Shared contradictions: links between Gabriela Mistral and Herminia Brumana. Between motherhood and female emancipation (1920–1945)

Abstract

Our article is the first to analyze the friendship and correspondence between Chilean educator, writer, and diplomat Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) and Argentine writer and educator Herminia Brumana (1897–1954). We thus establish Mistral's links with Argentine women educators of the left, who clearly transcended the elite. They shared bonds of friendship with the Chilean-Argentine Marta Samatán and the Argentine educator Marta Salotti. Both Mistral and Brumana embraced the cause of women's emancipation, while openly objecting to bourgeois feminism. To examine their critical and contradictory positions in relation to hegemonic femininity, we analyze three key moments: the 1920s, when Mistral was writing in the context of the achievements following the Mexican Revolution, and Brumana was writing in Buenos Aires, in a context marked by the renovating echoes of university reform. Then, the 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War; and finally, the 1940s, during World War II. We will see that both Mistral and Brumana take conservative positions on motherhood as a “natural instinct of women,” while discussing key aspects of gender roles and sexual morality of the time.