Puerto Rican Women's History: New Perspectives

New Perspectives

Felix Matos-Rodriguez, Linda Delgado

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317461593
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

A survey of the topics in gender and history of Puerto Rican women. Organized chronologically and covering the 19th and 20th centuries, it deal with issues of slavery, emancipation, wage work, women and politics, women's suffrage, industrialization, migration and Puerto Rican women in New York.

1

Women’s History in Puerto Rican Historiography: The Last Thirty Years

Félix V. Matos Rodríguez

In 1972, journalist Federico Ribes Tovar acknowledged in his introduction to La mujer puertorriqueña—one of the first books solely dedicated to providing a historical account of the contributions and experiences of Puerto Rican women—that “history, in general, tells us little or nothing regarding women.”¹ Twenty-five years later, historians can only claim a mixed record in their attempts to learn more about the history of Puerto Rican women. In some areas, like the role women played in early-twentieth-century labor organizations or the suffragist movement, there has been significant and important new research and findings. Unfortunately, however, we do not know much more about women’s history in Puerto Rico today than we did twenty-five years ago.

The purpose of this essay is to provide a historiographical review of the women’s history literature in Puerto Rico and in Puerto Rican communities in the United States since 1970. While it is undeniable that more attention has been given in scholarly circles to the historical roles women have played in Puerto Rico, there have been few attempts to review this literature in a comprehensive way.² As new related research areas emerge, such as the history of sexuality or lesbian studies, for example, it is important to see how the historical writing about women in Puerto Rico has evolved, what have been its most significant contributions and its most salient disappointments, and what are the new challenges and areas of inquiry for future research.

As academic disciplines go, history in Puerto Rico lags significantly behind most social sciences and humanities in the attention given to women’s issues. The problem seems endemic to the discipline in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe as well.³ This might be related to the women’s studies interest in solving public policy problems—discrimination, unequal pay, or domestic violence, for example—and the need to turn to the social sciences for answers. It is precisely because of this social science emphasis that more historically grounded work is needed regarding Puerto Rican women. Most social science or literary studies related to women have been done with little or no historical context. Many times women’s roles have been ahistorically analyzed, making for very poor scholarship. Still, there seems to be increasing interest in studying woman-related topics among Puerto Rican historians in the last decade.

Although there is substantial controversy about what constitutes the field or the discipline of women’s studies, few would argue that one of its most important defining elements is its interdisciplinary nature.⁴ If some of the earlier tasks of women’s studies were to “fill in the gaps” of knowledge about women, to identify and correct male biases in the epistemological construction of academic disciplines, and to redress power relations in the definition of knowledge and practice, it was logical that the canonical boundaries of disciplinary studies needed to be crossed. Still, while recognizing that a purely discipline-based perspective might not do justice to the richness of the field, I will concentrate this essay almost exclusively on works published by historians or on works that are historically oriented. I believe that this narrower focus will facilitate tracing the development of historical writing about Puerto Rican women and pointing to new directions for future research. Since this is a first attempt at providing an overview of the historical literature about Puerto Rican women, I have decided to use a chronological format on this essay. I am aware that several other approaches, such as a thematic one, could have been employed also. Yet, since I am trying to provide the most comprehensive coverage possible, I have decided to keep the range as inclusive as possible. I hope that more focused thematic studies follow this essay.

Women and Historical Writing: 1900–1960s

Until the early 1960s, there was no such thing as women’s studies or women’s history in Puerto Rico. Prior to that decade historians and other intellectuals had included women in their narratives mostly to address what were considered “feminine” topics, such as family, fashion, domesticity, and religion. Sporadically, several books had appeared dealing with woman-related issues, such as Gabriel Ferrer’s La mujer en Puerto Rico: Sus necesidades presentes y los medios más fáciles y adecuados para mejorar su porvenir (1881), or biographies of notable women such as Angela Negrón Muñoz’s Mujeres de Puerto Rico: Desde el primer siglo de colonización hasta el primer tercio del siglo XX (1935).⁵ Most of these books, however, were not part of a systematic inquiry into the history of women in Puerto Rico. María F. Barceló Miller has done a succinct analysis of the treatment given to women by Puerto Rican historiographical schools prior to the 1960s.⁶ She has characterized the historical writing about women generated in the early decades of the twentieth century as paternalistic and elitist. Women played a secondary and marginal role in the Island’s past, usually as shadows of men, who were the real protagonists of history. Barceló Miller also shows that the dominant historical vision emerging after the 1930s—particularly that of leading authors such as Tomás Blanco and Antonio S. Pedreira—was clearly anti-feminist.⁷ The gains of the early-twentieth-century feminists and suffragists alarmed patriarchal writers such as Blanco and Pedreira.

