK AS a labor leader echoed the legacy of Luisa Capetillo, Capetillo’s “anarcho-feminism,” rooted in the politics of the body, could not be replicated.30 For Capetillo, women’s autonomous control over their bodies was essential
for liberation. In Mi opini
on she argued that “women get married only to follow the
custom. And men do so to have a helper or a slave.”31 Quoting French feminist
Madeleine Vernet, she wrote: “The slave can never love the master.”32 In her
utopian view, men and women would come together as virgins and establish loving,
committed relationships without the sanction of church or state. Perhaps her parents’
example influenced her thinking, which was also in line with her anarchism. Nancy
Hewitt offers another explanation: that Capetillo’s disappointment with Manuel
Ledesma “fueled her critique of traditional . . . marriage, motherhood, and family.”33
Indeed, in a letter written to Ledesma a decade later, she reveals her “yearning” for
him, which she said “destroyed my illusions, and cruelly mortified me, beset by desire
to have . . . the one who made life bloom in me, sprouting into two souls, product of
my spontaneous love without fetters.” Speaking from her own experiences, Capetillo
claimed that women were ultimately responsible for their own happiness.34
By turns feminist manifesto and advice manual, Mi opini
on has a cadence reminiscent of nineteenth-century prescriptive literature, in which scenarios are presented
and guidelines for behavior offered—gendered parables, so to speak. If a woman has
a neglectful spouse, for example, and “in her solitude” she finds comfort in the arms
of another man, she should not be blamed or punished for “following her natural impulses.”35 Though Capetillo did not always practice what she preached, she warned
women about getting involved with a man “who is in a committed relationship, without demanding that he . . . give up his wife or lover.” With a dash of melodrama, she
continued, “if this wife . . . does not want to leave him, she will have to admit . . . that
her husband has another woman, because she cannot force him to love her if she has
not had the charm or persuasiveness to keep him herself.”36 This latter statement
seems rather uncharitable and not very feminist, even bordering on conventionality.
It also seems a bit self-serving, given her own relationship with a married lover.
Indeed, Capetillo’s pronouncements on free love did not extend to same-sex relationships, which she deemed “criminal, odious, and shameful against nature.”37 These
blind spots in her writings notwithstanding, we cannot discount her courageous
stands against women’s exploitation across all facets of their lives.
Demonstrating a level of pragmatism, Capetillo also endorsed reforms familiar to
feminists across the hemisphere, including women’s suffrage, protective legislation,
and temperance. She broke with other anarchists, such as Emma Goldman, in her
support of suffrage. Her experiences as a labor leader seem to have steeled her con-
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11
Long before the “grapes of wrath” had ripened in California’s vineyards, a people lived on
highways, under trees or tents, in shacks or railroad sections, picking crops—cotton, fruits,
vegetables—cultivating sugar beets, building railroads and dams, making a barren land
fertile for new crops and greater riches . . . These people are not aliens. They have contributed their endurance, sacrifices, youth, and labor to the Southwest. Indirectly, they have
paid more taxes than all the stockholders of California’s industrialized agriculture, the
sugar beet companies and the large cotton interests that operate or have operated with
the labor of Mexican workers.40
Shades of Luisa Capetillo, who thirty years before had penned the following lines:
Don’t beg, you destitute workers, you victims of . . . exploitation; exploited by political parties, by religions, by commerce, you are the eternal mine, from which the bourgeoisie and
the religions extract enormous treasures.41
Fiercely anticlerical, Luisa Capetillo imagined a world where “[c]hurches can become schools and libraries. And the worthy images in them will be consigned to museums.” Without class distinctions, society would reject nationalism and the state
(“the absurd and idolatrous respect shown to governments”). She continued: “The
religious ideal to be established in the schools will be brotherhood as supreme law,
38 Hewitt, “Luisa Capetillo,” 126; Capetillo, Mi opini
on sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la
mujer, 15.
39 Ibid., 8–9, 15.
40 Luisa Moreno, “Caravans of Sorrow: Noncitizen Americans of the Southwest,” in David G. Gutiérrez, ed., Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigration in the United States (Wilmington, Del., 1996),
119–123, quotes from 120, 122.
41 Capetillo, Mi opini
on sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer, 87.
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viction that women would join their compañeros as workers and vote in the interests
of their class, not their gender. Like most feminists of her day, she put her faith in an
“enlightened,” educated motherhood as the foundation for social progress. In addition to hygiene, women should have a thorough knowledge of “Physiology, Geology,
Geography, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Engineering, Agriculture, Geometry,
History, Music, and Painting.”38 Yet Capetillo emphasized that someone could “be
learned but not educated.” In her words, a proper education extended to “cultivating
patience, tolerance, [and] a sweet disposition.” In seeking feminine perfection, she
even offered beauty advice: “Women must strive by all natural methods to become
more beautiful, but it must be a true beauty . . . achieved by a healthy diet, without
eating meat or drinking alcoholic beverages, by practicing gymnastics, and taking
walks in the open air.” Like the young feminists of la Sociedad Gabriela Mistral,
Capetillo rebuked women who indulged in conspicuous consumption, describing one
apocryphal figure as “so loaded with bracelets and lace that she looks like a bazaar.”39
Close readings of selected passages in Mi opini
on, however, should not overshadow Capetillo’s commitment to proletarian revolution based on anarchist principles. As a grassroots activist, she encouraged working-class men to accept women
into their ranks as full partners in the struggle against exploitation. Both Luisa Capetillo and later Luisa Moreno believed in the dignity of the working poor, who by their
labor enriched the wealthy. In her only surviving speech, “Caravans of Sorrow”
(1940), Moreno spoke passionately about the rights of Mexican immigrant workers:
Vicki L. Ruiz
12
WITH ALL OF THEIR TENSIONS, the writings of Luisa Moreno and Luisa Capetillo reveal
a thirst for women’s equality. Well-educated, las dos Luisas placed their faith in an
Ibid., 98, 119.
