From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Woman's Movement for Legal Reform, 1898-1940
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From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Woman's Movement for Legal Reform, 1898-1940
254eBook
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Overview
Stoner draws on rich primary sources—texts, personal letters, journal essays, radio broadcasts, memoirs from women’s congresses—which allow these women to speak in their own voices. In reconstructing the mentalité of Cuban feminists, who came primarily from a privileged social status, Stoner shows how feminism drew from traditional notions of femininity and a rejection of gender equality to advance a cause that assumed women’s expanded roles were necessary for social progress. She also examines the values of the progressive male politicians who supported feminists and worked to change Cuban laws.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822381686 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/1991 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 254 |
| Lexile: | 1420L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 5 MB |
Read an Excerpt
From the House to the Streets
The Cuban Woman's Movement for Legal Reform, 1898-1940
By K. Lynn Stoner
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1991 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8168-6
CHAPTER 1
Breaking the Mold
Each generation bequeaths its descendants values and habits to accept or reject. The women who fought in the Cuban Wars of Independence presented their daughters with examples of heroism, durability, integrity, ingenuity, self-sacrifice, and combativeness during the campaigns against Spanish rule. The mambisas forged a new model for middle- and upper-class women of the twentieth century by breaking the mold of prescribed behavior for proper Cuban ladies who before 1868 were uneducated and dependent upon men. Mambisas, while remaining wives and mothers, left the protection of their homes, went into the manigua, and took up arms in support of national sovereignty. The protracted guerrilla wars increased the difficulties of daily existence that women could not escape. Engulfed in the struggle to survive, women of all classes expanded their capabilities to include nursing, gunrunning, supplying provisions, fund raising, publishing, and fighting. Their war efforts proved to men and, more importantly, to the women themselves, their worthiness as full citizens in independent Cuba.
The actions of the mambisas contrasted sharply with the activities of proper Cuban ladies who lived only two decades before. Social prescription for the highly bred in 1848 held that women were most desirable when weak, beautiful, and submissive. Men were their tutors in every matter save domestic work. If women received any education at all, it was in Church catechism to enhance their virtues as mothers. Men feared that women uninstructed in religious fundamentals risked becoming perverted, frivolous, and gossips. They might even fall into the disagreeable habit of reading "adventurous love stories" that would give them the illusion that love could possibly offer pleasure or enchantment. Such an illusion might lead them away from the brutal reality that marriage "was the painful job of having children." Women's education was based upon the principles that they should not use their intellects and that their place was having children and doing domestic work in the home.
Escaping the confinement of marriage was impossible for women and men. The family was the social base that united a people and preserved class and familial authority. It bound men to men through extended family ties. Society functioned according to power linkages between family groups, and each group succeeded or failed according to its ability to control wealth and to protect family and friends under the direction of the patriarch. Conversely, the family-based society was closed to interlopers or newcomers seeking power and wealth.
Marriage, ideally, was a panacea for all that was bad in society. It was a paradise for parents and children. It liberated women from working for a living as domestic servants, street vendors, or prostitutes. Parenthood increased social sympathy. Every member of society worked to enhance the well-being of the family. The husband and head of household, under the patria potestad, was the sole administrator of wealth and family relations. The husband and wife helped one another in time of need. Children were guaranteed protection, shelter, food, and sustenance. They also inherited what estate there might be. As adults, the children insured their aging parents against want, hunger, and loneliness. Theoretically, then, society progressed according to family economies and within family units and not according to a government's economic strategies.
Within marriage and parenthood, women were inferior to men. Women were mothers and expected to be generous, tender, merciful, soft, timid, and compassionate. Their only acceptable public function was to help children and disadvantaged women through Catholic charity organizations where the Church could oversee their work.
Many privileged women strove to be exemplary wives and mothers, though not always of their own volition. Their behavior was prescribed by Church teaching, social custom, and man-made laws. Religion and education reinforced their family orientation, while the penal code allowed husbands to kill unfaithful wives with impunity. Just as Cuban society under Spanish domination was subject to violent suppression for social and political restlessness, women were subject to violent repression for challenging their subordination to men.