It is important to remember that although authors such as Salvador Brau, Blanco, and Pedreira represented the boundaries of dominant historical and humanistic disquisition in the first four decades of the twentieth century, there were other contesting voices in the historiographical discourse. One such voice, for instance, was writer, feminist, and labor leader Luisa Capetillo. Her writings advocating women’s and workers’ rights in Puerto Rico have been recently described by literary critic Julio Ramos as a “hybrid discourse.”⁸ The hybrid nature of Capetillo’s writing—a combination of academic and plebeian oral discourses written in various literary genres such as letters, essays, autobiography, and poetry—was a challenge to more nationalistic, essentialist, and exclusivist discourses engaged in by the majority of Puerto Rican writers in the early decades of the twentieth century. Capetillo’s writings, according to Ramos, were an attempt to open an alternative space, one with fresh representational strategies and new social agents, including among them, of course, women. Unfortunately, the influence of Capetillo and other writers like her did not make a substantial mark on the dominant writers of the first half of the twentieth century, and their historiographical contributions have only recently begun to be reassessed by contemporary historians.

The so-called “Generación del ’40”—responsible for most of the historical writing produced in the 1950s and 60s—neglected women as historical subjects worthy of research and attention. It was this generation, with scholars such as Arturo Morales Carrión, Aída Caro Costas, Isabel Gutiérrez del Arroyo, and Luis Díaz Soler, among others, that provided Puerto Rico with its first cohort of professional historians. Paralleling developments occurring at the Institute for Puerto Rican Culture and other cultural and intellectual institutions, this generation of historians was responsible for shaping, organizing, and constructing much of the historical infrastructure—archives, journals, documentary and bibliographic collections, and research centers—which exists in the Island today. It is with and against this infrastructure—the legacy of a delayed positivist heritage and of institutionalizing cultural nationalism—that many of the historians researching women’s issues have had to work with since the 1970s.

The historians of the Generación del ’40 focused much of their research on institutions, political parties, diplomacy, legal issues, and patriotic figures.⁹ Given these research interests, it is not surprising that women and marginalized groups did not stand much of a chance of being treated as worthy or interesting historical agents unless, of course, they proved to be extraordinary in some way. As part of the ideological backbone of the ruling Partido Popular Democrático (PPD), many of the historians of the Generación del ’40 emphasized the nineteenth-century liberal ideology that generated a short-lived autonomous political relationship with Spain months prior to the United States’ invasion in 1898. For these scholars, particularly Morales Carrión, there was a historical link between those nineteenth-century liberals and the current leadership—himself included—of the pro-Commonwealth-status PPD. Yet even historians committed to Puerto Rico’s political independence shared a theoretical and methodological vision, which privileged institutional, political, and patriotic history.

For the historians of the Generación del ’40, women did not represent a coherent group for analysis or research. One finds scant references to women in their works, and these references are usually present in one of two forms: either in chapters or sections dealing with local customs, dress, religiosity, or marriage, or in reference to extraordinary women or pioneers, such as the early-nineteenth-century pro-independence activist María Barbudo, or the poetess Lola Rodríguez de Tió. Due to their rigid adherence to documentary materials, these historians reproduced what are now some of the best-known clichés regarding pre-twentieth-century women, such as the great skill of women horse riders and the amusing portrayal of women smoking cigars.¹⁰ In essence, this generation of historians, ground-breakers and pioneers in many aspects of historical inquiry and endeavor, passed on a legacy of depicting Puerto Rican women as either passive, caricaturesque, or exceptional.

Women and the Nueva Historia

Local and international developments in the 1960s and 1970s had transformative effects in Puerto Rican historiography. On the Island, the “new historians” altered the way history was written, analyzed and studied. In the United States, particularly in New York City, the field of Puerto Rican Studies was born out of the struggles of students and community activists tired of being marginalized by U.S. educational institutions.¹¹ Several institutions—such as the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York City and the Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Puertorriqueña (Center for Studies of the Puerto Rican Reality, CEREP) in Río Piedras—and individuals—César Andreu Iglesias, Frank Bonilla, and Ángel Quintero Rivera, for example—played key roles creating links between the new historians and the practitioners of Puerto Rican Studies. However, even when there was some collaboration and cross-influencing between scholars and institutions in the United States and on the Island, closer institutional connections and dissemination of research findings had to wait until the 1980s.