Ibid.,18.
44 Eileen J. Su
arez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico,
1870–1920 (Durham, N.C., 2000), 164–165, quotes from 165.
45 Hewitt, “Luisa Capetillo,” 133; Félix Matos Rodrı́guez, “Introduction,” in Capetillo, Mi opini
on
sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer, vii–li, here xxii, xliv; Matos Rodrı́guez, “Capetillo,
Luisa,” in Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sanchez Korrol, eds., Latinas in the United States: A Historical
Encyclopedia (Bloomington, Ind., 2006), 119; Voces de Liberaci
on (Buenos Aires, 1921).
42
43
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regardless of national boundaries or divisions of race, color, or language.”42 Feminism would play a vital role in such a revolution, and Capetillo set the stage not just
on the shop floor or at home, but within the individual: “The woman who feels
wounded in her rights, liberties, and womanhood has to recompose and reclaim herself, change her situation, no matter how high the cost.”43
Scholars have disagreed on the reception of Capetillo and her writings during her
lifetime. Eileen Suarez Findlay characterizes her as a lone wolf who routinely alienated multiple constituencies: working-class women, middle-class feminists, and her
male union colleagues: “Despite her call for women’s alliances, judgment seems to
have come more easily to Luisa Capetillo than did empathy.” Calling women idiots,
slaves, or just plain stupid because they remained in unhappy marriages out of economic necessity and social convention certainly did not further her cause. Suarez
Findlay asserts that Capetillo “fought an extremely steep uphill battle” in her daring
feminist campaign. She astutely points out the fears of proletarian women, who believed that without marriage, men would feel fewer obligations toward their children. 44 Two further points accounted for the skepticism Capetillo encountered
among the women she organized. First, most working women wanted a measure of
respectability, to be viewed as gente decente (decent people), and raising children
alone would taint such standing. Second, the power of religion in influencing Latina
worldviews cannot be underplayed given the vital role that Catholicism played in
women’s daily lives, from home altars to church clubs.
Cavils aside, Luisa Capetillo had exceptional gifts as a labor leader, and as scholars Félix Matos Rodrı́guez, Nancy Hewitt, and Ivette Rivera-Giusti emphasize, she
inspired a generation of Latina feminist union organizers, with perhaps more than
twenty women having followed in her footsteps. According to Hewitt, Capetillo
proved “the lynchpin in a vast network of Latina anarchist and socialist feminists
who sought to advance the interests of workers and women internationally.” Matos
Rodrı́guez places her legacy on a philosophical level: “Mi opini
on shows that Capetillo as an author was convinced of the power of humanistic thought—in her case
based on anarchism and feminism—as an effective tool to bring about change in the
world.” Capetillo’s impact as a labor organizer and writer reached beyond Latino
communities in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and the eastern United States. A year
before her death, one of her essays appeared alongside those of more familiar radicals Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg in a feminist collection from Argentina,
Voces de Liberaci
on.45
Class Acts
13
Moreno interview, August 12–13, 1977; Moreno interview, August 3, 1984.
Schechter, Exploring the Decolonial Imaginary, 4.
48 Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary, 5–7; Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, 12–17; “The Case
of Luisa Moreno Bemis,” Labor Committee for Luisa Moreno Bemis pamphlet (in author’s possession);
Steve Murdoch, “A Question of Deportation,” Our Times, September 9, 1949, Robert W. Kenny Papers,
box 7, file 53, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles, Calif. Steve
Murdoch was a San Francisco–based labor journalist who wrote for local labor periodicals like Our
Times.
46
47
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enlightened womanhood for either national progress or proletarian revolution. In
their writings, they valorized motherhood, but they themselves did not practice what
they preached. By the time she published Mi opini
on, Capetillo had lived apart from
pez and her peers waxed
her older children for ten years, while Rosa Rodrı́guez Lo
poetically (and presumptuously) about maternal duties purely in the abstract, given
their own positionality as sheltered adolescents. As an organizer who was always on
the move, Moreno was an absentee parent throughout most of her daughter’s childhood. Exile, whether forced or self-imposed, figured prominently in the two women’s
life scripts. While Capetillo integrated her writings within her world as an organizer,
Moreno compartmentalized her life, believing that her poetry and feminist essays belonged to her adolescent past. As she fostered women’s rank-and-file leadership and
incorporated their issues at the bargaining table, she practiced a labor citizen model,
a feminism grounded in their experiences rather than hers. Perhaps she understood
pez, she had borne much of the responsibility
that as the youthful Rosa Rodrı́guez Lo
for the demise of la Sociedad Gabriela Mistral, but as Luisa Moreno, she no longer
placed herself front and center, preferring a team approach that downplayed her
own contributions. In her words, “One person can’t do anything; it’s only with others
that things are accomplished.”46
Luisa Capetillo certainly fits within a decolonial imaginary as defined by such
scholars as Emma Pérez, Alicia Camacho Schmidt, and Patricia Schechter. Indeed,
the fiercely anticolonialist Capetillo challenged “the dominant ordering schemas of
modern society, especially the binaries of colonizer/subaltern and citizen/alien,”
writes Schechter, who further elaborates that “the decolonial can name resistance to
racialized categories of state and empire.”47 The young women of la Sociedad Gabriela Mistral fall outside of this decolonial paradigm, but within the constraints of
1920s Guatemala, their pronouncements were quite radical. In interviews given later
in life, Luisa Moreno underscored her feminist identity as a leader in la Sociedad,
but claimed that she did not consider herself “political” during her youth in the capital cities of Guatemala and Mexico. In the United States, her advocacy for the rights
of workers, especially immigrants, certainly challenged the state, a fact that was not
lost on the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which began tracking her movements in the late 1930s because of her work as a labor leader, a civil rights activist,
and for a time a member of the Communist Party. In preparing for her deportation
hearings, which resulted in her departure from the United States in 1950, Moreno
clearly articulated her own legacy: “They can talk about deporting me . . . but they
can never deport the people that I’ve worked with and with whom things were accomplished for the benefit of hundreds of thousands of workers—things that can
never be destroyed.”48
Though they shared a common vision of labor empowerment and gender equal-
14
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FIGURE 1: Luisa Capetillo in man’s attire, ca. 1919.