Women outside the privileged classes suffered under the same principles of subordination but lacked the protection that money and power provided. For many women, poverty meant arduous work and living on the verge of starvation. The sanctity of marriage and men's protection eluded many because poor men could not maintain their families. Racial and class distinctions placed an inferior value on black, mulatto, and poor women's lives. While the Catholic Church attempted to impose moral behavior on all women regardless of race and class, social custom—namely, concubinage and unsanctioned unions—determined that many poor women of any race would be unwed mothers and workers outside the home. For these women, marriage, religion, notions of the "bello sexo," the arts, charity, tenderness, and deference to men had no place.
Some privileged women ignored prescribed behavior and became recognized intellectuals before the end of the century. The better authors, however, spent much of their lives in Europe. One of Cuba's protofeminists, Mercedes Santa Cruz de Montalvo (La Condesa de Merlin), resided in France through the greater part of her life, having left Cuba at the age of twelve. Her writing reflects her womanly sentiments and Cuban roots. Perhaps in response to Descartes' enlightened phrase "I think, therefore I am," she said, "I think because I feel, and I write because I think. Herein lies my art." The Condesa's greatest contribution was her unbridled sentiment and her unapologetic respect for a feminine perspective.
The Condesa wrote prose about Cuba and her life. In 1833 she published in Paris Mis doce primeros años, which was about her early childhood in Cuba. Later she wrote Sor Inés 0 Santa Rosa, which was published along with Mis doce primeros años as Memorias de una criolla. In 1833 she published in two volumes Ocios de una mujer de gran mundo o Lola y María, Marquis de Foudras, a book that she claimed was essential reading for any woman who aspired to excellence in any given field. Her greatest work, La esclavitud en Cuba, was written in 1849. After her return to Cuba in 1851, the Condesa published in Paris three volumes about Cuba entitled Viaje a la Habana.
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Cuba's greatest nineteenth-century writer, wrote on a broad range of topics, most notably on slavery, independence, and the alienation of modernization. Born in Camagüey in 1814, La Avellaneda suffered the loss of her father at an early age and rejection by her first fiancé. Disillusioned with life, she emigrated to Spain where she continued to write novels, poetry, heroic legends, and plays. Her literature rarely reflected the frustrations of a woman intellectual, which for her must have been significant. She was denied a chair in the Spanish Royal Academy because she was a woman.
Upon returning to Cuba in 1859, La Avellaneda edited a woman's journal, Album Cubano de lo buenoy lo bello (1859–64), that encouraged women to enter the arts. She contradicted popular assumptions about woman's intellectual and spiritual weakness by using contemporary beliefs about women's moral superiority and sentimentality. She argued that women were superior to men in every way. Because women could reason and feel, and men could only reason, women were better able to lead than men. Women, she insisted, produced a higher percentage of memorable leaders from all female leaders than men did. She believed that women possessed capable intellects, and she resented their exlusion from advanced education and learned societies.
La Avellaneda's attention to gender issues comprised a minor fraction of her literature, and her approach to the topic was indirect and cautious. She sometimes wrote pieces that confirmed women's weaknesses and fragility. La Avellaneda's message to women was contradictory. La Avellaneda challenged male domination of the arts and the Spanish Royal Academy by the very act of writing well and she urged women to do the same. But she warned against competition between women and men based on her perception of women's feminine weakness.
Prescribed behavior notwithstanding, elite creole women were among the first to oppose Spanish rule publicly. In 1807, in response to the capture of Carlos IV and Ferdinand VII by Napoléon Bonaparte and fearing republican unrest, the Spanish government in Havana cracked down on Cuban stirrings for economic and social freedoms. Some Cuban women exhibited their commitment to republican ideals and their outrage at repression by cutting their hair short to distinguish themselves from the Spanish contemporaries. Several decades later, during the filibustering campaigns of Narciso López, Marina Manresa was executed for conspiring to receive rebel troops in Camagüey. Pepilla Arango hid patriots on her ranch. Rita Balben was active in a plot against her own husband. Both Arango and Balben were exiled.
