La Joven Moderna in Interwar Argentina: Gender, Nation, and Popular Culture 1683401166, 9781683401162

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La Joven Moderna in Interwar Argentina

LA JOVEN MODERNA IN INTERWAR ARGENTINA Gender, Nation, and Popular Culture

Cecilia Tossounian

University of Florida Press Gainesville

Parts of chapter two were published in “Images of the Modern Girl: From the Flapper to the Joven Moderna (Buenos Aires 1920-1940),” Forum for Inter-American Research 6, no. 2 (2013): 41–70 and in “Figuring Modernity and National Identity: Representations of the Argentine Modern Girl (1918-1939),” in Consuming Modernity: Changing Gendered Behaviours and Consumerism before the Baby Boom, ed. Cheryl Krasnick Warsh and Dan Malleck (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014), 220–236. Copyright 2020 by Cecilia Tossounian All rights reserved Published in the United States of America. 25 24 23 22 21 20

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows Names: Tossounian, Cecilia, author. Title: La joven moderna in interwar Argentina : gender, nation, and popular culture / Cecilia Tossounian. Description: Gainesville : University of Florida Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: In this book, Cecilia Tossounian reconstructs different representations of modern femininity from 1920s and 1930s Argentina, a time in which the country saw new economic prosperity, a growing cosmopolitan population, and the emergence of consumer culture. Tossounian analyzes how these popular images of “la joven moderna”—the modern girl—helped shape Argentina’s emerging national identity. Identifiers: LCCN 2019017944 (print) | LCCN 2019022226 (ebook) | ISBN 9781683401162 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism—Argentina—History—20th century. | Young women— Argentina—Conduct of life. | Women—Argentina—Conduct of life. Classification: LCC HQ1532 .T67 2020 (print) | LCC HQ1532 (ebook) | DDC 305.420982—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017944 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022226 University of Florida Press 2046 NE Waldo Road Suite 2100 Gainesville, FL 32609 http://upress.ufl.edu

Contents

List of Figures vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Building a Modern Nation 17 2. The Flapper and the Joven Moderna 33 3. The Modern Working Girl 53 4. Forging a Healthy and Beautiful Body 76 5. Embodying the Nation 94 Epilogue 114 Notes 123 Bibliography 147 Index 167

Figures

2.1. Beba dressed as a bataclana for Carnival 42 2.2. Paulina Singerman as a wealthy joven moderna 46 3.1. The actress Tita Merello in gaucho outfits 71 3.2. Niní Marshall as Catita 72 4.1. Athlete Hortensia Rodríguez of Club Racing 84 4.2. Jeanette Campbell, winner of the South American swimming competition 85 5.1. Winners of El Hogar beauty contest 104 5.2. Miss Universe contestants in their national costumes 110

Acknowledgments

In the course of researching and writing this book, I encountered generous colleagues and friends, as well as institutions and funding bodies, whose support and assistance proved fundamental to the project and to whom I would like to express my gratitude. This book profited enormously from the assistance of Giulia Calvi, Sebastian Conrad and Rebecca Earle, who supported, encouraged, and discussed my research with enthusiasm and dedication. I am grateful for their wise advice, boundless availability, and constructive remarks. At the European University Institute, I am thankful to Victoria de Grazia and Diogo Ramada Curto for their comments and suggestions on my research. At the Freie Universität Berlin, I owe gratitude to my colleagues Stephanie Fleischmann, Stefan Rinke, Adrian Valdmann and Nadia Zysman, and the participants in the seminar series organized by the International Research Training Group “Between Spaces.” Argentina’s Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and the Universidad de San Andrés, my home institution, provided the financial stability of a permanent researcher position and a welcoming and intellectually challenging environment for the drafting of the manuscript. I am thankful to Lila Caimari for her enthusiastic reads of segments of the manuscript and her endorsement of my work, and to Roy Hora, Sergio Serulnicov, and the participants in the history seminar for their helpful comments. The global history research group based at Universidad de San Andrés welcomed me kindly, and I was soon an active member of its seminar series. I would like to thank Laura Cucchi, Ana Romero, Juan Pablo Scarfi, Lisa Ubelaker Andrade and Eduardo Zimmermann for their insightful comments on parts of the manuscript.

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Acknowledgments

I would also like to extend my thanks to friends and colleagues from all over the world who supported the research and writing of this book. Among them, I am most indebted to Michael Goebel, who read several drafts, discussed ideas with me, and encouraged me to publish. I am also grateful to Paula Aguilar, Amelia Almorza, Julia Ariza, Cecilia Belej, Paula Bontempo, Cossimo Chiarelli, Isabella Cosse, Irene Fattacciu, Valeria Manzano, Ana Laura Martín, Graciela Queirolo, Inés Pérez and Ana Lía Rey for their readings, comments and suggestions. Two reviewers who disclosed their names, Matthew Karush and Rebekah Pite, and one who preferred to remain anonymous served as meticulous and resourceful readers for the press. I want to thank them for their detailed and thoughtful reports, which improved the manuscript immensely. To Mirta Lobato and Diego Armus, who sparked my initial interest in visual sources and consumer culture, I owe special gratitude. This book was also made possible by the generous support of several fellowships. An award from the Spanish International Cooperation Agency and a fellowship from the German Research Foundation, which funded several research trips to Argentine archives during the years I lived abroad, proved particularly important. I would like to express my appreciation for their support. I am also indebted to my editors at the University of Florida Press, first Erika Stevens, then Stephanye Hunter, for their encouragement and advice. Many thanks also to the archivists and librarians of the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin; the Royal Library of Belgium and the Centre for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Society in Brussels; and in Buenos Aires, the Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno, the library of Universidad de San Andrés, and the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken. Also, thanks to Mariana Iglesias and Emiliano Sánchez for their archival assistance, and to Wendy Gosselin and Patricia Ochoa, who copyedited the manuscript with great care and polished long, non-native English phrases. I have only words of gratitude for the love and support of those nearest to me. My parents, Ana María Lukowski and Eduardo Tossounian, as well as my brother and sisters, have always been there for me. My friends created a nomadic and warm sense of home, whether in Florence, Bologna, Berlin, or Buenos Aires. I dedicate this book to my husband Paolo Vanin, who combined caring support with his economist’s insights, and to our daughter Clara, who provided me with precious moments of joy and fun.

Introduction

In December 1928, in celebration of its one thousandth edition, the illustrated Argentine magazine El Hogar printed a special issue dedicated to the key changes that had taken place in the country over the past several decades. Through the juxtaposition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s images, the magazine conveyed the idea of how times were changing. Among these images, a drawing entitled “Yesterday and Today” stands out. It portrays an old lady of yore wearing a surly expression and a high-necked dark dress. She is looking disapprovingly at a heavily made-up and bobbed-haired girl in a short, low-cut dress who is smoking a cigarette. On the floor next to her is her golf equipment, and on the table an open magazine, probably El Hogar, which she may have been perusing.1 In the same issue, another drawing depicts a group of fashionable young women coming out of the subway, chatting and laughing. Entitled “Today’s Women on the Streets,” it stands in comparison to “Yesterday’s Women on the Streets,” in which the women are sketched with long dresses and foulards covering the high combs atop their heads.2 Later in the magazine, a set of sketches entitled “Greetings” portrays a man bowing before a demure lady; next to this image, a young woman is raising her fashionable cloche hat and waving to a man.3 New female fashions and mannerisms, novel socializing practices, and the remarkable presence of women in public were portrayed as ways of contrasting past and present. These images reference an important change in female representations and gender relations in Argentina. Not only was fashion transformed, but women also looked more confident in public spaces and more assertive in their relationships with men,

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conveying a greater sense of empowerment overall. The time of the modern girl had arrived. The figure of the modern girl emerged worldwide during the 1920s and faded around Word War II. These years were marked by an increasing interdependence among different countries both economically and culturally. Corporations and the mass media began to incorporate international strategies to conquer new markets. Transnational ideologies of consumption and individualism spread worldwide, and the connections among the world’s economies and cultures grew quickly. As a result of these interrelations—and particularly, of the emergence of a transnational consumer culture—the figure of the modern girl was marked by certain looks, behavior and attitudes that made her recognizable all over the world. Her cosmopolitan style, tall, slender figure, make-up, short, bobbed hair, loose-fitting clothes, and clearly flirtatious poses were her visual markers. Described as an unmarried, pleasure-seeking young woman involved in consumer culture, she was usually an object of nationalist scrutiny in every context in which she appeared. Indeed, different types of nationalism, ranging from cultural and ethnic to racial, emerged in these years as a way to undermine globalization, especially after the economic collapse of the world economy. In the Soviet Union, China, and South Africa, for instance, the modern girl was frequently represented as a threat to national traditions and was associated with American decadence, while in Nazi Germany, it was her cosmopolitanism that was often criticized. In several white-dominated contexts, such as the United States and Australia, the modern girl was employed in racial nationalism as an idealized representation of whiteness and good health that was contrasted with dark and “primitive” young women.4 The Argentine figure of the modern girl, or joven moderna, as she was locally known, shared a number of qualities with modern young women in European, North American, African and Asian contexts. Her emergence, but also her eventual decline, closely resembled the path of other modern female figures. After peaking in the mid-1920s, she persisted for two decades before being replaced by diverse representations of urban women during the Peronist administration. Like other modern girls, she also symbolized what contemporaries defined as the best and the worst of modernity—values like progress and strength, but also the anxiety associated with cultural loss. Her male counterpart, the modern boy, who also became a global novel figure during this period, never sparked the same level of interest.

Introduction

The joven moderna was also indicative of the class, gender and racial formation of Argentina, and more specifically, that of Buenos Aires. In the course of two decades, and due to a massive influx of European immigration, the population of Argentina’s capital more than tripled, reaching 1.5 million by 1914. Buenos Aires became a large metropolis characterized by rapid social mobility and a bustling consumer culture. Women became increasingly present in the public sphere as they entered the labor market, pursued career opportunities, and began to enjoy all that consumption culture offered. Mass culture helped inhabitants of Buenos Aires assimilate these rapid social and cultural transformations. The popular press, cinema, and radio explored the changing role of women and raised a debate over the pros and cons of this rapid transformation. By introducing a transnational consumer culture to a porteño audience—as inhabitants of Buenos Aires were called—popular culture encouraged the ideologies of consumerism, individualism, and middle-class aspirations, which specifically targeted women. At the same time, popular culture addressed the pressing issue of defining Argentina’s authentic values in a context of increased entanglement with the world.5 During the 1920s and 1930s, Argentine popular culture saw an explosion of new images of women. Magazines and newspapers portrayed figures of trendconscious upper-class young women zipping around the city in cars, sportswomen playing tennis or swimming, and beauty queens parading in bathing suits. Pulp fiction, tango lyrics, and films depicted variety theater performers and tango singers out and about in Buenos Aires nightlife and salesgirls at luxurious department stores flirting with men of a higher social status. These single young women became icons of the modern city. Though such representations were nurtured by domestic changes, they were also supported by a transnational repertoire of images, ideologies, and commodities that circulated globally, condensing complex and contradictory views about women, the nation and modernity. Next to these diverse modern female figures, images and stories of the gaucho, the famous cowboy of the Pampas, flooded the popular media. Portrayed wearing his typical outfit—a poncho and loose-fitting trousers—while drinking mate, an infusion sipped from a gourd, or out hunting, his image appeared in pulp fiction, films, and advertisements, as well as in state-sponsored programs and intellectual movements. The gaucho became the official symbol of being Argentine. Known for his strength, honesty, pride, and his proclivity for violence, he also embodied conservative male values. The

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contrast between images of the gaucho and the joven moderna could not have been more striking. While the former epitomized values rooted in the past, the latter looked confidently to the future. Through the collection and analysis of a wide range of sources, this book explores several Argentine variants of the modern girl figure. As Liz Conor explains in her study on the modern woman in the 1920s, different types of female identities emerged during this period. Modernity had made women more visible in Western culture, and a flurry of images centered on women’s visual status, taking advantage of the new visual technologies. According to Conor, these images of modern femininities, in turn, became part of women’s self-perception as modern.6 In this book, I pursue these considerations by analyzing visual and written descriptions of modern girls as defined by popular culture, the statements attributed to them, and the connection between their depiction and reallife women. I identified four diverse types of modern young women defined mainly by their social class. The archetype of the modern girl in Argentine popular culture was known as the joven moderna, and was characterized by her cosmopolitanism, wealth, and snobbery. She appeared as a widely recognized figure in general interest magazines, penny novels, and films during the 1920s and 1930s, and was consistently depicted throughout the period and across different genres. At the same time, other less-prevalent but nonetheless appealing versions of the modern girl also existed, including the salesgirl and typist figures, (who worked in downtown offices and department stores), the sportswoman, and the beauty contestant. The class identity of these modern girls shifted, in fact, depending on the type of young women being portrayed, the genre, and the context in which she was depicted. Young female workers were usually described as having humble origins, but their class identity could lean toward working- or middle-class values depending on the genre in which they appeared. Melodrama intensified class polarization and identified the female worker with the values of the poor, while magazines were more inclined to use her to spread transnational middle-class ideals. Conversely, many beauty contestants professed middle-class values, though the symbolism of their geographical origins (the rural provinces of Argentina, not its capital city) was equally important in defining an authentic and respectable identity. The only figure not decisively defined by class was the young athletic woman. The importance of social class in the diverse representations of the modern girl

Introduction

confirms the centrality of class to Argentine popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s and especially to the populist melodrama at its core. In fact, much of the gendered and class dynamics encompassed by popular culture during this period continued to be central during the Peronist administration, as I show in the epilogue. Peronism endorsed humble women’s aspirations for respectability and consumer rights while also validating notions of working-class loyalty and resentment over class differences. The book shows that during the 1920s and 1930s, young women were at the center of a public debate about modernity and its consequences for Argentine national identity. In this period, the multifaceted figure of the modern girl embodied the hopes, tensions and anxieties associated with sociocultural transformations, but was also subjected to diverse assessments of the qualities of the Argentine nation. While the young modern woman was sometimes used to symbolize fears of the country’s moral decadence and cultural loss—seen mainly as a consequence of foreign-inspired fashions and manners—at other times, she stood for an “advanced” nation in the media, and her image was a demonstration of national progress and civilization. By reconstructing the emergence and evolution of new female figures and their link to the different versions of Argentina’s national identity, this book not only analyzes the dynamics of sociocultural change, but also explores its gendered and nationalistic dimension.

Popular Culture and Women The emergence of a consumer culture and the advent of a strong feminist movement were two important historical developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cultural historians interested in mass culture, consumer culture, and women’s history have investigated this period from different angles, exploring in particular how gender representations were created as well as transformed by consumer culture and feminism. This book engages with popular Argentine cultural commodities from the 1920s and 1930s, mainly illustrated magazines and newspapers, but also literature, songs, cinema and advertisements, investigating the female representations they conveyed. Feminist cultural studies long ago identified these popular media sources as key to analyzing social and cultural constructions of femininity, but they have also noted the challenges of using these sources.