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15
ity, Capetillo and Moreno embodied divergent styles of self-representation. Capetillo, whether as an act of camouflage or as a deliberate political statement, at times
wore men’s clothing. Her bold pronouncements were thus not limited to her words
and deeds, but also found expression in her public appearance. In contrast, Moreno
could never quite escape her upbringing, as reflected by the terms cannery workers
used in referring to her (“a real lady,” “a classy dame”), which suggest a cosmopolitan bearing. A romantic woodcut depicts Moreno in action—carrying union leaflets
into the fields, she sports a fashionable, immaculately coifed hairstyle, a business
dress, and kitten heels. More than a selfless labor heroine, Luisa Moreno was above
all an elegant radical.49
In No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women, Estelle
Freedman breaks through the familiar episodic approach to women’s activism, one
defined and confined by region or temporal period, by her deliberate global framing
of issues and her construction of thematic cross-cutting conversations. Conceptualizing feminism as circuits of knowledge resulting in generative connections as well as
fissures opens up the field in exciting, creative ways. “Historically, Latin American
feminists have also had ties with other cultures that served as inspirational beacons,”
explained the distinguished historian Asunci
on Lavrin. “Latin American feminists
developed a strong vocation for internationalism, not only as an intellectual orientation, but as a validation of their aspirations for a political and juridical personality.”50
Though they worked outside of established Pan-American and pan-Latin American
49 Carmen Bernal Escobar, interview by author, June 15, 1986; Lucio Bernabé, interview by Patricia
Zavella and the author, August 29, 1980.
50 Asunci
on Lavrin, “International Feminisms: Latin American Alternatives,” Gender and History 10,
no. 3 (1998): 519–534, quote from 520.
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FIGURE 2: A woodcut illustration from “The Case of Luisa Moreno Bemis.” Labor Committee for Luisa Moreno
Bemis pamphlet (in author’s possession).
Vicki L. Ruiz
16
51 Estelle B. Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (New
York, 2002); DuBois, There Are No Waves; Merino, “Martha Vergara, Popular-Front Pan-American
Feminism and the Transnational Struggle for Working Women’s Rights in the 1930s.”
52 Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West,
1874–1939 (New York, 1990), xxiii; R. Rodrı́guez L
opez, “La necesidad del feminismo en el orientaciones para la mujer guatemalteca.”
Vicki L. Ruiz served as President of the American Historical Association in 2015.
She is Distinguished Professor of History and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She earned her Ph.D. in History from Stanford University in 1982. She is the author of Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican
Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950
(University of New Mexico Press, 1987) and From Out of the Shadows: Mexican
Women in Women in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1998;
10th anniversary ed., 2008), and co-author of Created Equal: A History of the
United States (Longman/Pearson, 2003; 2nd ed. 2005, 3rd ed. 2008, 4th ed. 2013,
and 5th ed. forthcoming). She and Virginia Sanchez Korrol co-edited the threevolume Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia (Indiana University
Press, 2006). On September 10, 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Ruiz
the National Humanities Medal.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL R EVIEW
FEBRUARY 2016
Downloaded from http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ at Harvard Library on March 8, 2016
feminist networks, these two radical intellectuals were influenced, nonetheless, by
these international circuits, especially by the feminist writings and deeds emanating
from (or filtered through) the Américas. They framed their advocacy in their own circumstances and in their hopes. Luisa Capetillo and Luisa Moreno are powerful examples of the many Latina transnational feminists who have contributed to a more
expansive view of gender equality on a global stage.51
Looking to the past to inform our present and future—what the late Peggy Pascoe referred to as the conversational nature of history—is a time-honored feminist
tradition. Despite belonging to the largest racial/ethnic group in the United States
with a history dating back to the 1500s, Latina narratives barely appear in the historiographical register. Over the past thirty years, I have felt privileged to belong to an
ever-growing number of scholars involved in this reclamation and reinterpretation of
the past. Pushing beyond the nation-state, trans-hemispheric perspectives offer a fulpez
ler recounting of Latina feminist traditions. In the words of Rosa Rodrı́guez Lo
(aka Luisa Moreno), “[I]f we kept searching, we could find an extensive list of audacious and determined feminists . . . We could see them planting seeds on stones, the
same seeds that have today flourished and will tomorrow give the world the sweetness of its perfect fruit.”52
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IPRINTI
(select citation style below)
Feminist Writings from Ancient Times to the Modern World: A Global
Sourcebook and History
By: Tiffany K. Wayne, Editor
131. Mi Opinion (1911)
Dara Nix-Stevenson
Luisa Capetillo
Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Luisa Capetillo (1879-1922) was a leader in the political and labor
struggles of the working class. In 1898 at the age of 19, she took Manuel Ledesma as her lover
and conceived a daughter,
Manuela; in 1900, their son Gregorio was born; and in 1911, Capetillo
gave birth to a third child, Luis. Capetillo and Ledesma never married and separated
years. Capetillo's
after three
mother cared for her children while Luisa worked in the textile and tobacco
industries to support the family.