Gaining political independence from Spain was an arduous struggle spanning three decades from 1868 to 1898. Its toll, both in terms of lives lost and economic dislocation, was staggering. In the years preceding 1868 and following 1898, Cuba's population increased steadily. In 1861, before the outbreak of rebellion, the annual growth rate was 0.9 percent. In 1877, the last year of the Ten Years War, population growth had diminished to 0.3 percent. In 1887, after nine years of peace, the growth rate increased to 0.8 percent, but, after the final war in 1899, the population had decreased to a negative 0.25 percent. In the last year of that war (1897–98) starvation and disease killed one out of four Cubans, women as well as men (see table 1). The strain of military conflict and repressive political tactics changed the lives and personal expectations of all Cubans, but in particular it altered women's expectations of themselves.
Table 1 Total Population Growth, 1774–1931
Cuba's first call to independence in 1868 required general public support and a sense of nationalism. The Ten Years War, though drawing on forces from all social and economic strata, was led by members of the Creole class interested in eliminating Spain's restrictive trade measures and establishing self-rule. Their strategy was to defeat the Spanish with a guerrilla army. Insurgent forces could not win set piece clashes against the superior arms and training of Spanish troops. Thus, the first military encounter at Bayamo characterized the Ten Years War, when it pitted Spanish cavalry and infantry with muskets and cannons against untrained campesinos with machetes. The Spaniards, who had themselves fought guerrilla campaigns against Joseph Bonaparte between 1807 and 1814 and rebellions in their north African colonies, knew exactly how to contain such an effort. By 1870 they had burned and destroyed the land and plantations where the insurgents operated with the intentions of starving them out of the manigua and forcing them to surrender.
By destroying civilian homes and farmland, the Spanish forced women and children out of their safe positions away from war fronts. In the first call to the machete, some mambisas went to the manigua to fight alongside their husbands and fathers. Whether in villages or with the army, women also served behind the lines as nurses, correspondents, spies, contraband arms traders, manufacturers of provisions, writers, and examples to men of the sacrifice that all would make for independence.
James O'Kelly, a New York Herald reporter writing from Cuba in 1871, described how the mambises carried out their war against the Spanish and how the Spaniards' retaliation affected patriot women. O'Kelly quoted Carlos Manuel Céspedes, the president of Cuba Libre, when he described the Spanish proclamation of the terms of war:
In the beginning we acted with too much generosity, setting at liberty the Spanish prisoners, even after the proclamation of the Spanish government announcing that all taken in arms would be shot, and that even the women captured in the insurgent districts would be subject to ten years' imprisonment or deportation to Fernando Po (one of Spain's political prisons in Africa). Several times I have made efforts to induce the Spanish government to carry on the war in a civilized manner, but without results.
The mother/patriot symbolized Cuban sacrifice and endurance. Separatist women taught their children the value of national independence. Pictures published in magazines of the day displayed strong, beautiful young mothers pointing the way for young men and children who clung to their dresses. Mariana Grajales, the mother of ten fierce patriot soldiers, one of whom was Antonio Maceo, became the legendary model of motherhood and patriotism. She and her sons fought in the Ten Years War, the Little War (1879), and the War of 1895, and she became a part of Cuba's pantheon of war heroes. José Martí called her La Leona. She taught her sons how to use the machete, and she instilled in them dreams of a sovereign Cuba devoid of slavery. With all but her youngest son at the front, she received news of the oldest's, Miguel's, death. Reportedly she turned to the youngest and said, "Y tú, muchacho, empíñate, que ya es la hora de que pelees por tu patria" (And you, son, stand tall, for the time has come for you to fight for your country).