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The question of whether popular culture manipulates women’s behavior and values has been a crucial one for media studies. The argument that mass culture is fundamentally manipulative emerged from Horkheimer and Adorno’s essay on the “culture industry.” Within the Marxist tradition, they delivered the first systematic analysis of mass culture as a standardized, conformist and homogeneous culture, which transformed the participant into a passive consumer.7 Following this line of thought, many feminist cultural studies scholars have argued that mass culture naturalized and reinforced sexual difference and projected market requirements on women, turning them into simplified and passive consumers of mass commodities.8 Since the 1970s, feminist scholars of both cultural studies and cultural history have criticized this approach and highlighted consumption as an active process, in which audiences assign multiple and complex meanings to the commodities supplied by popular culture based on their race, class, and gender. From this perspective, popular culture is defined as a contested space in which women remake meanings and images of femininity that, in turn, contribute to shaping their identity. Key to this understanding of popular culture is the concept of “lived experience,” which, as Angela McRobbie argues, considers not only the many representations that define femininity in a given historical and geographical context, but also their impact on women’s self-perception.9 According to the current consensus, popular culture provides historically specific, contradictory, and contested notions of femininity, thus becoming one of the forces that shapes rather than reflects women’s attitudes and worldviews.10 While media studies have focused on these topics from a theoretical viewpoint, historians specializing in gender and women’s history have concentrated on the beginning of the twentieth century, a period of significant female political activism. Their focus on this period reveals the novel notions of beauty and fashion that popular culture spreads and their repercussions for the feminist movement. Many scholars, adopting the Frankfurt school’s approach, understood this new beauty culture as a means of social control that objectified and manipulated women as sex objects, and violated their authentic selves. By analyzing U.S. beauty patterns, Lois Banner has argued that “of all the elements of women’s separate culture, the pursuit of beauty has been the most divisive and, ultimately, the most oppressive. In trying to be beautiful, women have been prey to unattractive qualities of narcissism and consumerism.” If the twenties witnessed an increasing liberation in fashion,

Introduction

the historian added, this was “only at the cost of the further commercialization of beauty.”11 According to this view, fashion and beauty were imperative for women during the 1920s and 1930s, which not only enabled their adoption of conventional behavior patterns, but also neutralized female political activism. Rayna Rapp and Ellen Moss have stated that by fusing sex, love, and consumerism, the new American consumer culture that emerged in the twenties co-opted feminist issues and concerns and turned them into lifestyle feminism, which dealt with individual choices and personal fulfillment and caused the decline of feminism as a mass movement.12 As Carolyn Kitch has argued, the transformation of American feminism into a matter of personal style involved “a redirection of women’s societal participation from voting to spending, a recasting of sexuality as silly sexiness, an educational shift away from reform and toward consumerism.”13 These new fashions and notions of beauty were deeply associated with the modern girl, who was considered frivolous and self-centered, and was perceived as taking an apolitical and individualistic approach to emancipation.14 This perspective has tended to separate leisure, consumption, and marketing from the domain of formal politics, as historian Kathy Peiss has recently suggested, and to conceptualize the female consumer as passive.15 Critical of this perception of the passive female consumer, several scholars have focused on the beginning of the twentieth century in order to explore consumption as a site of individual agency, some highlighting the liberating aspects of female consumer practices. According to this last interpretation, consumer culture and sites of consumption like the newly created department stores drew women into a more exciting and appealing life, and into a new individualism that challenged traditional notions of the feminine (passivity, dependence, and maternal nurture).16 These arguments have sometimes overemphasized the equalizing and liberating logic of consumer culture, disregarding that these were opportunities offered to a minority of women in certain social contexts and racial formations. However, they have certainly raised empirical and conceptual questions regarding the narrowness of the passive female consumer perspective and traditional feminist approaches to the subject. Furthermore, they prompted a new scholarship that resisted characterizing consumption as positive or negative, normative or liberating. This novel approach explored how identities are formed through acts of consumption in varying political, social and cultural contexts.17 Kathy Peiss has

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shown how beauty culture helped U.S. women, and particularly working-class ones, face the changing and challenging social conditions of their modern lives, while Lynn Thomas has analyzed South African black women’s consumption of cosmetics not as racial mimicry but as a way of recreating “racial respectability.”18 The question of the modern girl’s consumer agency has been linked to her participation in class and racial politics and to the possibility of contesting hegemonic identities. Therefore, these scholars invite us to think about the political significance of the modern girl’s participation in commodity culture in a way that departs from the formal conception of politics. In the words of Mary Louise Roberts, “the modern woman’s quest for freedom, spoken in the language of fashion and consumerism, deserves reconsideration as a form of collective political engagement.”19 This book engages with this scholarship and argues that beauty culture, fashion, dating, and romance were relevant practices in the lives of actual young women as well as crucial elements in the shaping of their emancipated identities. It complements the historiography on Argentine women in the 1920s and 1930s, which has focused largely on the feminist movement and on female political engagement, education and labor market participation. Through the analysis of (mainly) written historical sources held in both state and private archives, historians have explored women’s significant involvement in the public sphere.20 However, a new approach is emerging firmly, one that sheds light on other, more neglected topics like female fashion, beauty culture, leisure, romance, courtship, childrearing, and homemaking. Studies on the Argentine modern woman figure of the 1920s and 1930s, defined as an urban married mother and expert homemaker, have explored how women shaped their modern identities through the domestic realm and how this process allowed middle-class values and status to materialize.21 At the same time, important works have focused on how consumption allowed working-class males and females to be incorporated into the political arena during the Peronist administrations (1946–1952 and 1952–1955), studying in particular the impact of mass consumption on gender roles.22 Finally, through an exploration of everyday life, scholars working on Argentine youth and family in the 1960s have shown how new ways of experiencing sexuality, culture, and politics challenged traditional authority.23 These scholars have all drawn from mass culture sources ranging from mass-circulation magazines and newspapers to film, radio, and oral testimonies to explore changing male and female identities.

Introduction

In dialogue with these new studies, this book argues that changes in female identity were embraced and debated through the language of cultural consumption, and particularly the language of fashion and beauty. Consumer culture provided young women with a way of expressing their discomfort with social expectations. While the modern woman of the 1920s and 1930s was portrayed as gently altering the private sphere with her new domestic skills, the concomitant joven moderna figure analyzed in this book made much more noise. She was represented as a young, single, trendy, and active individual whose projected self-image as a liberated young woman engendered profound public discussion on the diverse notions of female identity.

Alternative Modernities and Womanhood An analysis of the modern girl figure in Argentina elicits the question of what made her modern and what modernity meant in context. The concept of modernity has been defined in numerous and contrasting ways. Several scholars have criticized the Eurocentric and teleological view of “modernization theory,” according to which modernity in Latin America, Asia, and Africa is inferior to modernity in Europe and the United States. They have suggested thinking about alternative modernities in order to challenge the notion of a singular modernity born in Europe. This book intervenes in debates that decenter the idea of Western modernity by analyzing the distinctive type of modernity that emerged in Argentina. More specifically, it examines the ways in which Argentine popular culture singled out the modern girl figure as a marker of the country’s modernity. Among the scholars who have sought to challenge the notion of a singular modernity, Nicola Miller has proposed distinguishing Latin American modernities from other ones. She has argued that while modernization denotes socioeconomic transformations manifested as industrialization, urbanization, and the emergence of the nation-state, modernities are understood as a “specifically reflexive consciousness of time, space, and self ” that worked “in relation to modernization without reducing it to modernization.”24 Miller has characterized Latin American modernity as uneven and dependent due to Latin Americans’ perception of the subordinate position of their nations in the global order. The combination of formal political sovereignty and economic dependence on international markets and capital generated anxiety

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and defensive nationalisms. In other words, modernization produced essentialist reactions that cast tradition as a refuge from change. Cultural nationalism, the praise of indigenous and mestizo cultures, and the rediscovery of the Hispanic legacy were, in different ways, part of this reaction. Emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century, these various discourses shared a desire to reconcile the positive aspects of modernization with the need to address national difference.25 Latin Americans embraced modernity in several ways. Governmental agents and intellectual elites promoted their specific versions of a political and cultural modernity, while transnational consumer culture advanced other modern identities. Recently, various Latin American scholars have turned to culture in order to study the construction of Latin American national identities. Interested in cultural nationalism, these scholars have analyzed the formal symbols and discourses—monuments and festivals honoring the past, official songs, dances, and costumes—embraced mainly by nation states and intellectuals. These new cultural histories frequently focus on the role of culture in the formation and assertion of an “official” national identity, often produced through joint political and intellectual efforts.26 Yet Latin American people also encountered other kinds of national modernity in advertising, illustrated magazines, pulp fiction and movies, a modernity nurtured by the transnational circulation of cultural products and practices. Consumption played a key role in the construction of Latin American identities; after their independence from European empires, elites demanded increasing amounts of imported goods from Europe in order to create a local version of modernity and show that they were “civilized” and “advanced” nations.27 Scholarship has noted that the influence on Latin America of European mass culture—and, since the 1920s, of North American mass culture as well—was not a unidirectional process. Ana López has argued that, by making modern cities, new customs, fashion, and novel technologies accessible, early Latin American silent films problematized the meaning of locality and created the need to consolidate the self both as a modern and as a national subject.28 Miriam Hansen has referred to this cinematic experience as “vernacular modernism,” describing it as a discourse that articulates the fantasies and anxieties that emerge in relation to American models, while drawing on local traditions.29 Other scholars have focused on Latin Americans as active participants in the globalization process. Jazz music and Hollywood movies were appealing commodities for many

Introduction

of them, who, instead of being characterized as simply passive consumers of U.S. mass culture, are shown appropriating these commodities and fashioning them to their own specific purposes.30 While many scholars working on Latin American cultural history have explored how government programs, elite discourses, and consumer culture have advanced their own versions of alternative modernities, they have often overlooked the importance of gender as constitutive of these modernities.31 Women, as symbolic signifiers of national difference, have been crucial to envisioning the nation.32 Postcolonial scholars, in fact, were among the first to signal the complex role of womanhood in Third World cultural nationalisms. They have described how women have been positioned between the celebration of a precolonial past—possibly connoting backwardness—and the imitation of metropolitan cultures, which could deprive subjects of their “genuine” identity. Accordingly, women have often symbolized contradictory notions of backwardness, uncontaminated national values or national progress.33 In the past fifteen years, Latin American scholars have begun to address the role of gender in official state ideologies and in cultural nationalisms.34 They have signaled the importance of representations of women as bearers of cultural and social tradition, and more specifically, have pointed out the significance of the morena, the sensual dark-skinned singer and dancer, as the typical female representation of Latin American authenticity.35 The figure of the morena epitomized not only the nation’s unique cultural identity but also the myth of mestizaje or racial mixing, which celebrated Latin American racial fusion and cultural hybridity.36 Argentina’s gendered and racial representations of the nation contrasted with this Latin American trope. Argentine intellectuals, artists, and politicians rarely embraced mestizaje or mestizo figures as an official national ideology. Instead, they presented the nation as racially white, as ethnically European, and as virile, signaling these characteristics as a symbol of national progress. The myth of Argentina’s exceptional whiteness, and its alleged similarity to Europe and the United States, was a source of pride for many Argentines at a moment when social theories questioned Latin Americans’ capacity for civilization. This is not to say that Argentines did not participate in the Latin American wave of cultural nationalism. The standards of civilization and racial whiteness to which many Argentine leaders and intellectuals aspired were gradually counterbalanced by the need to affirm Argentina’s authenticity.37 Important leaders and intellectu-

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als praised masculine gaucho culture and countryside conservative values as Argentina’s authentic soul. Most of the scholarship concerned with the emergence of the modern Argentine nation has focused on intellectual movements and government programs that institutionalized gaucho culture as the official symbol of national identity. The prominence of this topic has occluded the role that other popular gendered figures have played in gendering Argentina’s national identity. Only recently, a handful of scholars working on the gendered dynamics of popular culture have shown how different figures—mainly the morocha argentina and the modern urban homemaker—complemented and even disputed the gaucho as the nation’s defining character. These female figures, however, advanced different values. While the morocha symbolized the country’s authenticity, the urban homemaker stood for national progress and middle-class aspirations.38 This book argues that the modern girl, who coexisted with these figures, expressed the country’s profound identification with the promises of modernity, but also with its threats. In fact, the joven moderna was presented as both promoting and downplaying middle-class values, especially social climbing ambitions. Popular culture offered modern representations that differed not only from the nation’s official symbols, which were grounded on the notion of authenticity embodied in male subjects, but also from other popular female symbols of argentinidad, based on a notion of modernity conceived mainly as a positive national trait. Modern girls, as this book will show, were highly visible in the popular media as a symbol of a tense and complex version of a modern Argentina.

Sources and Structure The historical background of the emergence of the different versions of the modern girl has been well studied in extensive literature on Argentine social history, particularly labor history, women’s studies and urban history. Scholars in these fields have focused on the geographical expansion of the capital city, the emergence of a consumer society, the entry of women into the labor market, and the organization of the feminist movement. These processes contextualize the production and, more importantly, the consumption of popular culture. Among the diverse products offered by popular culture, I focus on general and women’s illustrated magazines and daily newspapers with a large readership. Ad-

Introduction

vertisements, movies, pulp fiction, radio programs, and songs are also used as complementary sources. The female types I analyze circulated widely among a heterogeneous audience in the form of written and visual representations. These female types were easily grasped forms of gender representation that served to maintain clear classifications. This book underlines the role of the popular media as an articulator of clashing and disparate representations and messages about gender expectations. By alternatively praising and condemning different modern girl representations and related patterns of behavior and consumption, the popular media also molded gender into stereotypes and images that, in turn, affected women’s perception of themselves. The question of agency and intent in the production of popular culture in general, and of the joven moderna in particular, is a challenging topic. Identifying journalists and cultural creators and guessing the motives behind their varied depictions of the modern girl is problematic, as they usually signed with pseudonyms, hailed from diverse social backgrounds, and presented views at odds with their class origin. Many contemporaries captivated by the modern girl figure were part of the emerging middle classes, like the famous writer Roberto Arlt, while some upper-class elites, such as Manuel Gálvez and Consuelo Moreno de Dupuy de Lôme, were among the most important detractors of the upper-class modern girl figure. More important to consider, however, was the fact that the pressure to create profitable cultural products was a driving force in their work. This produced inherently polysemic cultural commodities, shaped by the contradictory forces of mass cultural capitalism. Therefore, the intention of cultural producers, though important, becomes less central to the analysis. Shifting the focus from the level of representation to the lived experience of women is also challenging, especially because of the analytical implications of using the category of agency and because of the limited sources available. In the absence of oral testimonies for this period, I have relied on letters to the editor written by ordinary women and men, along with interviews and memoirs of famous actresses and tango singers, sportswomen and beauty queens; this approach allows the voices of popular media consumers, although mediated, to come through. As sources left by common women are always scarce, I filled this gap through an analysis of their style, studying fashion as a visual statement. I define agency as the capacity of these young women to shape the events of their lives. However, I am interested in using agency as a category that constructs not