In 1905, while working as a reader at a tobacco factory (reading
books and newspapers to cigar rollers and other workers),
Capetillo first encountered
organizing
efforts in La Federacion de Torcedores de Tabaco (Federation
Capetillo's
life as a mother,
inform the sentiment
lover, factory worker, union organizer,
behind the document,
union
of Tobacco Rollers).
and community
organizer
Mi Opinion, which was published in its first edition in
1911. She died in 1922 after a bout with tuberculosis,
438
Document
Nowadays, all this talk about the "silence and seclusion of woman"
the European woman aspires to public office, to government,
losing her feminine
personality,
nor her motherly
is unacceptable
to administering
and wifely duties.
It is has been said countless times, that women in the public sphere and workplace
ground, jeopardizing
because today
towns, without
would lose
their home, their family and their children!
But those who think in this way forget that the lady of high and well-off
visits friends, museums and theaters,
and dressmakers
position goes to the stores,
and the home is left alone, her children
with the servants or their nannies only. The mothers see their children for only a moment,
they
give them a kiss, and go out again, and this is their daily routine.
Why should one think that home life will be in jeopardy
Is home life not jeopardized
doesn't want to accompany
her husband to the theater,
And isn't the family jeopardized
the home is not jeopardized
development
by women working?
when a woman does not want to breast feed her child, or when she
because she went to church to confess?
when she occupies her day in church, social visits, and strolls? But
when the woman contributes
her talent and activities
to the
of nations.
And the working class woman who leaves her children at home in order to tend to those of the
rich, and who works in factories
The working-class
and workshops,
doesn't she jeopardize
her home?
home, the peasant and his wife, who abandons her home and has no one to
leave behind to care for the children,
and who returns home to find her child burned in an accident,
this home is not in jeopardy?
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So they say it endangers
the household!
It endangers
for men! But this is the home of the wealthy,
But what about the poor home, the working
the family!
class family,
mistaken
It is the highborn
lady:
does it not harm itself? The unhappy
servant or peasant woman who rents herself out to breastfeed
must abandon her own children,
Women are confused,
the family of the aristocrat!
the son of the wealthy
and who
doesn't she suffer? Doesn't she have natural feelings? The poor
woman who must push a cart in the mines, mixed in with male workers,
who goes and comes back
alone, does not become a man. And neither do the women who go off to work the land. No way!
These people are made of bronze, and are tempered
road worker,
by adversity!
The poor wife of a sugar mill or
who only makes 50 or 60 cents a day and who does not make enough to look after
four or six children
whom she has to dress and cannot, so to help out she washes others' clothes
and does odd jobs, and thus leaves her children
unattended,
doesn't she bring harm on herseIP ...
A woman whose husband owns a sugar mill or hacienda and calls herself a Spiritist
should not seek to load herself down with jewelry,
nor make useless purchases.
or Christian
She should visit
the families of her peons, who produce the wealth she and her husband possess and who continue
increasing
it, and observe
beds, and other utensils.
how they live, if they lack items that are useful or necessary,
like chairs,
And she should notice if their roof doesn't leak, and if the inhabitants
live in the house in sanitary
conditions,
that it is sufficiently
can
clean so that she would want to live
there herself.
And if you find opposition
from your husband,
obstacle to your great and just aspirations,
you will see the symbol of ignorance,
Dh woman!
the symbols
Equality, and Fraternity,
symbols
and becomes an
trying to hold on to its power.
You will set a great and dignified
unjust and tyrannical,
if he is cruel and egotistical
do not blame him and do not fear him; because in him,
example
of ignorance,
by breaking
traditional
in order to establish
customs,
which are
the realm of Freedom,
of truth and justice!
438
439
I cannot explain why a man always feels he has rights over a woman.
regardless
Although
he has tasted and enjoyed
thinks it perfectly
all types of pleasures and knows of all types of vices, he
by social formulas.
because of our supposed weaknesses
We women have to change this system,
Luisa. "Mi Opinion"
translated
Copyright
these customs.
No woman should
and if men do not want to give up these
upon us the same liberties.
(1911). In A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks
derechos y deberes de la mujer, edited by Felix V. Matos
by Alan West-Duran.
Reprinted with permission
Rather, this is what we women have tolerated,
we have to transform
practices, they will have to agree in bestowing
Out: Mi opinion sobre las libertades,
and honest.
that we have always been accused of.
accept a man who is not up to her moral stature;
Source: Capetillo,
a young man,
life experience.
natural to form a bond with a young woman who is temperate
This is what has been allowed
Rodriguez;
For example,
of age, always aspires to form a bond with a young virgin without
Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 2004, 19-23, 28.
from the publisher
C¢) Arte Publico Press - University
of A Nation of Women by Felix V. Matos Rodriguez.
of Houston.
