Suffragism and feminism, conjunctions and disjunctions in Argentina (1930-1943)

In this paper, we analyze women’s struggles for political rights in Argentina between 1930 and 1943. We address the interventions of Alicia Moreau de Justo, a socialist activist, and Angélica Mendoza and María Rosa Oliver, communists. Although they fought for women’s rights, only Alicia embra-ced feminism. We also include voices close to anarchist ideo-logy who did not identify themselves as feminists or were su-ffragists, with a few exceptions, making it interesting to place them in the scene. Finally, we include Ana Rosa Schliepper de Martínez Guerrero, a member of the Argentine Women’s Union—an association promoted by communists—and an ac-tivist in the Radical Civic Union, a reformist centrist party. We focus on the 1930s, a period in which the struggle for women’s rights (whether or not they were claimed from a fe-minist position) was subsumed within the authoritaria-nism/democracy dispute, spurred by the rise of fascism in Europe. The period coincides with a particular persecution of left-wingers, feminists, and radicals alike. In this unique con-text, we investigate the specific strategies these women deve-loped to demand their rights and question the classification of “feminism”, which, according to some current historiographical readings, is applied indiscriminately to these women. The corpus combines institutional records, periodical publications, testimonies, autobiographies, and correspondence in order to triangulate them.