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only notions of independence and autonomy, but also of contradictory intentions and narratives.39 In my analysis of lived experiences, I have limited the focus to women who lived in Buenos Aires, as most popular media sources, though targeting a national audience, were produced and consumed in the capital city. The book is divided into five chapters that chronicle the emergence and transformation of four representations of the modern female and reveal the diverse meanings of the modern girl figure. Each chapter presents a particular modern female type and examines how it was forged through the complex interplay of cultural, racial, gendered and social formations both global and local. Chapter 1 examines the sociocultural changes that characterized Argentina, and particularly Buenos Aires, in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the emergence of a consumer society and the expanded presence of women in public spaces. Rapid social and cultural transformations sparked a debate on the promises and perils of becoming a modern nation. Intellectual movements and government programs aimed at promoting cultural nationalism advanced their own ways of reconciling cosmopolitan modernity and local tradition, while popular culture became a platform for debating the role of women in constructing a modern national identity. Chapter 2 studies how the flapper, the archetypal modern girl, was construed by popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Mass media was engaged in a debate about the defining traits of the American flapper and her Argentine counterpart. Thus, while the flapper inhabited a distant land and was looked at with a mixture of curiosity and criticism, the Argentine joven moderna was defined as belonging to the upper classes and, due to her eagerness to consume popular fashions both domestic and foreign, was considered frivolous and a snob. Seen more as a product of mass culture than as a concrete reality, the Argentina flapper was used to alert the public to the dangerous effects of international consumer capitalism on gender and national identities. But this new figure not only generated criticism. Popular culture also presented other less negative versions of the joven moderna. In chapter 3, I turn from the upper-class flapper to representations of female workers in order to explore how pink-collar labor influenced women’s daily lives, especially in the areas of dating and fashion. By tracing the representations and lived experience of these working modern girls, the chapter examines the contradiction expressed by the popular media, which alternatively praised the freedom, autonomy, and personal fulfillment associated with female work while at the same time condemning the effects of work and consumption on traditional

Introduction

gender roles. Chapter 4 examines the popular media’s campaign to promote female physical culture to show how notions of health and beauty were used to promote and justify women’s exercise and how these conceptions redefined traditional ideas of femininity. Physical culture’s appeal was based on its combination of a modern agenda, which focused on the social rewards of individual physical fitness and beauty, and nationalist and eugenic concerns. A well-built, healthy, beautiful female body went hand in hand with a vigorous nation. In chapter 5, I turn to modern girls who were called to serve the nation through their beauty. Beauty contests functioned as an arena for debates about Argentina’s ideals of womanhood and its national identity. Beauty contestants embodied an ideal that valorized whiteness as it emerged from the intermingling of diverse “white European races,” and promoted a softened version of the upper-class modern girl figure. At the same time, in forging images of argentinidad and representing a modern Argentine femininity, the winners of these contests embodied values of nationhood that symbolized the progress Argentina was achieving, as well as its potential among nations. Finally, the epilogue examines Peronism, and especially the figure of Evita, through the lens of the reformulation of gender identities in 1920s and 1930s, and highlights the changes and continuities that the Peronist administration effected regarding representations of the female and their role in the gendering of Argentina. The proliferation of images of modern girls in Argentine popular culture speaks to a profound change in gender relations. Young modern women were a source of concern for many contemporary voices in the popular media because they condensed the possible negative consequences of modernization. At the same time, popular culture often acclaimed sportswomen, beauty contest winners, and the pink-collar modern girls of the 1920s and 1930s. Described as alluring, fashionable and independent, these models of the female were a source of fascination within popular culture. Consumer culture and popular culture also offered young Argentine women new opportunities to go beyond social expectations. Their participation in international consumer culture presented them with a life of independence and excitement, or at least, for the majority of young women, the possibility to dream of such a life. In the context of Argentina, this signified an important change. It meant that young women’s presence in the public space—gaining access to the streets, to a job, to consumption, to sports—reconfigured the lives of this book’s protagonists as well as the contours of that space. By providing an Argentine perspective on

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gender, modernity, and consumption, this project adds a new pin to the global map that marks the modern girl’s presence worldwide. Further, in specifying how Argentine mass culture imagined modernity as a gendered practice and therefore fashioned a multifaceted modern girl figure who combined traditional and cosmopolitan traits, the book challenges narratives that reduce modernity to a singular pattern.

1 Building a Modern Nation

The lives of a great number of Argentines, especially in urban areas, were profoundly affected by the economic, social, and cultural changes that took place in the country from the end of the nineteenth century onward. Argentina’s strengthened position as a grain and meat exporter on world markets, along with an influx of capital and immigrants, led to widespread economic prosperity. Buenos Aires became the hub of emerging consumer capitalism, a large metropolis characterized by social fluidity. Economic growth also provided employment and career opportunities to a growing number of women. Their presence in public and their access to consumer culture changed notions of entertainment, socialization, and fashion. This rapid social and cultural transformation—and especially the rapidly changing role of women—raised a debate among intellectuals, the state, and ordinary Argentine women and men on the promises and perils of becoming a modern nation. This debate, though present in intellectual and elite circles, was chiefly conducted on the pages of illustrated magazines and newspapers, in tango songs and in motion pictures, which provided a platform for the dispute over acceptable gender standards and for the definition of a modern national identity. This chapter situates the figure of the joven moderna within the economic, social and cultural context of an emerging modern Argentina. I explore the sociocultural changes that characterized the 1920s and 1930s, especially those affecting the lives of women, and examine the diverse ways in which cosmopolitan modernity and local tradition were reconciled by intellectual movements, government programs of cultural nationalism, and also mass culture, in order to highlight the central role of gender in the discourse of modern nationhood.

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Women and Social Change in Times of Growth From the end of the nineteenth century onward, Argentina experienced rapid economic growth and demographic expansion. The country’s role as a major producer and exporter of wool, beef and grain for the European market led to a veritable economic boom and massive immigration. From 1875 to 1930, Argentina’s gross domestic product increased by a factor of 20 and the population rose fivefold, from two to twelve million, largely due to immigrant inflow.1 The expansion of the domestic market and the rise in the demand for new products in the 1920s led to the massive influx of U.S.-finished manufactured goods. By the end of the 1920s Argentina was receiving 37 percent of the United States’ total exports to Latin America. It was the continent’s largest share of such exports, followed by Brazil at just 20 percent.2 Although Argentina’s economic prosperity was linked to the export of commodities and the import of manufactured goods, this did not preclude significant industrial growth. The 1920s witnessed the arrival of American subsidiaries that manufactured metal, home appliances, and cosmetic and toiletry products. This prosperity also contributed to building local industry, particularly consumer goods like textiles and food products targeting the middle and working classes.3 The economic crisis of 1929 interrupted international trade and migration, and reversed a decade of strong economic growth. The Argentine economy, however, recovered relatively quickly from the Depression, and internal migration replaced the international influx of newcomers. By the mid-1930s, grain exports had resumed and, due to the lack of imported goods, the manufacturing sector expanded significantly.4 The rapid economic expansion of these years was most evident in the city of Buenos Aires. Besides being the capital city and the country’s most important commercial port, it was also the main point of entry and final destination for European immigrants, and the city chosen by migrants from other provinces as well. In 1914, 25 percent of the Argentine population resided in Buenos Aires, which had blossomed into a large-scale cosmopolitan metropolis with 2.3 million inhabitants by the 1930s.5 The downtown area ably adapted to the new levels of economic prosperity. Fashionable department stores, cafés, restaurants, banks, cabarets and movie theaters proliferated in the elegant centro (city center). With its luxury and consumer capitalism, Buenos Aires began to be known as the “Paris of South America.” Meanwhile, new suburban neighborhoods be-

Building a Modern Nation

came home to the sons and daughters of immigrants, who, thanks to this economic prosperity, were able to abandon the overcrowded downtown conventillos (as their homes were known) where their parents had lived and build their own houses in the emerging neighborhoods.6 The northern and western areas of the city grew by leaps and bounds, partly due to the concomitant expansion of public utilities across the city.7 Many residents of the new barrios lived far from their workplaces, but thanks to efficient public transportation, including subways, trams, and buses, the urban space began to be densely occupied and well-connected, favoring in turn new patterns of social interactions among barrio residents.8 Rapid economic growth, rising industrial production, and urbanization generated a society profoundly driven by consumption. Fernando Rocchi has classified the Argentina of the turn of the century as a consumer society, in which “fulfillment of demand creates new desires for consumption and fosters dissatisfaction.”9 Thanks to the increase in real salaries during the period, particularly in the years between 1918 and 1930, consumption expanded, and became increasingly tied to social status, class, and changes in taste and fashion.10 While middle-class consumers were the primary drivers of demand, the working classes also contributed to consumption.11 New barrio residents were eager to invest their time and money in a growing variety of entertainment and massproduced goods, and constituted the most important market for the domestic industry’s products.12 This new consumer society generated a sense of “democratization” and blurred class distinctions, as people of the middle and working classes were now capable of emulating the taste of their social superiors. Department stores and advertising campaigns paved the way for this new sense of standardization. The palaces of the fledgling consumer culture included A la Ciudad de Londres (1873), Gath and Chaves (1910), and the Argentine subsidiary of the British Harrods (1913), and their large buildings, with several elegantly decorated floors, offered a variety of consumer goods arranged in women’s, men’s, and children’s sections. The displayed goods, together with the tearooms, fountains, and even orchestras, presented a radically different world from everyday life. It was an idyllic world, and more importantly, one everybody could access simply by stepping into one of these stores.13 Advertisements, equally, promoted the dream of a world devoid of class difference, in which anyone could attain respectability and a higher social status simply by buying the proper suit or dress.

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Members of the elite were concerned about the democratization consumer culture had inaugurated, and denigrated the efforts of people of modest means to purchase respectability and a higher class status. In their view, these nouveaux riches lacked interest, distinction, and grace. In fact, through the quality and origin of the goods they consumed, as well as through the diverse uses they made of these same goods, the elite made great efforts to re-create a sense of distinction that they perceived was under attack.14 And the elite were not alone in endorsing limits to successful social climbing. Producers of mass culture, and especially tango and pulp fiction authors, also tended to criticize the naivety of those who believed in utopian promises of easy and fast upward mobility—especially women.15 In fact, consumption began to be increasingly perceived as a feminine practice. Advertising agencies put women at the center of marketing strategies because of their alleged knowledge of the market; they characterized their target audience as primarily female. The use of brands, along with “educational advertising,” basically aimed to steer the female consumer clear of cheaper products and educate her on buying high-quality ones. The successful campaign of Unilever soap and toiletries, for example, which used women’s magazines and the radio to reach suburban stay-at-home wives and mothers, showed the importance of recognizing the gendered nature of consumption, as Rory Miller’s study has noted.16 Although different products targeted diverse types of women, ranging from typists to newly married housewives, advertising sent a very similar message to women: prestige, beauty, and sex appeal, key to catching, marrying, and retaining men of higher social status, were some of the benefits derived from purchasing the promoted products.17 The advertising promise of climbing the social ladder was not just a sales gimmick. Rapid economic growth had produced significant levels of social mobility. The first estimation of Argentine annual incomes, completed in 1914, showed that the lower classes constituted 55 percent of the total population, while the rich represented just 0.33 percent. The 39 percent of the population in between, as Fernando Rocchi has suggested, was a group of people that could be identified as middle class.18 Besides these telling numbers, a significant number of Argentine-born children of immigrants could afford a good education, domestically manufactured goods, and homeownership in one of the heterogeneous barrios in which they settled.19 Markers of strong ethnic identities did not preclude a relatively rapid process of national integration.

Building a Modern Nation

While it was a fact that an extensive network of ethnic mutual-aid societies, clubs, and newspapers existed, and that the first generation of immigrants preferred to marry within their ethnic groups, scholars have also shown that the second generation’s proportion of marriages outside their own ethnic group grew.20 Moreover, the cultural and linguistic similarities between Italians and Spaniards—then the two largest immigrant groups—and the already native population also contributed to the rapid Argentinization of the immigrant population.21 Luis Alberto Romero and other historians have stated that these developments dissolved the homogeneous and defiant working-class identity of previous decades, giving way to a more conformist and reformist identity. These “popular sectors,” as they were named, inhabited a mobile and open society and were characterized by the pursuit of self-improvement, higher social status, and respectability, all quintessentially middle-class values.22 Although there is undoubtedly some truth to this depiction of the up-and-coming working classes during this period, some scholars have also emphasized other aspects overlooked in this interpretation. Matthew Karush has shown that although mass culture encouraged the individual pursuit of material abundance and upward mobility, it also forwarded populist denunciations against the rich. The versions of national identity disseminated in mass culture reproduced and intensified class divisions by denigrating the rich as selfish and immoral, while extolling the working poor’s dignity and solidarity.23 Equally, Ezequiel Adamovsky has stated that while many values associated with the middle classes were taking root in the 1920s and 1930s, including notions of respectability, frugality, and modesty, a self-perceived middle-class identity was not widespread in Argentina until Peronism.24 One of the most emblematic middle-class ideals that took hold during the first decades of the twentieth century was in fact domesticity, the idea that true women stayed at home and took care of their offspring. The image of the respectable family, composed of a hardworking father, a stay-at-home mother, and a few dutiful children living in a comfortable house in the suburbs became prominent in this period. This model was constructed through a complex process involving normalizing discourse from the government, the church, and the medical sciences, and which converged with urban sectors’ aspirations to social respectability.25 Statistics provided empirical evidence of this transformation in the family

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model, as was occurring in other parts of the world. Argentina was indeed experiencing a demographic change, especially in Buenos Aires and other exportoriented provinces like Entre Ríos and Santa Fe, where birth rates had begun to decline. While at the turn of the century, the country had a net birth rate of 44 per thousand, this had fallen to 26 per thousand by the end of the 1930s. The trend continued, dropping to 21 per thousand in 1947, mainly as a result of greater access to birth control and women marrying later. In terms of family size, this meant that in 1914, Argentine women had an average of 5.5 children, while three decades later the number had fallen to 3.2. In the richest and most populated city in the country, Buenos Aires, a mother bore an average of 3.4 children in 1914 but only 1.3 children by 1936.26 Although the nuclear family appeared as an ideal during this period, contemporaries were alarmed by what they perceived as the dizzying pace of this process. The decline in the birth rate, coupled with the drop in immigration during the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s, only exacerbated the perceived population growth problem. Population experts—mainly healthcare professionals and economists—were concerned about these rapid demographic changes, arguing that in the near future, the country risked depopulation.27 Eugenic discourses expanded precisely in the moment when the preoccupation with these problems was spreading to the public. Eugenics manifested the need to control the quantity and quality of the population, focusing its discourse on the regeneration of what was loosely called the “Argentine race.” Eugenic arguments were disseminated through education campaigns, public health measures, and maternal health and childcare initiatives. Among the most controversial and divisive proposals promoted by eugenics were laws regulating marriages and the fringe view of sterilizing those deemed unfit for reproduction.28 Scholars have highlighted the variety and even the mutually contradictory nature of racial categorization systems that existed in Argentina during the first half of the twentieth century, showing that race was a pervasive and malleable category. As Eduardo Zimmermann has signaled, race could refer to national populations imagined as different from one another, as, for example, in the use of the term “Argentine race,” or could indicate the distinction between different human groups, like “whites” or “blacks,” and the hierarchies among them.29 At the same time, references to neo-Lamarckian systems of racial classification and to the importance of the environment coexisted with notions of