Analysis
Mi Opini6n is autoethnographic,
birth to her three children
addresses the "silence
based on essays written
and was employed
and seclusion of women."
factory worker and union organizer,
working-class
and affluent
women.
class women who are demoralized
she argues that affluent
by Capetillo
as a factory worker.
during the years she gave
Her opening statement
In her subsequent
arguments!
Capetillo is careful to emphasize
as a working-class
the distinction
between
In Mi Opinion, Capetillo writes from the experience
of working-
by their husbands and lovers for taking jobs outside the home;
women do not face similar demoralization
because they are spared from
taking jobs outside the home to support their families or they have the funds to hire domestic
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workers to care for their children,
which raises problematic
think that home life will be in jeopardy
questions,
such as, "Why should one
by women working?"
Critical Response
Utilizing her voice and the pen, Capetillo condemned the exploitation
parties, religious institutions,
philosophical
tutor and domestic,
a tradesman.
and capitalism.
ideology of her mother,
and her father,
of workers by political
Capetillo's activism evolved from the shared the
Luisa Margarita Peron, a French immigrant
who worked as a
Luis Capetillo Echevarria, a Spanish immigrant
who worked as
Raised as an only child, Capetillo's parents exposed her to a more liberal education
than most young women could receive at the time and encouraged
issues, ideologies, and philosophies.
Ultimately,
open and free debate on many
Capetillo adopted an anarchist
was those ideals that she lived by. She was baptized a Catholic, but rejected
she was not an atheist.
Unlike other anarchists,
Capetillo considered
philosophy,
religion.
and it
However,
herself a good Christian,
although she did not agree with the rigid dogmas and rituals of
439
440
the church. She insisted instead that true Christianity
oppression and exploitation.
was to be found in the eradication
To be a Christian meant that one believed in justice
of
and equality.
Impact and Legacy
Luisa Capetillo was the first Puerto Rican woman to commit to writing
her feminist
ideas and
theories on the rights of women when she published Mi opinion sobre las libertades,
deberes de la mujer como cornpehere
of Women").
Although
herself a feminist,
("My Opinion about the Liberties,
history considers her the first Puerto Rican suffragist,
Capetillo did not join feminist organizations
her efforts to the labor movement,
part of her unionizing
that equitable
opportunities
and she considered
of the day. Instead,
she dedicated
believing that the union was the best vehicle for poor working
women to obtain justice and equality.
pants in public. Moreover,
derechos y
Rights and Responsibilities
In a challenge to the social mores of the time, she wore
she advocated for free and liberal education for all men and women. As
activities,
Capetillo noted that a living wage was a worker's
pay would lead to happier families,
less domestic violence,
right and insisted
and more educational
for children. The focal point of her advocacy was the plight of the female worker.
Capetillo was successful in her organizing
that issues of the private world (family,
with those of the public world (politics,
because she used an intersectional
single motherhood,
strategy,
stressing
and women's status) are intertwined
wages, and education).
Her message was simple-workers
must unite under one banner to defend their rights to dignity and equality.
Suggested Reading
Acosta-Belen, Edna. The Puerto Rican Woman: Perspectives on Culture, History, and Society. New
York: Praeger, 1986.
Roy-Fequire,
Magali. "Contested
Life ill the Early Twentieth
West-Duran,
Territory:
Century."
Puerto Rican Women, Creole identity,
Callaloo 17, no. 3 (Summer
Alan. "Luisa Capetillo in Translation."
and Intellectual
1994): 916-34.
Centro Jouma/19,
no. 2 (2007):
140-49.
APA
Nix-Stevenson, D. , L. Capetillo (2011). 131. Mi Opinion (1911). In T. K. Wayne (Ed.), Feminist
Writings from Ancient Times to the Modem World: A Global Sourcebook and History. Santa
Barbara, CA: Greenwood. Retrieved from http://ebooks.abc-clio.com/reader.aspx?
isbn =9780313345814&id = B4966C-5118
Select Citation Style: MLA
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Maria W. Stewart was an African American domestic servant who became a teacher, journalist,
lecturer, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist. The first known American woman to speak to
a mixed audience of men and women, whites and black, she was also the first African-American
woman to make public lectures, as well as to lecture about women’s rights and make a public
anti-slavery speech. The Liberator published two pamphlets by Stewart: Religion and the Pure
Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build (which advocated abolition
and black autonomy) in 1831, and another of religious meditations, Meditations from the Pen of
Mrs. Maria Stewart (1832). In February 1833, she addressed Boston’s African Masonic Lodge,
which soon ended her brief lecturing career. Her claim that black men lacked "ambition and
requisite courage" caused an uproar among the audience, and Stewart decided to retire from
giving lectures. Seven months later, she gave a farewell address at a schoolroom in the African
Meeting House ("Paul's Church"). After this, Stewart moved to New York City, then to
Baltimore, and finally Washington, DC, where she worked as a schoolteacher, and then head
matron at Freedmen’s Hospital, where she ultimately died.
