“They don’t even look like women workers”: Femininity and class in Twentieth-Century Latin America
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22456/1983-201X.18940Keywords:
Femininity, Working-class, Housewife, Appropriation, EvitaAbstract
Recent research on consumer culture and working-class femininity in the United States has argued that attention to fashionable clothing and dime novels did not undermine female working-class identities, but rather provided key resources for creating those identities. In this essay I consider whether we can see a similar process of appropriation by working-class women in Latin America. In that region women employed in factories had to contend with widespread denigration of the female factory worker. Looking first at the employer-run “Centers for Domestic Instruction” in São Paulo, I argue that “proper femininity” in these centers – frequented by large numbers of working-class women – reflected middle-class notions of the skilled housewife, and situated working-class women as nearly middle class. What we see is a process of “approximation,” not appropriation. I then look at the case of Argentina (especially Greater Buenos Aires) where Peronism also promoted “traditional” roles for working-class women but where Eva Perón emerges as a working-class heroine. The figure of Evita – widely reviled by women of the middle and upper classes – becomes a means to construct an alternative, class-based femininity for working-class women.
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