Building a Modern Nation

race grounded in bodily differences and heredity in scientific discourse.30 At the center of these issues was the deeply ingrained assertion of the European and white origins of Argentina’s population. This shared image of the country as a “melting pot” built a myth of origins based on several exclusions. African and indigenous heritages, as well as the population from “the interior,” as provinces of Argentina were called, were erased from the representation of the national community.31 Concern about the quality and quantity of the population had several offshoots, including pronatalist policies and discourses that exalted women’s maternal role. They taught women how to be better housewives and mothers and emphasized the importance of a healthy female body to enhance the Argentine race. Manuals and sections on domestic science and childcare abounded in women’s magazines during this period. The aim was to impress upon women— especially lower-class women—the importance of thrift, cleanliness, and the art of raising healthy babies and children.32 Concomitantly, advertisers and manufacturers reinforced this powerful image of respectable domesticity by promoting the consumption of modern goods targeted especially at the emergent middle-class woman.33 The spread of the domesticity ideal was a fundamental change both in Argentine society overall and specifically in Buenos Aires. However, other scholars have also emphasized the constant transformations and challenges that this model faced. Paula Bontempo, Rebekah Pite, and Inés Pérez have explored the emergence of the efficient mother and homemaker representation and its relation to consumer culture. Also known as the modern woman figure, this image was widely depicted in the mass media as revolutionizing the private sphere through the professionalization of domestic duties and the embodiment of nascent middle-class values.34 At the same time, many women simply ignored the mandate to refrain from paid work. Recent statistics on female labor in Buenos Aires show that in 1914, 27.9 percent of the economically active female population held positions in factories, shops and services, while by 1947, this figure had risen to 55.8 percent. At the national level, 1.2 million women were employed in 1947, 59 percent in the tertiary sector and 27 percent in manufacturing.35 Among those occupations considered respectable, sales and office work attracted larger numbers of women.36 Concomitantly, the expansion of the education system gave young women the opportunity to attend school and learn teaching and business skills.37

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While a considerable number of lower-class women entered the labor market, increasing their presence in public places, upper-class women tended to get involved in charity work. By deploying the values of domesticity, they usually participated in the public sphere by running institutions and programs to address the needs of working-class mothers and children.38 Women’s public presence led to a 1926 civil code amendment that enabled women of legal age, regardless of their civil status, to exercise all the rights that the law granted men.39 The presence of women in public life facilitated their emergence in the political arena. A number of feminist organizations were founded during this period to lobby for rights and reforms, including legislation on education, better labor conditions for women, and suffrage.40 Feminism tended to justify women’s involvement in social and political activism on the basis of their innate feminine qualities, which made them morally superior to men.41 While most feminists in the first decade of the twentieth century concurred on the need for civil equality, women’s political rights were a stickier issue, as many feminists did not entirely support giving the vote to women. However, the demand for the right to vote gained widespread societal consensus and political support in the twenties. Although the suffragist struggle reached a pivotal point in 1932, when the Senate considered various proposals for granting women the right to vote, Argentine women would not be allowed at the polls until 1947. The conservative climate of the 1930s caused projects of national suffrage to languish, signaling the defeat of the political goal of the women’s movement.42 Just as noteworthy as the developments in women’s education, work and feminism was the freedom women encountered in the social sphere at the time. Many young women had more chances than before to socialize in public places, attend unchaperoned outings, and openly flirt with men.43 Some gained access to literature and illustrated magazines that explored new topics such as sexuality and eroticism.44 Countless young women adopted the latest fashion trends and wore bobbed hair, heavy makeup, and short skirts in order to express confidence and independence when out and about. Feminists, especially socialist ones, found this newfound freedom concerning, as they wanted to avoid the associations among female emancipation, loose morals, and new fashions. In their opinion, by expressing their liberties through fashion and sexuality, women were not only jeopardizing true emancipation, but also undermining the seriousness of feminist goals.45 Unwilling to be aligned with conservatives,

Building a Modern Nation

feminists nonetheless shared the social fear that young women were being corrupted through exposure to new fashions and manners. This ongoing debate on gender transformation reflected not only concerns regarding women’s role in society, but also, as I will argue, different notions of modern nationhood.

The Rise of Modern National Identities The two decades between 1920 and 1940 were marked by a rapidly changing economic and social milieu. Argentines developed diverse cultural responses to experiences of modernization, as they were aware of the allure of the modern, but also of the possible negative impact that these developments could have in a country with a subordinate role in the international arena.46 Thus, the fascination with modernity created profound ambivalence and became a source of anxiety. Intellectuals, as well as governmental agents and cultural producers, shared the idea of making Argentina into a modern nation, and put forward different views on how cosmopolitan modernity could be reconciled with local tradition. During the first decade of the twentieth century, cultural nationalism was at the forefront of intellectual discourse. The central project of the nationalist movement—whose most outstanding and well-known representatives were Ricardo Rojas, Manuel Gálvez and Leopoldo Lugones—was the consolidation of a coherent national identity and the promotion of nationalistic sentiment to oppose what some considered the excessive cosmopolitanism of Argentine society. Members of the movement shared the conviction that foreign influences and the growing immigrant population threatened to destroy the country’s authentic traditions, an autochthonous culture embedded in the Hispanic past and molded by the experience of the countryside.47 Its main figure was the courageous and loyal gaucho, who had been a central character in the criollista literature popular at the turn of the century.48 By the early 1930s, the choice between an authentic and inauthentic Argentina was still central to the debates over national character, but the old dichotomy confronting native and immigrant values had dissipated, especially due to the drastic slump in immigration. While the authentic Argentina continued to be, as Delaney has argued, the ser nacional, a distinctive essence rooted in the rural provinces and in gaucho folkways, Buenos Aires, with its cosmopolitanism, was depicted as false and superficial.49 Conservative nationalists of the

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1930s radicalized some of the proposals of cultural nationalism. In the context of economic crisis, corrupt oligarchic governments, the political aftereffects of the Russian revolution, and the international rise of fascism, conservative nationalists expressed anti-liberal, authoritarian and xenophobic sentiments.50 They criticized liberal democracy, and especially the Radical regime of 1916 to 1930, for its inefficiency and populism, and embraced corporate and military rule as a guiding principle, contributing with their ideas to the coup d’état that brought General Uriburu to power in 1930. Moreover, they spread a revisionist interpretation of Argentine history that celebrated the Federalist caudillos while criticizing the liberal forefathers of the nation and British imperialism for the country’s sluggish development. For the conservative nationalists, argentinidad was rooted in the federal traditions of the interior and in its virile gauchos and caudillos.51 Many of these intellectuals’ arguments coincided with state discourses. Successive administrations, from Radical to Conservative presidencies, promoted nationalist campaigns intended to mold a modern national identity.52 Public education and state-sponsored cultural programs spread a set of discourses and images of this national worldview. From the turn of the century on, one of the most pressing public concerns for the consolidation of a homogeneous Argentine identity was the country’s cosmopolitan population.53 In response, the state increased access to public education and launched far-reaching national literacy campaigns, which translated into a drastic reduction of illiteracy, from 18 percent in 1914 to seven percent in 1938.54 Concomitantly, during both the Radical and Conservative administrations, the state organized patriotic rituals and national festivities, exalting the historical characters and emblems of the nation. At school, students were supposed to raise the flag, sing the national anthem, and commemorate Independence Day as a way of strengthening their argentinidad and of setting aside their ethnic identities. In the 1930s, the Conservative regime emerging from the 1930 civic-military coup reinforced these nationalistic rituals. During “The Infamous Decade,” as the period has come to be known due to the fraud-ridden political system, the state made Flag Day a national holiday and introduced Pin Day at schools, when female students were expected to make and distribute among their companions pins featuring the colors of Argentina’s flag.55 The state also launched gaucho culture as an official national symbol. In 1939, the government of Buenos Aires proclaimed November 10th—the birthday of

Building a Modern Nation

José Hernández, author of El Gaucho Martín Fierro—to be the “Day of Tradition.” On this day, people would honor the nation’s rural roots, public schools would give classes on native art and music, and the national radio broadcaster would play only autochthonous music. That year, two folklore museums opened, one in the province of Buenos Aires and the other in the capital city, where gaucho culture was re-created and exalted.56 These nationalist campaigns ensured that people with linguistic and ethnic differences, divided by regional and diasporic affiliations, would ultimately come to identify as modern Argentine citizens. In creating these modern citizens, mass cultural capitalism, and specifically advertising, illustrated magazines, popular fiction, and movies, proved as important as government programs and intellectual proposals. Mass consumption and mass entertainment spread images and ideas from around the world, creating tension between internationalist desires and nationalist aspirations. Argentine middle- and high-income consumers—who usually resided in Buenos Aires and in a few other rich provinces—became increasingly fascinated by American consumer culture during the first decades of the twentieth century. Images of American movie stars and sports heroes along with U.S.-manufactured technology-intensive goods, such as automobiles, radios, and cameras, were in high demand, as were other consumer items like cosmetics, over-thecounter drugs, and personal care products.57 Advertising played a key role in promoting these overseas commodities. As Argentine consumer patterns were considered very similar to those in other Western countries, many advertising campaigns imported market research techniques developed in North America to sell their products in Argentina. This was particularly the case for marketing agencies like J. Walter Thompson (JWT) and McCann Erickson, which had opened Argentine subsidiaries in 1929 and 1935 respectively.58 Odorono deodorant and Pond’s cold cream, for example, whose campaigns had been designed by JWT, were promoted with the same message displayed in different national contexts. While Odorono showed the young, beautiful, glamorous modern woman endorsing an active social life by using the promoted product, Pond’s employed a testimonial ad, capitalizing on the emotional prestige of, in this case, a beautiful and accomplished Spanish princess in order to sell its face cream among Argentine women.59 Advertising emphasized what international agencies considered universal values—like the idea that every woman aspired to be civilized, sophisticated, charming and

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intelligent—in order to sell their products.60 However, a successful advertising campaign also required an agency to adapt the message to local consumers, whose tastes sometimes differed from American ones. Argentines, for example, seemed to relate more to heroes than ordinary people, as seen in a failed campaign that praised common people’s professional achievements.61 Deploying national culture, and especially the gaucho figure, in order to appeal to the local consumer became a common advertising tactic during the 1930s. Thus, as Ricardo Salvatore has shown, “‘gaucho’ stories served to promote foreign meat packing firms, cattle-ranching ‘estancias’ helped to sell American cars, and the prestige of British punctuality was suddenly used in connection with ‘national’ traditions.”62 Both general illustrated and specialized magazines offered snapshots of modernity by giving common people a glimpse into the sophisticated lifestyles of wealthy people and films stars, both at home and abroad. The spread of national literacy campaigns created a new reading audience that had now expanded from the middle to the working classes, and a plethora of weekly magazines and newspapers catered to them.63 Among the various general interest magazines published during this period, Caras y Caretas (1898) emerged as the most popular and important thanks to its handy format and low cost. Its combination of photo reports and written articles on diverse topics ranging from local to international news coverage, and from costumbrista tales to articles about the latest fashions and technology, made it an attractive product for a vast and socially varied readership.64 Other illustrated magazines such as El Hogar (1904), edited by Haynes, and Mundo Argentino (1911) and Atlántida (1918), edited by Atlántida, replicated the format of Caras y Caretas. While El Hogar targeted the upper middle class, the Atlántida publishing house was interested in capturing the attention of the middle and upwardly mobile working classes.65 With this goal in mind, Atlántida also decided to launch the first magazine for (and run by) women. Drawing inspiration from foreign magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Para Ti (1922) was presented as the modern woman’s guide to the world. As Paula Bontempo has shown, Para Ti defined the modern woman chiefly as a professional mother and housewife. It featured articles and illustrations on fashion, cooking, and interior design of both national and American origin, and offered advice on motherhood and housekeeping-related topics as well as on romantic and work-related issues. Although the magazine

Building a Modern Nation

faced competition from Plus Ultra (1916) and Femenil (1925)—both of which targeted middle- and upper-middle-class women—it cornered the market until the emergence of Vosotras (1935), edited by Julio Korn.66 As part of its specialization strategy, Atlántida also launched El Gráfico (1919), dedicated to the promotion of physical culture and sports.67 The profound transformation in publishing could also be seen in the layout of newspapers and fiction. Both acquired a more flexible and appealing format, along with more accessible prices. Among the dailies, Crítica (1913) was the first popular tabloid and the most widely read. Its sensationalist techniques, including detailed crime reports, comprehensive coverage of Buenos Aires nightlife, and a varied array of topics of interest, appealed especially to “popular” audiences. As Silvia Saítta has argued, the key to its popularity was its transformation into “the voice of the people:” it made use of inclusive language and portrayed itself as the true representative of common people’s interests.68 Its most important competitors were Última Hora (1908) and Noticias Gráficas (1931), edited by the conservative newspaper La Nación.69 The general public was now also able to afford the latest editions of national and international bestsellers, edited as paperback novels and pulp fiction.70 Among the most popular pulp fiction was La novela semanal. With a weekly release and a reduced price, it contained mostly romantic short stories that were avidly consumed by women of the lower classes.71 The 1920s were marked not only by an expansion of the publishing market, but also by the emergence of tango as a mass cultural product. Tango, born around 1880 in the poor outer districts of Buenos Aires, was initially disdained by the porteño elite, who considered it an immoral lowbrow dance of prostitutes and pimps. Thanks to campaigns by cultural critics designed to polish and sanitize tango’s sensual movements and its gender characters, it gradually gained social prominence and conquered a vast domestic audience, turning into the most popular form of Argentine music.72 While the publishing boom and tango revolutionized popular culture of the 1920s, the emergence of radio and cinema, and especially of Argentine films, marked the following decade. During the 1930s, radio programs expanded greatly and reached Argentines of all social classes, especially women, who were the most important audience for radio programs, broadcast music (especially tango) and radio theater.73 Among the 23 radio stations on the air in Buenos Aires in 1935, Radio Nacional (1924), which turned into Radio Bel-