Excerpt from Maria W. Stewart, Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality (1831)
Shall it any longer be said of the daughters of Africa, they have no ambition, they have no
force? By no means. Let every female heart become united, and let us raise a fund ourselves; and
at the end of the one year and a half, we might be able to lay the corner-stone for the building of
a High School, that the higher branches of knowledge might be enjoyed by us; and God would
raise us up, and enough to aid us in our laudable designs. Let each one strive to excel in good
housewifery, knowing that prudence and economy are the road to wealth. Let us not say, we
know this, or we know that, and practise nothing; but let us practise what we do know.
How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath
a load of iron pots and kettles? Until union, knowledge and love begin to flow among us. How
long shall a mean set of men flatter us with their smiles, and enrich themselves with our hard
earnings; their wives' finger's sparkling with rings, and they themselves laughing at our folly?
Until we begin to promote and patronize each other. Shall we be a by-word among the nations
any longer? Shall they laugh us to scorn forever? Do you ask, what can we do? Unite and build a
store of your own, if you cannot procure a license. Fill one side with dry goods, and other with
groceries.
We have never had an opportunity of displaying our talents; therefore the world thinks we know
nothing. And we have been possessed of by far too mean and cowardly a disposition, though I
highly disapprove of an insolent or impertinent one. Do you ask the disposition I would have you
possess? Possess the spirit of independence. The Americans do, and why should not you?
1
Possess the spirit of men, bold and enterprising, fearless and undaunted. Sue for your rights and
privileges. Know the reason that you can attain them. Weary them with your importunities. You
can but die, if you make the attempt; and we shall certainly die if you do not. The Americans
have practiced nothing but head-work these 200 years, and we have done their drudgery. And is
it not high time for us to imitate their examples, and practisehead-work too, and keep what we
have got, and get what we can? We need never to think that any body is going to feel interested
for us, if we do not feel interested for ourselves. That day we, as a people, hearken unto the voice
of the Lord our God, and walk in his ways and ordinances, and become distinguished for our
ease, elegance and grace, combined with other virtues, that day the Lord will raise us up, and
enough to aid ago befriend us, and we shall begin to flourish.
Did every gentleman in America realized, as one, that they had got to become bondmen, and
their wives, their sons, and their daughters, servants forever, to Great Britain, their very joints
would become loosened, and tremblingly would smite against another; their countenance would
be filled with horror, every nerve and muscle would be forced into action, their souls would
recoil at the very thought, their hearts would die within them, and death would be far more
preferable. Then why have not Africa’s sons a right to feel the same? Are not their wives, their
sons, and their daughters, as dear to them as those of the white man? Certainly, God has not
deprived them of the divine influences of his Holy Spirit, which is the greatest of all blessings, if
they ask him. Then why should man any longer deprive his fellow-man of equal rights and
privileges? Oh, America, America, foul and indelible is thy stain! Dark and dismal is the cloud
that hangs over thee, for they cruel wrongs and injuries to the fallen sons of Africa. The blood of
her murdered ones cries to heaven for vengeances against thee. Thou art almost become drunken
with the blood of her slain; thou hast enriched thyself through her toils and labors; and now thou
refuseth to make even a small return. And thou has caused the daughters of Africa to commit
whordomes and fornications; but upon thee be their curse.
O, ye great and mighty men of America, you might and powerful ones, many of you will call for
the rocks and mountains to fall upon you, and to hide you from the wrath of the Lamb, and from
him that sitteth upon the throne; whilst many of the sable-skinned Africans you now despise, will
shine in the kingdom of heaven as the stars forever and ever. Charity begins at home, and those
that provide not for their own, are worse than infidels. We know that you are raising
contributions to aid the gallant Poles; we know that you have befriended Greece and Ireland; and
you have rejoiced with France, for her heroic deeds of valor. You have acknowledged all the
nations of the earth, except Hayti; and you may publish, as far as the East is from the West, that
you have two millions of negroes, who aspire no higher than to bow at your feet, and to court
your smiles. You may kill, tyrannize, and oppress as much as you choose, until our cry shall
come up before the throne of God; for I am firmly persuaded, that he will not suffer you to quell
the proud, fearless and undaunted sprits of the African forever; for in his own time, he is able to
plead our cause against you, and to pour out upon you the ten plagues of Egypt. We will not
come out against you with swards and staves, as against a thief; but we will tell you that our
souls are fired. We will tell you that too much of your blood flows in our veins, and too much of
your color in our skins, for us not to possess your spirits. We will tell you that it is our gold that
clothes you in fine linen and purple, and causes you to fare sumptuously every day; and it is the
blood of our fathers, and the tears of our brethren that have enriched your souls. AND WE
CLAIM OUR RIGHTS. We will tell you, that we are not afraid of them that kill the body and
2
after that can do no more; but we will tell you whom we do fear. We fear Him who is able, after
he hath killed, to destroy both souls and body in hell forever. Then, my brethren, sheath your
swords, and calm your angry passions. Stand still, and know that the Lord is God. Vengeance is
his, and he will repay. It is a long lane that has no turn. America has risen to her meridian. When
you begin to thrive, she will begin to fall. . .
3
Margaret Sanger, "Notes on Address before the Woman Rebel Trial," [Jan] 1916.
Autograph Draft Speech. Source: Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress ,
Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm, Library of Congress, L130:0342 .
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=
143701.xml
A handwritten note by Sanger reads: "Notes on address when contemplating trial re
Woman Rebel 1916." At the top of the 4th page, Sanger wrote "buck up." Portions of
this text were used again in the stump speech she gave on her 1916 national tour. For
an example see Condemnation is Misunderstanding Apr.-July, 1916.