Mariana Grajales also joined the men on the front. Together with Antonio Maceo's wife, María Cabrales, she helped nurse the wounded and feed the troops. These two women won the admiration of José Martí when he observed them entering the battlefield to rescue the wounded Antonio with only the gunfire of José Maceo to cover their retreat. They inspired his epic remark: "Fáciles son los héroes con tales mujeres" (It is easy to be heroes with women such as these).
The mambises expected no mercy from the Spanish. To reduce the number of rebels killed and maintain confidence within the ranks, they promised to carry away their wounded to hospitals scattered throughout the manigua and staffed by women. The patriots bound themselves together in expressed solidarity through "El Silencio," a secret society that pledged never to abandon a soldier and to rescue their wounded, even if it meant passing behind enemy lines. The hospitals became a popular target for the Spanish forces, because they could find weakened soldiers and women and children whom they could eliminate with little effort. O'Kelly wrote about the mambises:
The Mambis have maintained a struggle as glorious as the Suliote or Cretan wars against the Turk, and in all history there are no more gallant struggles than these, but modern society is such a sham that it can see nothing great in the struggle of a weak people holding out against fearful odds; sacrificing fortune, family, and life; perishing by sabrestroke, and bullet, and disease; seeing their wives and children hunted like beasts of the forest, sinking with fatigue and hunger, dying miserably in the savage woods; and amid all their suffering and desolation remaining unshaken in their resolve to conquer or to die. Yet all human history cannot furnish a greater example of heroic purpose. Thermopylae was not but the passing effort of an hour, whereas the heroism of the Cubans has been constant, and displayed in a hundred fields.
Some nationalist women used their influence as writers to spark nationalist sentiments. They exhorted Cubans to take up arms, and they wrote poetry and patriotic songs for the independence cause. Sofía Estevez urged her compatriots to defeat the Spanish in the following verse:
But now is the time that Cubans
Rise up against the executioner
And lay aside fearlessly the yoke
That he placed upon their hands.
Curse his inclemency,
We wish death to his existence,
We offer up our prayer to God,
Let Cuba become free,
And long live her independence!
Besides being conspirators, combatants, and inspirational writers, women also created homes for the soldiers. They moved into the manigua where they continued family life despite the complications of war. Living in the manigua meant belonging to a community of a few families and inhabiting a cluster of bohíos (peasant houses), in mountains where the difficult terrain discouraged attacks from Spanish forces. Under these circumstances, women contributed to the liberation effort by making hammocks, nursing the wounded, growing and foraging for food, fighting and spying, and supplying emotional support for the independence effort. According to O'Kelly, all the rebels were poorly, but not miserably, dressed. Yet, even in poverty, the mambisas did not lose their eye for feminine style. They would don a ribbon or a kerchief that accented a coquetishness which even their rude surroundings could not suppress.
In the manigua men and women shared the struggle to survive and developed new family arrangements. Men hunted game, dug tubers, and cut cane. Women made clothing, cooked, washed, and cared for the children. There was no concept of community property. Each person was the owner of her/his possessions, and each person distributed the fruits of labor as circumstances warranted. This arrangement generated a respect for private property, regardless of the owner's gender, and challenged the old concept of the father's authority over family property. Women's right to control their own property without a prenuptial agreement was established first in the manigua. After independence, as Cubans rewrote laws, women's control over property became law in 1917.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From the House to the Streets by K. Lynn Stoner. Copyright © 1991 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsTables
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
1 Breaking the Mold
2 Statecraft and Women's Rights, 1902–1918
3 Feminist Congresses and Organizations
4 A Prosopography of the Feminist Leadership
5 The Feminist Journalists
6 Women's Suffrage and the Question of Democracy
7 Feminism and Social Motherhood
8 Legislating Morality
9 Fields, Factories, and Feminists
10 Blacks, Whites, and Women: The Equal Rights Law
Conclusion
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index