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grano (1933)—and the successful Antena and Radiolandia magazines, focused on cinema and radio stars—targeted lower-class audiences and had plenty of success. In terms of its reach and popularity, however, cinema was the new medium par excellence. The country’s first public exhibition of films—which included the Lumière brothers’ short documentary film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat—took place in Buenos Aires in 1896. Over the next two decades, Argentine entrepreneurs began to shoot newsreels and documentaries, and soon tried their hand at silent movies as well.74 The local film industry, however, encountered a crisis in the early 1920s due to the rise of Hollywood cinema, and only with the appearance of “talkies” at the beginning of the 1930s did the Argentine film industry rebound.75 The lower and middle classes were the main audience for these domestic films. The upper classes tended to consider them lowbrow entertainment and preferred Hollywood pictures, shown at high prices in fancy downtown theaters.76 While popular culture exposed readers to global cultural circuits by showing modern cities, fashion, and technologies, and encouraged consumerism and middle-class aspirations, it also gave them a sense of locality by relying on earlier forms of popular culture. Tango songs, gauchesca tradition, the short comic theater plays known as sainetes, and pulp fiction, which shaped Argentine popular culture, were deeply melodramatic. They disseminated the image of a rigid and immobile society, marked by fatalistic resignation.77 Concomitant with the image of a free-flowing porteño class structure—mainly emphasized in advertisements and magazines, which pushed self-improvement and consumerism as key values—melodramatic stories displayed a Manichean division between the poor and the rich. In these fictions, the poor are generous and noble, while the rich are depicted as pretentious, arrogant and frivolous. The melodramatic structure that shaped movies, pulp fiction, and radio programs signaled the futility of attempting to climb the social ladder and dissuaded the poor from doing so. As Matthew Karush has argued, by repeatedly criticizing the rich and praising the poor, domestic filmmakers, lyricists, screenwriters, radio entrepreneurs, and journalists imprinted authenticity on mass culture, and re-created a version of argentinidad that reproduced and intensified class divisions. The mass-cultural national identity that emerged as a result of this was deeply populist and identified the nation with the poor.78 The different versions of argentinidad endorsed by the cultural and politi-

Building a Modern Nation

cal campaigns of nationalists as well as those promoted by popular culture also included and transmitted clear notions about gender.79 The gaucho figure, depicted as a courageous, honorable, and independent horseman, and identified with icons of masculinity such as knives and horses, was central to the definition of argentinidad. Praised as a national emblem by the state, nationalist intellectuals and the popular culture, the gaucho gave Argentine national identity a profoundly virile manifestation.80 Female characters were not given the same symbolic place in the official imagery of the nation. The gaucho’s partner, the china, was relegated to a secondary role in stories that portrayed his life. Some scholars have argued that, contrary to this official imagery, popular culture did present lower-class women, and men, as symbols of a patriarchal and traditional notion of argentinidad.81 More specifically, Ezequiel Adamovsky has argued that the figure of the morocha argentina, which emerged in melodramatic stories at the turn of the twentieth century and was defined by its lower-class authenticity, was the embodiment of national femininity.82 While the morocha populated tango songs and films of the 1920s and 1930s, popular culture was also permeated with modern representations of the nation. Rebekah Pite has stated that both Doña Petrona, whose run as a celebrity chef began in the 1930s, and her cuisine became potent symbols of argentinidad. This was, however, a gender- and class-specific version of nationhood, as Petrona’s modern urban homemaker followers belonged to a relatively privileged group of middle-class women who stood for the ideal of upward social mobility and national progress through consumption.83 The modern girl figure analyzed in this book played a concomitant role in gendering the nation. Emblematic of values such as progress, she was also seen as symbolizing the threats of modernity.

E Illustrated magazines, pulp fiction, music, cinema, and advertisements portrayed trend-conscious upper-class young women driving expensive automobiles, coquettish saleswomen and typists walking around the city wearing the latest fashions, and beautiful, active women playing sports. Popular culture exposed Argentines to modern representations of womanhood, forged, in turn, in the transnational circulation of images, goods and ideas related to the expansion of consumer capitalism. Through these cultural products, Ar-

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gentines debated the changing role of women as well as acceptable gender standards. At the same time, popular culture also contributed to the construction of an Argentine national identity. Mass culture tended to emphasize characterizations of Argentina as a modern and civilized country, which meant praising some of the social and cultural changes that affected women while rejecting others that could jeopardize argentinidad, in order to generate a domestic version of modernity. As I will argue, this constant struggle to define the nation as modern and Argentine led to the emergence of several modern girl figures. Among them was an upper-class young woman fond of conspicuous and cosmopolitan consumption, who became the most criticized version of the modern girl figure in Argentina.

2 The Flapper and the Joven Moderna

In the 1927 short story “Una mujer muy moderna” [A very modern woman], Manuel Gálvez portrays the young protagonist as “the perfect embodiment of the modern girl.” “She smoked, danced in a tight embrace with her partner, drank heavily at parties, talked and went out with her boyfriends, dressed provocatively, read indecent books, had radical ideas about morality . . . rejected religion and was a priestess of the flirt cult.”1 A popular conservative writer, Gálvez encapsulated a series of very common views about the archetypal modern girl, globally known as the flapper. Mainstream mass media of the 1920s and 1930s became almost obsessed with this female icon, who appeared in magazines and newspaper cartoons, comic strips, social commentaries, and advertisements. The modern girl also materialized as the fictional heroine of short, serialized stories ( folletines) and films. Descriptions of her look—usually short-bobbed hair, noticeable makeup, and loose-fitting dresses—and of her provocative behavior, which involved flirting, dancing, smoking, and drinking, repeatedly appeared in these cultural products. The overview of her main traits was often accompanied by disparaging remarks and heated debates about the essence of this novel figure. Many scholars have shown that the modern girl figure was a worldwide phenomenon.2 Kathy Peiss has pointed out that while a process of linear Americanization might be too simple of an explanation for the similarities and simultaneous appearance of modern girl figures worldwide, there was in fact a close relationship between the growth of American consumer culture and the emergence of the modern girl around the globe.3 In order to understand this complex relationship, I focus on how the Argentine mass media perceived the American flapper and, in turn, how it defined her Argentine counterpart. While

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the global archetype of the flapper was typically described as young, white, and single, the Argentine joven moderna added to this archetype an unquestionably upper-class status and a penchant for both cosmopolitan commodity culture and national popular culture, especially the tango. The fact that the joven moderna was the predominant depiction of the modern girl figure in Argentina did not preclude the existence of other versions of modern girls. By the same token, the fact that she was often mocked and criticized did not prevent young women throughout the country from aspiring to the lifestyle associated with this archetype, even when their circumstances differed greatly due to social factors. Although she was not presented as an exemplary figure, the joven moderna became a popular type of modern girl.

Views on the American Flapper Argentine mass media featured images of American women with increasing frequency, principally Hollywood films stars and advertising models. This came as no surprise given the global predominance of the United States in the creation and distribution of films and advertisements. Photos and columns describing the glamorous lives and fashion styles of Hollywood stars flooded the popular press. From the late 1910s on, every major magazine and newspaper had a section on Hollywood films and starlets, such as “Las actrices bonitas” in El Hogar, “Teatro del silencio” in Caras y Caretas, “Chismes de cinelandia” in Atlántida, and “Sombras y sonidos” in the newspaper Crítica. Magazines specializing in movies and their stars, like Cinegraf, emerged in the 1930s.4 The popular press helped turn female stars into objects of adoration, with audiences developing a strong identification with and attachment to their favorite actresses.5 The diffusion of Hollywood actresses’ supposedly unique traits facilitated moviegoers’ identification with them. Thus, Greta Garbo was presented as a mysterious woman and Marlene Dietrich as complex, while Clara Bow conveyed spontaneity and Joan Crawford frivolity.6 Critics pointed out that Argentine women imitated the looks of these actresses, grooming and dressing like them, and, what was worse, ended up emulating their mannerisms as well.7 According to one journalist, the “vamp,” an originally American movie character portrayed as masculinized and sadistic, had unfortunately been replicated the world over thanks to Hollywood’s popularity.8 Writer Roberto Arlt, acknowledging the influence of Hollywood on women’s everyday

The Flapper and the Joven Moderna

lives, argued that cinema was creating a sense of dissatisfaction among Argentina’s female audience. After watching beautiful, elegant, successful characters fall in love and have perfect lives, he argued, local women began looking down on their boyfriends and husbands for being too ordinary.9 Along with Hollywood starlets’ photos and descriptions, the mass media also published pictures of beauty contest winners, especially the American-based pageant queens. Under the title “Las mujeres modernas” (modern women), for instance, the magazine Caras y Caretas presented photos of American women: two actresses dressed in Hawaiian outfits and two regional beauty contestants posing in bathing suits. All four wear skimpy clothing, their beauty and exoticism on display for the Argentine reader.10 These images strengthened the idea of the modern girl figure as an aesthetically fashionable subject originating in the United States.11 Advertisements were another way of spreading the image of American women, and specifically of the modern girl. By promoting both national and foreign products, ads targeted young modern women as consumers and as part of ad contents.12 Advertising showed images of fashionable girls with bobs striking assertive and sexy poses, driving cars, or smoking cigarettes, promoting a wide range of products that promised to improve the life of Argentine men and women and help them attain the social values these images expressed. The modern girl appeared particularly frequently in ads for cosmetics and toiletries, encouraging female consumers to cleanse and beautify their skin and modify their facial features or hair color, shape, and length in order to become like the women in the drawing or photo. The companies and the advertising agencies behind the ads often employed identical images of the modern girl to advertise these products all over the world. A Pepsodent toothpaste ad designed for Argentina by the American advertising agency J. Walter Thompson used an elegant drawing of the modern girl to sell the product, proclaiming that Pepsodent removed “dingy film” from teeth. Readers were urged to send in the coupon accompanying the ad to get a free product sample, as was common in many advertisements in diverse national contexts at the time.13 Scholars have suggested that these Pepsodent ads, which could also be found in South Africa and Germany, expressed Americanness through the modern girl’s relaxed body language.14 By the 1930s, photos showing Hollywood film stars had often replaced drawings, demonstrating the allure of “authenticity” in advertising. Several ads produced by JWT relied

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on stars like Sylvia Sidney, Claudette Colbert, and Lupe Vélez to sell Lux soap in Argentina.15 While portraits and information about famous U.S. women were the most common means of spreading the modern girl’s looks, photos of regular young American women also made their way into the Argentine mass media, increasing her renown as well. The newspaper Crítica published several photos of clearly modern girls doing bizarre things, like a close-up of a woman who, after being arrested for driving her car into a streetlamp, took off her overcoat to reveal only a bathing suit beneath. The young woman had short hair and a cloche hat, and smiled for the camera.16 Female images from the U.S., be they of starlets, beauty queens, or everyday modern young women, denoted the idealization of modernity and glamour and showed the Argentine reader what a modern girl should look like. While many articles praised these images, giving readers an opportunity to take voyeuristic pleasure in this kind of “exotic” representation, magazines and newspapers also portrayed modern U.S. young women and the way they related to men in a far more critical way.17 Many articles criticized the “American way of life” through an analysis of gender relations, in which the customs of young American modern women, especially the flapper, were always the center of debate. The identification of the modern girl with the United States was so intense that English terms like “girl,” “flapper,” “dancing” and “flirt” were used when referring to her and the activities she performed. Although some French terms—such as garçonne, boîte, and voiturette—were also used when discussing the modern girl and her habits, and French fashions were also mentioned, this figure tended to be presented as an American phenomenon.18 The term “flapper” was so generalized that not only editors and journalists but also readers used it, as in the case of a female reader who pointed out the selfishness of the “flapper” and contrasted it with the altruism of the maternal type of woman.19 Many critics described the American flapper as a masculine subject. An article by the well-known Uruguayan-Argentine writer Horacio Quiroga portrayed the American “flapper” as a female conqueror seeking to usurp men’s spaces. He pointed out that “these flat-chested virgins” were not only a freak of nature but also a threat to the natural equilibrium of U.S. society.20 Other articles focused less on the masculine aspect of the flapper figure and more on her immoral behavior. According to one journalist, America’s high divorce rate could be at-

The Flapper and the Joven Moderna

tributed to the lack of true commitment among married U.S. couples. These marriages, he argued, were merely a game dictated by the whims of young U.S. women as embodied by the “flapper,” a “being without any sense of morality” who was only after money or fame. Therefore, when a yanqui (the Argentine term for gringo) flapper got married, she was to blame if her marriage did not last. “North American civilization is developing under this dangerous form of femininity,” bemoaned the journalist. In contrast, because love was a serious matter in Argentina, marriage was conceived of as a lifelong bond. The journalist added that Argentine women were very different from American ones because love and marriage were the supreme ideals of happiness for them.21 According to Manuel Rey, a journalist writing for El Hogar, the main problem of U.S. gender relations was related to the fact that American women had too much freedom—more than Argentine women had. While yanquis usually stayed out with their boyfriends until late at night, chatting, drinking, and smoking—behaving like flappers—the Argentine woman tended to be chaste, spent only a few hours a day with her boyfriend, and would never let herself be kissed in public, noted another journalist. U.S. couples were portrayed as having a relationship closer to friendship than romance, one that lacked true love. Conversely, Argentine couples were described as more committed to each other and as having longer engagements, which, in turn, resulted in more satisfying marriages, because they knew each other better and took the bond of matrimony more seriously.22 Americans, lamented the same journalist in another article, did not realize that the behavior of young women could have devastating consequences for their country, even contributing to the breakdown of the U.S. family. Argentines were far removed from such a catastrophic future, added the reporter, because Argentine women still stayed at home, keeping house for their husbands and raising their children.23 The mass media tried to balance this view by asking a U.S. journalist for her take on gender roles in Argentina. In a series of articles published in the magazine El Hogar, the American journalist Lilia Davis declared that young Argentine women were already “Americanizing” themselves. She noted how they were showing off their independence by going to dance halls, drinking, smoking, and riding around in cars, but asserted that as soon as a potential husband showed up, they shed their modern “costume” in order to get the ring.24 Davis added that young women in Argentina had not “evolved” like U.S. ones and, consequently, their marriages lacked the companionship ele-

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ment that American women favored. After getting married, credulous and docile Argentine women remained stuck at home, concluded the journalist.25 Her article provoked responses from annoyed readers, like that of an offended male critic who reiterated the fact that Argentina didn’t have “flappers,” just lovely housewives and mothers.26 The mass media reinforced the idea of the flapper as an American phenomenon. Her depiction oscillated between a figure who could be either admired or reviled. At times, especially when photos of her were published, the flapper was conceived of as a beautiful, erotic, and modern female who provoked curiosity and voyeuristic desire. At others, she was seen as a morally threatening and masculinized subject who could unleash a social maelstrom. In both cases, however, the figure was portrayed as the antithesis of Argentine femininity. Critics aimed to disparage American mannerisms in order to extoll the virtues of the Argentine way of life. By comparing female looks and behaviors, they contrasted immoral foreign hussies with the moral women of Argentina. This ultimately contributed to an image of Argentina as a moderate country that had successfully avoided the extreme consequences that modernity had brought to the U.S.27 At the core of this critique lay the idea that modernity was embodied by bold women who, most significantly, resided abroad.