HISTORY OF EDUCATION.
It would ↑might↓ be surprising to me that in the year 1916 a woman who is a trained
nurse and a mother, must be brought into this Court as a criminal and plead with you for
her liberty, ↑because she↓ advances a subject of the greatest importance to
womankind. Were I not acquainted with the long struggle education has had against the
powers of government and the tyranny of Authority. As we look back to the past we find
from the beginning of time governments persistently sought to stifle all new ideas as
well as to suppress all attempts of their expression. We look back with horror at the
persecution, champions of new ideas have endured at the hands of authority. Only thirty
years ago Annie Besant was prosecuted in England for vindicating ideas of liberty and
for publishing literature which was then deemed obscene. The results of her educative
work were to give the English people ↑and the English Press↓ the utmost liberty for the
free discussion of subjects which the Post Office authorities in this country deem to be
↑obscene↓ " non-mailable matter." To what extent the right of the press is ↑now↓
recognized in England may be seen by the following extracts from the summing up
of immigrants ↑idealists↓ caused a change in conditions here and a second battle took
place for the freedom of religious expression and now to-day with our rapidly increasing
commercial lives, with women out in the industrial field, standing side by side with their
brothers in the world's work, a new demand has come forth for the freedom of moral
discussion.
The three events are epoch-making in the history of the moral progress of every country
and you are indeed privileged men that you have the opportunity to be instrumental in
saying that ↑whether↓ the United States of America shall go on the map beside other
civiliszd nations or whether it shall still lag behind in all moral issues as it has
continuously done for the past fifty years.
WOMAN AND MORALITY.
1
The moral issue is mainly of greatest concern to women. For centuries woman has
gone forth with man to till the fields, to feed and clothe the nation. She has shared with
him the struggles and hardships of his efforts. She has sacrificed her life to populate the
Earth. She has overdone her labors. She has entrusted Man with the wealth of her
offspring. He has failed her. He has allowed their ↑her↓ children to die by the thousands
in the social system he has constructed and maintains. Woman at last steps forward to
demand that she have a word to say in her function of Motherhood and her first request
is that woman cease to produce children in ignorance.
For this ↑Because↓ twentieth century sees woman emerge from the cave of ignorance
into the light of knowledge. She demands that she shall have control over her own body;
that she shall be a mother when she desires to be one, consciously and voluntarily. In
order to do this she must have the knowledge to control birth. Man has seen fit to place
the most sacred function of her body on a footing with pornography and he calls any
education bearing upon it as "Filthy, vile, obscene". Woman must undo that crime. She
must raise Man's standards in this as she has done in the past to a still higher level and
place the function of motherhood and its physiology where it rightly belongs. She can
only do this through education. And this paper, the "Woman Rebel" was a pioneer
attempt to give her that education.
It has been said that the issue advocated in this paper is fifty years ahead of the times.
But this I deny. Rather is it a few narrow-minded officials who are fifty years behind the
times, for I have found that the great mass of people desire this education knowledge,
and it is only the existence of an anti-social law inspired by the late Mr. Comstock that is
keeping them in ignorance. From all over this country letters have come to me from
women in all departments of life's work, expressing their opinions that the knowledge to
prevent conception is a great social necessity and is far removed from obscenity.
DIFFERENCE IN INTERESTS.
As a trained nurse and mother of three children I have reason to consider my views on
this question far superior to those of the prosecution whose interest in this question are
so removed from mine, for he is not concerned with the fifty thousand women who die
each year from abortion in this country. He is not concerned with the 150,000 abortions
that occur each year. He is not concerned with the fact that 95% of them are performed
on women of the working class; neither is he concerned with the tremendous number of
babies who die each year before they are one year old. He is concerned only in winning
a verdict in this case while my interests are prompted by the most piteous cry ofthe
women of this country have ever uttered.
What can Man know of the mental agony of carrying beneath one's heart a little life
which every instinct tells the mother it cannot survive? Little can he know of the mental
agony and fear of unwanted pregnancy. Why then should he dictate to her in a function
which chiefly concerns her.
CHARGES.
2
The indictments charge me with publishing and circulating ↑indecent↓ obscene
literature. What is the meaning obscenity of this word "Obscene"? The average men
and wocitizen is not familiar with the definition given in law books but must rely upon the
only available source, that is in dictionaries and encyclopedias. I refer you to a standard
authority The Encyclopedia Britannica which defines says of "obscenity":"The precise meaning of the word is decidedly ambiguous. It has been defined as
something offensive to modesty or decency or expressing or suggesting unchaste or
lustful ideas or being impure, indecent or lewd, or tends tending to deprave and corrupt
those whose minds ↑which↓ are open to immoral influences."
I deny the charge. I deny that there is one word or sentence or article in any of these
papers, which can be termed obscene or which in any way violates this law or the intent
of this law. I have read Section 211 many times and by the wildest stretch of the
imagination there is nothing from the pages of "The Woman Rebel" which in any way
incites to passion or immorality. The law distinctly says that no one shall give any
information to prevent conception or to produce abortion and nowhere in the columns of
this paper has this information been given. The law does not prohibit a discussion of
these questions, but that is what Mr. Content wants you to believe. I advocate that the
knowledge to prevent conception be placed in the hands of women. I advocate small
families for ↑the↓ working mothers class mothers and have encouraged them not to
have more children than they can feed, clothe and care for. Is this obscene? Why is it
that I am indicted for advocating small families when others quite prominent in the
world's affairs are allowed to go up and down the length of the land advocating large
families. Certainly if the picture brought to ↑a↓ young girl's mind by telling her not to
have many children is in any way inciting to immorality, what must it be to be told that it
is her duty to have many children? Which is the most moral? Is it obscene ↑indecent↓ to
help educate people; to have a responsibility towards their actions and towards their
offspring or is it not more obscene to keep them in ignorance, misery and poverty. This
law does not say that one cannot advocate small ↑families↓ and therefore nothing that
has been read to you from the pages of "The Woman Rebel" violates that law.