The origins and agendas of the nueva historia have been the subject of much scrutiny lately.¹² The historical work produced between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, which marked the peak of productivity and influence of the new history, saw a fundamental shift in methodology, theoretical approaches, and thematic concerns. The paradigms that had guided the works of the Generación del ’40 were rejected by the new generation of historians. In general, the new historians were interested in documenting the life of oppressed and marginalized people in Puerto Rico, such as peasants, slaves, and workers. To achieve this, the nueva historia dug into new and often untapped primary sources, such as notary and trial records, tax data, and hacienda records. New historians also moved away from relying on the humanities as a source for theoretical and methodological insights and looked for models in the social sciences. Furthermore, for most new historians economics and material conditions became central explanatory phenomena. In many ways, Puerto Rican scholars were responding to and engaging the changing political and scholarly currents emerging from the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Africa. Finally, the nueva historia wanted to reach audiences beyond the scholarly community and, as a result, was concerned with disseminating the results of historical research in the broadest possible way.

Women were among the neglected and marginalized groups that the new historians were supposed to incorporate into the mainstream. Yet for most of the better-known figures of the nueva historia movement, such as Gervasio García, Fernando Picó, Ángel Quintero Rivera, Blanca Silvestrini, and Guillermo Baralt, women were not a central concern, although they did include important sections in their respective studies regarding women cigar-workers, mothers and daughters of jornaleros, and rebellious female slaves, among others.¹³ Some of these authors, like Picó and Silvestrini, published essays focusing exclusively on women’s history.¹⁴ Although some authors have been critical of the lack of attention that many new historians paid to women’s history, it is important to acknowledge the extremely influential task performed by many of the new historians as teachers and mentors of younger scholars who later did groundbreaking work in women’s history. Given the difficult odds, lack of resources, and often disheartening working conditions faced by Puerto Rican scholars both on the Island and in the United States, publishing is not always easy. Therefore, in pursuing any kind of historiographical study about Puerto Rico it is crucial to accentuate the importance of teaching and mentoring in shaping emerging methodological and thematic currents.

Most of the works that specifically addressed women’s history topics in the 1970s tended to be short essays. Many essays were the result of work in progress, which latter evolved into full-length monographs. Others were the result of conferences, usually sponsored by CEREP, different university-affiliated programs, or a government agency such as the Comisión para el Mejoramiento de los Derechos de la Mujer (Commission for the Improvement of Women’s Rights). The lectures given in 1975 by anthropologist Jalil Sued-Badillo, for example, regarding women in Taino society—as part of a CEREP-sponsored Women’s History Week series—later formed the basis for his book La mujer indigena y su sociedad.¹⁵

Some of the most influential essays were the ones by Marcia Rivera Quintero, Isabel Picó, Blanca Silvestrini, Edna Acosta-Belén, and Norma Valle Ferrer, incorporated into the anthology The Puerto Rican Woman (1979). This anthology—a slightly modified version of which was immediately published in Spanish—became one of the standard scholarly references in the field of Puerto Rican women’s studies in the 1980s. Of the eleven essays included...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Women’s History in Puerto Rican Historiography: The Last Thirty Years
• 2. Puerto Rican Women Workers in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Appraisal of the Literature
• 3. “¿Quién trabajará?”: Domestic Workers, Urban Slaves, and the Abolition of Slavery in Puerto Rico
• 4. Virgins, Whores, and Martyrs: Prostitution in the Colony, 1898–1919
• 5. Gender and the Decomposition of the Cigar-Making Craft in Puerto Rico, 1899–1934
• 6. Halfhearted Solidarity: Women Workers and the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Puerto Rico During the 1920s
• 7. Literacy, Class, and Sexuality in the Debate on Women’s Suffrag in Puerto Rico During the 1920s
• 8. Rufa Concepción Fernández: The Role of Gender in the Migration Process
• 9. Gender, Work, and Institutional Change in the Early Stage of Industrialization: The Case of the Women’s Bureau and the Home Needlework Industry in Puerto Rico, 1940–1952
• 10. Labor Migrants or Submissive Wives: Competing Narratives of Puerto Rican Women in the Post–World War II Era
• 11. Political Empowerment of Puerto Rican Women, 1952–1956
• Index
• About the Editors and Contributors