The Rise of the Upper-Class Modern Girl While to some critics, young Argentine women had successfully shielded themselves from fashions and trends from abroad, others concluded that the joven moderna was already an Argentine reality. This prompted a dedicated effort to explore the nature of the Argentine modern girl. The mass media presented her primarily as an upper-class, coquettish, and shallow young woman. Critics ridiculed her fondness for flirting, her materialism, and her lack of originality. Their frequent mockery was a way of voicing social fears, while dismissing the modern girl’s lifestyle as trivial. One of the best examples of the modern girl’s materialism and coquetry was the comic strip Mecha y su sombra [Mecha and her shadow]. Featured by the women’s magazine Para Ti in 1924, Mecha was a local version of the Charles A. Voight comic strip Betty, which had been published weekly in the New York Herald since 1920. Usually, the Argentine press opted to purchase American comic strips from King Features Syndicate and then adapted and trans-

The Flapper and the Joven Moderna

lated their contents for Argentine readers.28 In the case of Mecha y su sombra, however, Para Ti used the original comic strip simply as a source of inspiration in order to avoid paying fees. Thus, Betty and Mecha shared some basic characteristics, but were also different in marked ways. They are portrayed as belonging to the upper classes, enjoying a life of leisure, and dating several handsome, rich young men. Both are depicted as selfish, and constantly take advantage of their short, unattractive, and doting suitors—Lester de Pester in Betty’s case and Rino Pegotti in the Argentine version. This character, ignored and mistreated by the protagonist, never stops adoring her. Both comic strips highlight the materialistic side of their protagonists and their flirtatious personalities. Although the design and plot of the strip are very similar, there is one crucial difference between them. In contrast to Betty, whose ornate style hearkened back to an earlier age, Mecha is depicted as a typical modern girl, probably because she was born four years after the publication of the original comic strip, in a moment when the flapper phenomenon was at its height. Mecha appears with short hair and heavy makeup, and in loose, short dresses, all typical markers of the flapper figure.29 These comic strips were not alone in mocking the flapper’s materialism. In one of many cartoons published on this topic, a modern girl’s mother reproaches her daughter for going out with a different man every day, to which she responds: “You are right, mother. But find me one man who can afford to play tennis, golf, go for a drive, and go out dancing during the week.”30 Men, according to comic strips and cartoons, were falling victim to selfish and confident modern girls who merely toyed with them in order to satisfy their thirst for leisure pursuits and entertainment.31 The modern girl’s materialism was closely related to the desire for foreign goods and imported lifestyles. One journalist, for example, argued that young modern women varied from country to country because “the concept of the modern” had to be adapted to each young woman’s personality and to the unique traits of each location as well. The essential characteristic of the porteño (that is, Buenos Aires) modern girl was her lack of creativity. Where other modern young women invented, their porteño counterpart copied and standardized. According to the journalist, she refrained from inventing anything new or original for fear of making a fool of herself. Thus “the female porteño way of being modern . . . has been achieved by a smart assimilation of the examples available for emulation.”32 Luis María Jordán, a well-known essayist, noted that

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the Argentine modern girl’s fondness for foreign consumption was understood as a marker of social distinction. He argued that formerly modest young Argentine women with upper-class “creole lineage” had decided to copy Parisian fashions and adhere to a sense of moral freedom originating in the U.S. in order to distinguish themselves from “bourgeois” women. According to the author, they “became frivolous and lost . . . a lot of their colonial creole modesty,” feeling “a little overwhelmed by the excessive freedom, surprised by a liberation that came all too quickly.” Jordán concluded that the situation could be salvaged if Argentine youth returned to its austere origins.33 Undoubtedly, the overtly satirical story “La Beba: Historia de una vida inútil” [Beba: The story of a futile life] was the most comprehensive reconstruction of the Argentine modern girl. The story appeared in serial form in Caras y Caretas, the most popular Argentine magazine, between June 1927 and March 1928. Written by Consuelo Moreno de Dupuy de Lôme under the pseudonym “Roxana” and published weekly, the story described the life of Beba, a modern upper-class seventeen-year-old who lived in Buenos Aires. In the first episode, Beba is presented as frivolous, fanciful, and conceited, the symbol of an entire generation of young porteño women, and also men, who enjoyed a “frenetic,” “agitated,” modern way of life “throwing cares to the wind.”34 Beba is pictured as thin and lithe, wearing heavy makeup, short skirts, and bobbed hair. Her alter ego is her sister Martha, described as intelligent, quiet, somewhat old-fashioned, and always worrying about Beba’s improper, impulsive behavior. As the author noted, the sisters seemed to belong to two very different generations. While Martha is reflexive and calm, Beba is flighty and frivolous, someone who “embodies all the manifestations of modern frippery.” They represented the “past and the present” of Argentine society.35 In the 35 episodes that follow, Beba is shown in a range of settings doing diverse activities. She goes to theaters and movies, cafés and dance halls. She assiduously does the Charleston and dances the tango. She also smokes, drinks, sings tangos, drives her own car, and dresses up as a bataclana (as the actresses and singers who worked variety theater were known) for Carnival. Indeed, perpetual motion appears to be one of her defining characteristics. In every chapter, Beba goes to a different place to do something different.36 Beba is also described as incapable of emotional commitment. She has several “modern” boyfriends who endorse the same values as she does. They flirt with her but, just like Beba, do not want to commit to a serious relationship.37 In terms of morality, the con-

The Flapper and the Joven Moderna

trast with her sister Martha’s desire for romantic love becomes more apparent with each episode. In the last chapter, the reader gets a glimpse of Beba who, though married, will soon revert to the habits of her single life. In fact, in the last chapter, Beba ends up marrying an older man whom she hardly knows and doesn’t love. The advantage, according to the author, is that as a married woman, she will have more freedom, which will eventually lead to the “disintegration of her future home,” a dismal forecast of the consequences of the modern Argentine lifestyle.38 Beba is initially portrayed as an innocent young woman who comes into progressively greater contact with mass culture and the leisure activities offered by the modern city, which turns her into a modern girl.39 U.S. and Argentine popular culture, the main elements that shape this character, are presented as alien: both are incompatible with the traditions of the nation and its upper classes. Consuelo Moreno offers various examples of this contamination. At one point, Beba seems determined to see an allegedly “immoral” Hollywood film that provokes licentious desires in her and to read foreign novels with “morbid” contents by “modern writers,” shriveling her innocent soul.40 Her aspiration to trendiness leads her, like other porteño modern girls, to adopt the fashions and customs of American, French, and Argentine actresses—like the miniscule bathing suits and low-cut dresses that make her look like the tawdry bataclanas.41 Finally, the fact that Beba likes modern dances such as the Charleston and the tango, which requires close body contact, is considered scandalous.42 These influences serve to pervert an old type of native morality embodied by Martha and described nostalgically. By satirizing Beba and elevating Martha, the author was denouncing the influx of foreign mannerisms. It is clear that being modern signified a wholehearted embrace of U.S. popular culture. Beba likes modern dances such as “the Charleston, the shimmy, and black-bottom,” dances that not only had been imported from the U.S. but, even worse, were described negatively as “exotic,” “savage,” “uncivilized,” and “inspired by the dances of black Africans.”43 Moreno argued that these dances were copied by Hollywood film stars and then adopted by modern Argentine girls who wished to be viewed as different and modern.44 The story of Beba has equally clear references to certain national popular traditions like the tango and the bataclana’s style and customs, which the protagonist also adopts.45 Beba is fond of the tango, and in this story, the tango retains its popular connotations, and dancing it implies symbolic downward mobility on the social

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Figure 2.1. Beba dressed as a bataclana for Carnival. “Beba en un baile de máscaras,” Caras y Caretas, February 10, 1928, n.p.

scale. In addition, the musical style and choreography of tango at the turn of the century owed much to African-Argentine culture, and tango’s association with blackness continued well into the twentieth century.46 Modern girls like Beba not only danced the tango; they sang it as well. The lyrics, based on an elaborate jargon known as lunfardo, were characterized by oblique sexual references.47 The author considered it indecent for upper-class girls to use this popular argot.48 Indeed, the protagonist of the story was presented as embracing the tango

The Flapper and the Joven Moderna

and lunfardo in order to distinguish herself from her parents and sister and assume the role of an “ultra-chic” and rebellious modern girl. It is interesting to note that, in a sort of reversal, modern young women in Europe, the U.S., and even Russia often danced the tango and dressed in tango style in order to appear different, exotic, and modern themselves.49 While Beba’s fondness for national popular traditions was evident, so was her disdain for middle-class people and habits. When Beba declines to participate in a charity event starring an Italian girl, arguing that she does not like to socialize with people from diverse social circles, her snobbery is again revealed.50 Through her affinity for the tango, shimmy, and Charleston, Beba is flirting with black transnational mass culture, which had gained prominence during this period.51 As Mathew Karush has stated, this culture was increasingly associated, in the Argentine case, with the poor and with national authenticity.52 Modern girls like Beba were accused, therefore, not only of being fond of transnational cultural products rooted in black traditions but also of trying to incorporate lower-class values into what was considered the antagonistic lifestyle and values of the elites. In fact, for those who disdained the cosmopolitanism of certain privileged porteños and their fondness for “slumming it,” the repository of true aristocratic values was well-off, “traditional” young women. Considered the cornerstone of Argentine nationhood, characters like Beba’s sister Martha were depicted as the uncorrupted source of authentic femininity.53 The references to the joven moderna’s frivolity and freedom could easily turn into more earnest commentary on the sexual promiscuity of the modern girl. With critical intent and a lowbrow intended audience, popular serialized collections of short stories known as folletines portrayed the modern girl as a socially liberated and sexually dangerous wealthy young woman, who contravened traditional morality and socially accepted behavior. In the story “La casa de soltera” [The single girl’s apartment], written by Josué Quesada but published, as was common for this type of work, under the pseudonym Elsa Norton, the main character is depicted as a fearless upper-class young woman who decides to move in with her Russian lesbian lover. When her former male lover proposes a ménage à trois, she realizes she has been unable to forget him. In an ambiguous last scene, she fires a single shot from her gun.54 The short stories “La patotera” [Running with the bad boys] and “Un casamiento en el gran mundo” [A wedding in the big world] had even clearer, more tragic, and more moralizing ends. Here, several modern and wealthy female characters take lovers (both lesbian

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and straight), snort cocaine, drink and smoke, and eventually commit suicide or die from an overdose.55 The writers of these short stories portrayed their female protagonists as subjects of desire, but with superficial concerns, dismissing any complexity in the modern girl’s character. Critically commenting on this type of narrative, left-wing essayist Josefina Marpons described the fictional encounter of a pulp fiction writer with one of his female admirers and muse—the very embodiment of a joven ultra moderna—in her short story “Satanás” [Satan]. Marpons explores how the writer of serials draws material for his plots from his exchanges with his female reader, who is depicted as flirty and assertive. As Francine Masiello has argued, Marpons thus denounces the ways in which these stories objectified women, who merely served the fictional requirements of male narrative.56 The moral transgressions of these modern girls, exemplified by topics such as premarital sex, adultery, seduction, lesbianism, and the defense of divorce, involved violations of accepted female behavior. These actions were inevitably accompanied by tragedy, and the deaths of the female protagonists came in the form of suicide, disease, or drug addiction. Framed by the melodramatic code, these folletines constantly punished wealthy women’s assertive sexuality and warned their audiences against any deviation from propriety and decorum.57

Domesticating the Modern Girl The predominant cultural understanding during the 1920s was that the joven moderna was ill-prepared for motherhood. Only a few contemporaries emphasized the feminine and maternal attributes of the modern girl, arguing that the joven moderna had the potential to become an exemplary mother figure for future generations of Argentines thanks to the education she received, the type of life she chose, and her experiences.58 In the 1930s, however, the maternal nature of the modern girl was increasingly a focus in a transformation that coincided with a growing concern about Argentina’s national identity. Rising nationalist anxiety permeated both left- and right-wing movements and became more intense in the context of the economic crisis and the manifest corruption of the political system. Many felt that Argentina’s identity was getting lost in waves of foreign influence, mainly in its uncritical imitation of the United States. While the behavior of women of the porteño elite was still at the core of this anxiety

The Flapper and the Joven Moderna

surrounding Argentina’s blurred identity, this time the condemnation of the modern girl took on a populist tone. Mass culture explored the reasons behind the emergence of the modern girl’s maternal traits. Some journalists pointed to the crisis of 1929 as one explanation. As one put it, because of the economic crisis, upper-class women were out and about less frequently in public, choosing instead to stay at home and take care of their children and spouses. This improved the health of both children and mothers—mothers, not nannies, were looking after the kids and cooking healthy food for them, concluded the critic.59 Quite often the transformation of the modern girl from a frivolous girl into an exemplary mother had nothing to do with economics but was seen as the result of meeting a man who could change her priorities. Frequently, this man belonged to the working class and freed the modern girl from her frivolous existence. This story line can be seen in several films of the 1930s featuring the modern girl, such as Puente Alsina (Agustín Ferreyra, 1935), La rubia del camino (Manuel Romero, 1938), Isabelita (Manuel Romero, 1940), Caprichosa y millonaria (Enrique Santos Discépolo, 1940), and Elvira Fernández, vendedora de tiendas (Manuel Romero, 1942). These 1930s films all employed the same formula: a rich modern girl, portrayed as fanciful and snobbish, is domesticated by the love of a man of humble origins. This romance liberates her from her frivolous existence by introducing her to the values of the working-class world, and the films end happily when love and marriage triumph over class prejudice. Conceived as melodramas, they portray the upper class as snobbish, egocentric, and evil, in sharp contrast to the generous, noble characters of humble origin. Manuel Romero, the director of most of these films, was a journalist, a producer of musical variety shows, a tango lyricist, and above all one of the most prolific and popular Argentine filmmakers of the 1930s.60 He typically cast Paulina Singerman as the joven moderna. In an interview focused on the roles she looked forward to playing in the future, Singerman confessed to having tired of the part, given that she herself did not actually smoke, drink, or gamble.61 Presumably because of her blond hair and rather patrician features, however, she was associated with the character of the rich, beautiful, glamorous, and fashionably attired modern young woman, a role she played for years. At the beginning, these films focus on the snobbishness and stubbornness of the female protagonist. While the former characteristic is criticized, the latter is praised. By either being rude to the servants or making derogatory

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comments about the habits of the working classes, the protagonist initially provokes dislike in viewers. She is spoiled and arrogant, exclaiming plainly in one scene in La rubia del camino that she does not need to work, struggle, or suffer, because she is rich. Concomitantly, the modern girl usually feels restricted when it comes to choosing her own path in life, and her opposition to her destiny triggers the plot. One common element in all of these films is the clash between the modern girl’s desires and what her parents expect of her. As the girl’s parents attempt to control whom she chooses as a spouse, her interests, and her thoughts, the conflict between parents—usually the father—and daughter ends with the modern girl imposing her will. Indeed, the stubbornness of the joven moderna is one of the driving forces of a variety of plots. By refusing to settle down with a man with whom she is not in love, the modern

Figure 2.2. Paulina Singerman as a wealthy joven moderna in Caprichosa y millonaria. Courtesy of Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken.