Is it moral for two adult people to bring children into the world knowing that there is no
possible provision made for their survival? Is it moral to leave the welfare and health of
your offspring to the charity of a few kindly and well-intentioned philanthropists or is it
not the duty of two people to be responsible for and the consequences of their acts,
securing to the best of their ability all advantages for their children's development? Is
this not the greatest moral step forward which the working people of this generation are
desirous of taking. For it is a noted fact that as soon as a woman raises herself out of
the lowest stages of poverty and ignorance where the present system of society has
placed her, her first step is to seek knowledge whereby she shall have control over the
size of her family? Where can she go for this knowledge? She knows that the woman of
the upper-class has this information, which she in her poverty cannot afford to pay for.
Consequently she must bring forth children who either die in infancy or grow up to fill
the reformatories jails and poor-houses, or she must resort to abortions! Abortions and
3
their horrible consequences are unnecessary. The "Woman Rebel" has said this and
the District Attorney has chosen to call it "obscene" ↑indecent↓ .
I trust you do not feel that I would have the impertinence to go into a work of this kind
without realizing the responsibility which the dissemination of such knowledge brings;
without a thorough study of the question from all points of view. For the past four years I
have studied this subject and visited different countriesFrance, Holland, England and
Spain where the subject is considered from the family, the moral, the individual and the
racial point of view, and before I go any further I should like to give you a brief summary
of my life's work and the conditions that I met with which made me study this question
and has brought me here today.
↑intent↓
For in bringing in a verdict it will not be enough for you to decide whether these papers
are obscene in character but it will also be necessary to get at the intent. The
prosecution in drawing up the indictment has used great cunning in carefully extracting
parts of the paper which do not dwell on the bigness of the Cause. He has said that the
intent was good but that the intent does not matter. I claim that the intent is a very vital
part of this charge. I further claim that these indictments should never have been
brought against me, and were those who are back of this prosecution really interested in
the welfare of the people as they pretend to be, they would not be wasting your time
here to-day and piling up the enormous costs on the people's backs by such
proceedings. The intent is the very essence of the character of this paper. It may be
defiant; it may be bold; it may be much that you do not approve of but ↑ [you do not
want to agree?] ↓ . the intent is certainly not obscene! ↑The question you are to decide
is-- Is it obscene?↓
HISTORY.
Far back in my early childhood days, my first impression of life was that large families
and poverty went hand-in-hand. I was born and brought up in a small factory town in the
western part of New York State. I was one of eleven children, so that I had some
personal knowledge of the struggles and hardships which a large family endures. At the
age of seventeen my mother died from the results of overwork and the strain of toofrequent child-bearing which left me with the care of four younger children to share the
burdens with a lovely poetic Irish father.
A few years later I entered a hospital to take up the profession of nursing. It is
impossible for anyone↑woman↓ to go through a general training without realizing that
↑she must revalue ideas of life--↓ 75% of the diseases of men and women are the
results of their sex lives. This discovery decided me to specialize in women's diseases
and I devoted myself to gynecological and obstetrical work. A few years of work in this
special line gave me a still greater discovery, i.e. that knowledge to prevent conception
was obtained and practiced among the women of wealth while the working women were
kept in ignorance of this knowledge. I found that the women of wealth were able to have
4
abortions performed if it became necessary and such care and attention was given
them by the medical profession that seldom did a death occur among them. I found that
the women of the working-class were as anxious to obtain this information as their
sisters of wealth but that there were laws upon the statute book against imparting this
information, and the medical profession was most religious in obeying the laws when
the patient was a poor woman. I found that the women of the working-class had
emphatic views on the crime of bringing children into the world to die of hunger and
were willing to risk their lives through abortions rather than give birth to unwanted
offspring. I found that 300,000 children die each year from poverty and neglect, while
the parents remain in ignorance of the means of preventing 300,000 more from coming
into the world to die the following year. I found that the children who toil in factories and
mills all come from parents who average 9 living children. I found that ↑from↓ the
records concerning the woman of the underworld; the so-called prostitute--that 85% of
them come from parents who average 9 children. I found that the laws against imparting
knowledge to prevent conception had forced women into the hands of filthy midwives
and quack abortionists unless they would bear unwanted children, with the
consequences that the deaths from abortions were almost wholly among women of the
working-class. I found that no other country in the world has so large a number of
abortionists nor so large a number of deaths resulting therefrom, as the United States of
America, and that the quacks and abortionists were rolling in wealth while our lawmakers were closing their virtuous eyes. What did I find that Society was doing to alter
these conditions. I found that it was treating with the symptoms instead of
the disease ↑causes↓ . They founded the Little Mother Leagues, Babies Nurseries,
Better Baby Leagues, and hundreds of well-intentioned philanthropic and charitable
organizations are trying to ↑tried to�...
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