The Flapper and the Joven Moderna

girl remains open to true love, which she ultimately finds with a working-class character. Thus, in Puente Alsina, the modern girl falls in love with a construction worker; in La Rubia del camino, she surrenders her heart to a truck driver; in Isabelita, she marries a working-class tango singer; in Elvira Fernández, vendedora de tiendas, a salesman in a department store; and in Caprichosa y millonaria—the least subversive of these films because the boyfriend is not working-class—she ends up with an accountant. The modern girl in Romero’s films undergoes a profound transformation in order to love a man of humble origins. This involves the erasure of her defining traits—her frivolity and snobbishness—and the embrace of working-class habits and values. Usually, this conversion is signaled by the new name that the protagonist adopts when descending into the world of the working classes, leaving behind her upper-class persona. Therefore, Betty becomes Isabel in La rubia del camino, abandoning her foreign nickname; Alcira, a rather fancy name, is also swapped for Isabel in Isabelita. Finally, Elvira Durand switches her last name to Fernández, a less foreign and more run-of-the-mill one, in the film Elvira Fernández. The protagonist’s increasingly close contact with the working-class world, represented by her suitor and his friends, leads the modern girl to rethink her lifestyle and her attitude toward the characters of humble origin who, supportive and noble, offer her support without asking anything in return. This conversion is shown in several scenes in which the modern girl embraces unrefined habits she formerly disdained, such as when Betty eats sausage and bread, typical working-class fare, and drinks mate, a popular tea, in La rubia del camino. A similar transformation comes in Isabelita when Alcira tastes pizza for the first time, eats spaghetti with meat sauce, and agrees to dance tango arrabalero (a term that could be loosely translated as “from the hood.”) These scenes are usually clinched by a comparison between the upper-class boyfriend and the working-class boyfriend-to-be. Whereas the former is often portrayed as a pusillanimous character who devises a ruse to try to regain the protagonist’s affection, the working-class hero is quite the opposite: brave, honest, noble, and generous, he firmly dislikes and refuses to cater to the modern girl’s whims. These traits are precisely why the modern girl feels attracted to him in the first place. Although the transformation of the joven moderna commences when she encounters a noble working-class man, there is a turning point that signals her

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conversion as irreversible. Matthew Karush has pointed out that the breakthrough happens when the modern girl’s maternal instinct, hidden under her girlish mask, emerges, as when Betty, the protagonist of La Rubia del camino, helps deliver a couple’s baby. The impractical modern girl becomes an expert midwife. From then on, Isabel embraces working-class habits without hesitation and realizes she is in love with the truck driver, Julián.62 Indeed, Julián remarks on her transformation, exclaiming: “It’s like day and night! You don’t seem like the same woman I found on the road yesterday . . . a modern, useless, frivolous girl like you turned out to be a fairy godmother to those poor people.” In Caprichosa y millonaria, Coca, the protagonist, pays a visit to her old nanny and pours out her sorrows while holding her old doll in her arms, surrounded by the cradle and toys from her infancy. In the next scene, she surrenders to the accountant and stops acting condescending and mean. In these scenes, the modern girl overcomes her shallowness and arrogance by letting her maternal instinct emerge, thus completing the domestication process. While in the majority of these films the maternal instinct of the modern girl signals the emergence of her adult femininity, in Elvira Fernández, vendedora de tiendas the transformation from modern girl to respectable woman occurs during the protagonist’s three-year stay in the United States, where she goes to study. Upon her return to Buenos Aires, the protagonist, Elvira—the daughter of the owner of a successful department store chain—declares that being in North America has changed her. In a surprising twist, she asserts that there she learned to become an independent woman, composed, generous, and reflexive, leaving behind her modern, frivolous, and selfish upper-class persona. It is this transformation that explains why she decides to work as an undercover saleswoman in her father’s department store, experiencing the daily difficulties and joys of the working classes. Caught between her coworkers, who are fighting to get her father to rehire the employees he has fired, and her father’s refusal to do so, she chooses to join and then lead a strike. The salesman she ends up falling for is rallying the workers, and together they eventually get her father to agree to better working conditions for the employees. Remorseful, her father apologizes at the end of the film. Elvira Fernández, vendedora de tiendas is one of the few portraits of the modern girl in which the U.S. is depicted as a place of self-betterment, not corruption.63 Elvira’s transformation is almost complete when she returns to Argentina at the beginning of the film, and serves more as a sine qua non for the plot than

The Flapper and the Joven Moderna

its falling action. Nevertheless, she must still fall in love with a coworker in order to complete her conversion, as the other protagonists of Romero’s films do. In the last scene of the film, when she turns into a working-class hero, she confesses to her father what she has been doing and announces she will marry Raúl, the salesman. Elvira Durand thus officially becomes Elvira Fernández, leaving behind not only her upper-class past but also any foreign connotations of her former life. These films narrate interclass romances within a melodramatic frame in which poor people are honest and good and rich people are arrogant and evil. While the modern girl belongs to the urban elite of Buenos Aires and, consequently, is depicted as materialistic, conceited, and Americanized, the man she falls for is poor and is portrayed as an honest, brave Argentine. As Mathew Karush has argued, in order for the couple to work, the female protagonist must cross the class divide that separates her from her lover, joining the working-class world and adopting its values, becoming “one of them.”64 The protagonist not only erases her modern gender self and abandons her upper-class identity, she also becomes an authentic Argentine women. This means, on the one hand, leaving behind her morally deprived life in the city, with its conspicuous consumption, and embracing the simple existence of the countryside. Even in Caprichosa y millonaria, in which the male protagonist is a refined accountant, he announces to the modern girl that he is actually the farming type and prefers an unpretentious life. The film’s last scene reveals the couple driving away from the city, skyscrapers fading behind them. In Puente Alsina, Edmundo lives and works in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, and when modern girl Lidia complains about the area’s lack of cinemas, theaters and dance halls, of love and joy, Edmundo dismisses such matters as frivolous illusion, defending a serene life of meditation and abnegation, dedicated entirely to hard work. The film suggests that Lidia will incorporate those values once she moves to Edmundo’s rustic house near the river, a home she has grown to love. Becoming an authentic Argentine woman, on the other hand, also means stripping away anything foreign, as when Elvira abandons her rather exotic last name of Durand, and instead takes the Hispanic Fernández when she begins working at the department store. Her fellow salesgirls reassure Elvira that they (and she) are true Argentines by clarifying, when they introduce themselves, that they are all Fernández and Gutiérrez. While these films depict, respectively, the opposition between city and countryside and between foreign and national, La Rubia del camino, as Mathew Ka-

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rush has shown, joins both, delivering a more decisive message about what it means to be a true Argentine woman. In the plot, Julián, the male protagonist, is an emblematic Argentine, a poor but hard-working truck driver who lives and works in the countryside. He insists on calling the modern girl Betty by her real Hispanic name, Isabel, and not by her English nickname, and later teaches Betty a lesson about being Argentine when he shows her how to prepare mate, the green tea drunk from a gourd by Argentina’s lower classes. Betty, who was unaware of mate’s existence, discovers she actually likes it. The mate has a clear Argentine connotation as, besides being sipped by the working classes, it is also associated with the gaucho and his rural lifestyle in the Pampas, the place where the love story between Betty and Julián unfolds.65 Unlike portraits of the joven moderna such as Beba, in which the modern girl continues her mixture of immoral, foreign, and uncouth habits even after marriage, or such as the wealthy and decadent modern girls depicted in pulp fiction, whose stories irremediably head for tragedy, these films offer the protagonist the possibility of redemption. By turning female characters into traditional Argentine women, these films emphasize that the modern girl needs only the right man to unveil her feminine and maternal essence, guiding her toward a future of humility. The price to pay for being saved is the erasure of the modern girl. The joven moderna becomes successfully domesticated when the values of the poor prevail over the rich, when the countryside triumphs over the city, and when authenticity trumps cosmopolitanism, deleting any trait of the female character’s modernity.

E Argentines viewed the modern girl figure with a mixture of fascination and alarm. Praised and feared, the flapper generated a heated debate in the mass media. At the core of the ongoing controversy was the suspicion that Argentine women, particularly the well-off, were losing their inherent and appropriate feminine traits, a process that prompted concerns about the nature of the flapper in what appeared to be her country of origin, the United States, and in Argentina as well. The mass media focused on young American women as a way of understanding the modern girl’s nature. Their exoticism, freedom, and boldness, together with their materialism, lack of morality, and masculine mannerisms were their defining characteristics, which supposedly ultimately differentiated the Ameri-

The Flapper and the Joven Moderna

can modern girl from her Argentine counterpart, reassuring the domestic audience that the dramatic change in gendered behavior was occurring abroad. But other critics concluded that the new fashions and mannerisms inherent to the American flapper had already won over young Argentine women. Argentine mass culture conceptualized the modern girl as primarily an American import, whose looks and behavior were being adopted by Argentine women. In defining the joven moderna as alien to domestic Argentine culture, a nationalist message was conveyed. The fact that she was perceived as a foreign-inspired phenomenon went hand in hand with another of her defining characteristics, her class status, which was unquestionably upper class. The wealth of the joven moderna was understood as that which enabled her leisure activities and conspicuous consumption, especially of expensive or imported commodities, and this consumer power is what bestowed upon her her much-debated independence. In addition to U.S. commodity culture, popular Argentine traditions emerging from the world of tango were also central to the configuration of the joven moderna. Many critics of the modern girl conflated her fondness for imported and popular traditions with her class identity, and denounced the joven moderna for belonging to the cosmopolitan and decadent elite of Buenos Aires, dazzled by the allure of U.S. and Argentine popular culture. It was emblematic that the joven moderna was fond of tango. Her cosmopolitanism—the result of the transnational circulation of commodities and styles—mingled with popular culture traditions (the tango and its lyrics), turned the joven moderna into more than just a copy of her Western sisters. By the same token, there were important differences between the Argentine and other Latin American modern girl figures. In contrast to the Cuban flapper, who was constructed as an extremely cosmopolitan figure, her Argentine counterpart retained some characteristics emerging from popular culture that denoted authenticity.66 But unlike her Mexican sister, who, as Joanne Hershfield has shown, blended rural and Indian women’s styles with modern looks, the Argentine joven moderna’s uniqueness came from her embrace of the urban and alluring world of tango, which itself constituted an intriguing combination of primitivism and modernity.67 It is interesting to note that when the modern girl finally became domesticated, her modern traits faded under the weight of traditionalism. The values of traditionalism, however, did not emerge from the tango but from the more conservative tropes of countryside life and gaucho culture. In

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the melodramatic code, elite, challenging modern girls had no place. They were either punished by death or “freed” from their frivolous and vacuous existence by a man of humble origins, who would reveal to them their true maternal and Argentine self. The mass media tended to portray the Argentine flapper simplistically. Even if some actual upper-class jóvenes modernas did behave like this archetype, the point of the media’s distorted representation was to alert audiences to the threatening effects of consumer capitalism on gender and national identities. While a few voices highlighted the independence and stubbornness of the Argentine flapper as positive traits, the majority mocked and criticized her by focusing on her materialism, frivolity, snobbery, and explicit sexuality. What was at stake in these assessments of the joven moderna was the type of modern values that could be incorporated into notions of Argentine womanhood. In the dispute over the definition of acceptable behavior for modern Argentine women, the upper-class modern girl was not presented as an exemplary figure. Other, more acceptable versions of the modern girl were made available to Argentine audiences during the 1920s and 1930s, as shown in the following chapters.

3 The Modern Working Girl

In 1925, the popular magazine Atlántida had a section entitled “Confidencias” that provided a space for readers to meet potential love matches. Using the pseudonym Modernista (modern girl), a female reader described herself as a short, likeable fourteen-year-old with bobbed hair and a dark complexion who was interested in meeting new friends.1 Her ad received a plethora of responses from male readers eager to know more about this friendly girl. She was one among hundreds of young women who used popular media outlets to run personal ads, stating their preferences regarding the physical and personal traits of their potential suitors and describing their looks, personality, or a combination of the two in a way that seemed appealing to a wide audience. Through these ads, these young women took control of their image and of the type of men and relationships they preferred, acquiring a new sense of freedom and autonomy. These personal ads were a symptom of the changes that young women were experiencing in their relationships with men, and a sign of the impact fashion was having on their everyday lives. Flirting and wearing a short bob were, in fact, two key components of the modern girl’s identity that many young women adopted in order to express a fresh sense of empowerment. This chapter explores the modern working girl figure, paying special attention to the representations and lived experiences of young women who worked in the tertiary, or service, sector. In particular, it explores the impact of female work on dominant understandings of womanhood and investigates women’s changing attitudes toward flirting, dating practices, consumption, and fashion. To achieve this, popular media outlets are analyzed, especially women’s maga-

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zines, which contained opinion pieces, articles, photos, advice columns, and letters to the editor that enable a reconstruction of young working women’s lives through their experiences and cultural depictions. In this analysis, I apply a contingent and fluid notion of class, emphasizing the dynamic relationship between middle- and working-class values and identities.2 In the Argentina of the interwar period, industrialization and urbanization led to a rise in the number of women who worked outside the household, especially in the tertiary sector. According to Graciela Queirolo, 11,715 women held office jobs in Buenos Aires in 1914, a number that spiked to 79,770 by 1947.3 These new employment opportunities, and the existence of a modern mass transportation system, increased the presence of young women in public places. Contemporary observers were puzzled by the increasing social visibility of young women in big cities like Buenos Aires, and their public presence generated both critical analysis and curiosity. Those who opposed the phenomenon of female labor believed it could have terrible social consequences not only for women with jobs, but across society. Female workers were accused of promiscuity, neglecting their family duties, and eroding patriarchal values. They were usually portrayed by the popular media as either empowered materialistic women with loose morals or as the victims of employers or rich customers who took advantage of them. Apart from the criticism that female work drew, however, popular media outlets were also fascinated by female labor, especially with the new urban jobs women were taking as typists, secretaries, and salesgirls. While female blue-collar workers did not appear all that frequently, images of the independent and fashionable pink-collar girl filled Argentine popular culture. Women’s magazines in particular took a sympathetic approach toward female labor, portraying it not only as the product of a pressing economic need— the absence of a male breadwinner or a deficit in the household economy—but also as a specific desire of some young women. Work, these publications argued, gave women the opportunity to interact with men without supervision, to contribute responsibly to the family economy, and to manage their pocket money for personal expenses. In other words, waged work was viewed as something that gave many young women a new sense of independence and economic autonomy. In turn, many of them, a little overwhelmed by their newly acquired independence, consulted the advice columns of these same magazines looking for counsel on how to handle the impact that work had on their daily lives. This added yet another perspective on the effects of female work. Almost all those

The Modern Working Girl

engaged in the discussion concurred that female employment was a temporary pastime, and assumed that young working women would quit their jobs as soon as a suitable marital candidate came along, allowing them to transition smoothly from modern working girl to married woman. It the meantime, for better or for worse, they were single girls in their prime, and had both the freedom of moving around Buenos Aires as they pleased and the money to enjoy the consumerist urges they could afford.

Girls Just Want to Have Fun A typical working day in the life of a salesgirl or typist was marked by the novelty of men’s constant presence. Be it in the office, the department store, the lunchroom or the subway, young women had to learn to interact constantly with men. The rise of wage labor for women, along with forms of mass leisure and mass transportation, allowed the sexes to intermingle more frequently. This contradicted traditional gender behavior, which generally involved the separation of men from women in public and supervision of any private interactions. In particular, etiquette manuals and the many advice sections in women’s magazines were very clear about the fact that men were responsible for courtship, under the watchful eyes of the young woman’s parents.4 Moreover, from the moment a young woman met a man until she married, the couple had to follow certain rules for fear of compromising her moral integrity. Courtship began either as a casual flirtation or a formal introduction, but once it was clear a man and woman were a couple, they were expected to socialize at events or gatherings under the supervision of a chaperone, as young women were not allowed to be alone with their suitors. After courting for a time, the couple would formalize their commitment through an engagement. A boyfriend was supposed to visit his girlfriend at her parents’ home twice a week for a couple of hours, socializing under the supervision of one or more family members.5 Popular media outlets reacted to the appearance of young female employees in public with curiosity and surprise. Among public locations where women were now making appearances, the streets and the workplace were portrayed as the most popular spots for young working women to exercise their new freedom. The commute, for instance, was seen as a time when female workers were able to socialize with boyfriends or suitors free from family oversight. Writer Roberto Arlt, among others, offered a humorous and sympathetic description of the lives

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of working couples whose only alone time was on the subway, or on their lunch hours or breaks.6 Melodramatic narratives took a more critical approach to this new phenomenon, depicting working girls being pursued by niños bien (rich boys) during their commutes. Generally, though they resisted these men’s advances initially, the working girls ultimately surrendered to their charms.7 Taking a more pragmatic approach, one women’s magazine article defended the right of female workers to be alone with their boyfriends after a hard day of work. These couples took advantage of the trip home to talk about their future together, which was perfectly fine—provided both came from the same social class. The danger, noted the journalist, was that after work these young women tended to consort with young men of higher social status who just wanted to take advantage of them. The journalist advised female readers to avoid this type of encounter, because it would inevitably end in tragedy.8 Meeting a boyfriend during one’s commute was only acceptable if the young couple were both from the same social class, and also if these encounters took place during the day. Leda, the advice columnist at Para Ti, was very clear when responding to a female reader who wanted to know her opinion about returning home at night in the company of a boyfriend: Leda recommended she avoid such intimate encounters for the sake of morality, as Argentine men were unable to refrain from flirting.9 During the commute, female workers could spend time with their boyfriends but also seize on the opportunity to meet new people. According to a subway employee interviewed by one magazine, the subway was becoming the perfect spot for young working women to meet future husbands, as the casual glances exchanged at the station every day could easily turn into a conversation and end in dating and marriage.10 Not every chance encounter culminated in a wedding, of course. Public transportation was also a place for flirting, as Arlt showed in a chronicle describing the exchange of glances between two employed sisters and a young male passenger riding in a subway car, which ended dramatically with the man getting off the subway to escape the ardent stares of both sisters. Arlt was certain that the sisters had opted not to take the subway car exclusively for women and children—created to avoid any unwanted physical contact during rush hour—because they enjoyed the interaction with male passengers and were hoping to find a “good man” among them. What startled the traveler in Arlt’s chronicle was that the sisters were openly flirting with him, adopting the role of the pursuer, a conduct that was neither appropriate nor expected of women.11

The Modern Working Girl

According to a worried and nostalgic journalist of El Hogar, the trend of meeting new people in public locations like the streets and subway was limited to lower-class women. The new custom of going out to places like the cinema, the confiterías and boîtes, which had replaced quiet home-based gatherings, was particularly fun for wealthy young women but inaccessible for “poor-middleclass” girls. According to this journalist, since they did not have the resources or the same opportunities to go out as the upper-class ones did, chance meetings on the street were their only way of becoming acquainted with new people.12 While for some contemporaries, interacting and flirting with a stranger on the street was thought to be detrimental to a young woman’s morals, it must have been rather common. A magazine questionnaire for single women interested in getting married, for example, included a question on the level of gratification obtained from flirting with strangers on the street. According to the questionnaire, a high level of gratification demonstrated that certain women were not fit for marriage.13 Without a doubt, this phenomenon sparked concern. One female reader, for example, sent a letter to Para Ti magazine recounting that a man had approached her on the street and given her his phone number. Now she was asking for advice on how to proceed. The columnist responded that if she called him, she was showing how gullible she was, advising caution in the face of this type of wily man.14 A typical way for men to engage with women in public places was by complimenting them as they passed. Known as piropos, these catcalls were usually directed to women who were out on the street and not accompanied by men, a daily situation for young working women. Popular media outlets tended to disapprove of piropeo altogether, condemning every manifestation of unsought male attention, from the suggestive glance to an unsolicited touch, considering it a “primitive” practice characteristic of “uncivilized countries.”15 Some piropos, however, were more socially accepted than others. Exclamations such as “You’re gorgeous!” or “little star” were considered gallant piropos that women could appreciate, while more aggressive lines were criticized for lacking charm.16 Catcalling women on the streets was nothing new, but the notion that women could enjoy unsolicited male attention clashed with old customs that characterized them as passive victims. Silvia Guerrico—a renowned journalist and a modern young woman herself, famous for her liberal practices—conducted interviews to get a few women’s opinion on the piropo.17 While not representative of all women, it is an interesting sample of the diverse reactions to it. One

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educated American woman said it was disconcerting for her and offensive to women, while the popular actress Olinda Bozán stated that she disliked the practice because men usually said unpleasant things to her. A young woman who worked at a shoe store was the dissonant voice among them, confessing that she did enjoy the usually vulgar remarks of men because they made her feel prettier. She then added, with what the journalist described as a flushed face, that men on the street often pinched her and her colleagues. Silvia Guerrico was pretty sure that the young woman left giggling.18 The fact that a woman could find being desired, pursued, and even touched by men pleasing—and indeed consider it a natural part of male-female interactions—clashed with the journalist’s expectations of the proper reaction for women, despite her openmindedness. It probably also shocked more conservative readers, who viewed not just flirting, but any expression of interest when being pursued, as entirely inappropriate.19 In their analysis of the new dating practices of female workers, popular media outlets showed not only that public places were becoming new hubs for flirting, but also that the workplace was now a hotspot for social interaction between men and women. Female employees had appeared in places that had until recently been conceived of as entirely masculine, like the office. The fact that it was now mandatory for women to interact with both male coworkers and customers unsettled men and upset workplace dynamics. The daily interactions between young working women and men certainly made them less shy and more self-confident, but it also crafted an ambiguous moral reputation for working women that was hard to elude. Folletines and films showed salesgirls and typists flirting with coworkers, employers, and clients, potentially marrying if they found a man of the same social class, and inevitably being mistreated if the man in question was wealthy. The romantic conflicts of these melodramatic narratives almost always served to contrast the generosity and unselfishness of the poor with the pretentiousness and arrogance of the rich, “grouping the characters on an ethical and physiological axis,” as Beatriz Sarlo has noted. The clearest expression of this narrative can be seen in the bella pobre, the poor but beautiful girl character who, though innocent and romantic, lacks moral fiber and ends up being tempted by promises of love from manipulative wealthy men. The bella pobre becomes the wealthy man’s lover, and hence a dishonored woman.20 Regardless of whether this resulted from mutual attraction or nonconsensual advances by these deceitful

The Modern Working Girl

men—generally wealthy employers or rich customers of department stores—the girl’s destiny was stereotypically either abandonment or death. The mal paso or misstep, a euphemism for premarital sex, turned these working girls into fallen women with few chances of redemption.21 The workplace hierarchy subjugated young female workers, facilitating unwelcome sexual advances and abuses of power. This was a popular topic, especially in melodramatic narratives, and a common way to depict relationships in the workplace. A typical presumption during this period was that a woman who got a good job or promotion—which, in melodramatic narratives, usually meant becoming the employer’s private secretary—had obtained it in exchange for sexual favors. Dora Barrancos has shown how switchboard operators were seen as particularly loose women, which she attributes both to the kind of intimate interactions they had with male clients over the phone and to their lessinhibited conduct with men in general. On top of this, a job at a switchboard was one of the rare and coveted permanent positions available to women during this period, and was thus assumed to have been bestowed in return for sexual favors.22 However, as Mirta Lobato has argued, the fact that sexual harassment was the prevalent topic in media may have occluded the existence of genuinely consensual relationships at work.23 Dora Barrancos, for example, has explored the liberal sexual mores of switchboard operators, particularly one such worker in a small town in the province of Santa Fe. The promising career of this young working woman, who dated several male customers and had an affair with a coworker, was cut short when these affairs were made public.24 The study by Barrancos shows that young working women were not just the victims of their employers and customers, but played active roles in their own sexual and romantic lives. The notion that young working women had dubious virtues transcended folletines and films, and was also very much present in comic strips. Tillie the Toiler (1921), a very popular American comic strip created by Russ Westover, featured a coquettish and inefficient typist. The strip was reprinted and translated in Argentina as Milonguita dactilógrafa (Crítica, 1923), then as Pepita dactilógrafa (Crítica, 1928) and as Titina (Noticias Gráficas, 1932).25 Tillie and her Argentine avatars described the daily life of a typist at a fashionable women’s wear company, showing her spending most of her day powdering or rouging her face or arranging her hair in order to be well-prepared in case a handsome and

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wealthy customer or friend came into the office. After a visit from one of these men, she spends the rest of the work day flirting and planning the social events they will attend together in their spare time.26 When she does actually work, she is disorganized and makes spelling and technical mistakes, and then resorts to her charm to keep from getting fired.27 In fact, it is her male coworker—a short, bulb-nosed character—who always saves her from being reprimanded by the boss. This character—very similar to Lester de Pester (from the upper-class comic Betty) or Rino Pegotti (from Mecha y su sombra)—was her unconditional friend, enamored of the protagonist despite her apparent lack of interest in him. Liz Conor has argued that the modern typist character of various comic strips, which flourished around the world during this period, is portrayed as intentionally disturbing the office’s productivity through constant attempts to get coworkers, employers, and customers to appreciate her sexual appeal. The female worker’s supposed lack of industry and diligence was the material consequence of her narcissism.28 In order to counteract the poor moral reputation that female workers seemed to have, advice columnists opposed any type of romance during office hours. Dorothy Dix was among the most famous American advice columnists and wrote about romance, marriage, and female wage labor. Based on her popularity among American women and her expertise as a consummate advice columnist in the United States, Dix was republished in several newspapers and magazines all over the world, and her daily columns reached the homes of over 33 million readers worldwide.29 Para Ti magazine seemed especially fond of her and published several of her articles, selecting the Dix topics that the magazine wanted to endorse, including issues related to young working women’s daily lives. Considered one of the female advice columnists most open to women’s employment, Dix stated that the best piece of advice she could give young working women was not to fall in love with the boss and not to flirt with coworkers, as life was not a novel in which women ended up marrying them.30 An article in Para Ti with even more detailed advice similarly stated, “There is no possible friendship with them. Proper but distant cordiality is the right behavior. The office is not a marriage agency, let alone an appropriate place for flirting.”31 This opinion was part of a broader trend against interclass romances, one also conveyed by folletines and films, particularly if the girl was poor and her love object was rich. Leda, the columnist for Para Ti, discouraged interclass

The Modern Working Girl

romance again when contacted by a female reader, who consulted her about a failed relationship with a man of higher social status. It was better off over, explained Leda, given that he would never have abandoned his social circle and she would never have been accepted in it.32 While popular media tended to portray female workers as vain—if not promiscuous—subjects in search for admiration and fun, advice columnists preached against getting involved with men from the workplace—especially if they were wealthy and thus presumably womanizers. Young working women, in the meantime, were learning how to walk the fine line between enjoying their new social lives and being considered too forward.

Fashioning the Modern Working Woman The newly acquired independence of young working women gave them more freedom in terms of their interactions with men as well as economic autonomy from their families. For many young women, earning a living meant a certain self-determination regarding how to spend their salaries, turning consumption into a central part of not only their daily lives, but also their identities. Kathy Peiss and Nan Enstad have shown the centrality of young working women’s visual style to mediating the dynamics of urban life and labor in turn-of-thecentury New York.33 Similarly, their Argentine counterparts used their public appearance to convey diverse and sometimes contradictory messages about themselves. They adapted their looks in response not only to the concerns awakened by their presence in the workplace, but also to the cultural freedoms they were experiencing in their everyday lives and the famous and worldly flapper style, creating a localized modern look. Young working women were expected to hand over their salaries, or at least a substantial part thereof, to their families, a custom that undoubtedly upset some of them. According to a survey of urban working women who earned a salary of AR$150, AR$60 to AR$100 went to their families and the rest was reserved for personal expenses. However, the journalist who conducted these interviews noted that little money was left over after these women spent an average of AR$39 on breakfasts and lunches, plus AR$12 on commuting.34 In some cases, parents not only demanded their daughters’ entire salaries, deciding how much the girls had left for personal expenses, but also made a distinction between the contributions of sons and daughters. In these cases, young female workers

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were understandably indignant. Take, for example, the case of a young female worker who complained about her situation in Para Ti, stating that her brother contributed only a small percentage of his salary to the household and was exempt from household chores, while she not only handed over her whole salary but was also expected to help her mother with the housework. According to this employee, a working girl should be left to decide for herself how much money to contribute to the household and how to spend her earnings, as a good daughter would never let her mother go without clothing or her siblings without shoes.35 Wise parents, according to another article in Para Ti, did not interfere with their daughters’ consumption habits, even if they considered them superfluous or extravagant, as it was their daughters’ right to decide what to spend her earnings on.36 As Nan Enstad has noted, when working women claimed entitlement to their entire salaries, they were also demanding the status of “worker” granted to their male siblings but denied to them.37 Many articles concurred that once young working women got used to their economic independence, they would find it difficult to give up small luxuries in order to get married. After interviewing four female employees, a journalist concluded that while earning an average salary of AR$145, they devoted AR$53 to personal expenses, which comprised clothing (AR$14.40), shoes (AR$7.50), underwear (AR$4.50), hats (AR$2), stockings (AR$5.25), purses (AR$1.50), gloves (AR$1.60), recreation (AR$10), and toiletries (AR$6.25).38 Graciela Montaldo, in a work analyzing consumer culture in twentieth-century Argentina, has argued that with the advent of mass consumption, these everyday objects began to capture “the beauty of poor people’s world.” Women, because they were presumed to be banal, were portrayed as more inclined than men to purchase and use such items.39 According to the popular media, the importance that some young women placed on these small luxuries was the reason why some considered working after marriage, even if it was customary for them to quit their jobs to become fulltime housewives and mothers. A female journalist stated that if the future bride used her salary for personal expenses or decorating her new home, continuing to work after marriage was worthwhile.40 Another female journalist concurred, reminding readers that quitting their jobs would mean renouncing the comforts they had been able to afford as single working girls, as they would become economically dependent on their husbands, allocating their tight budgets to home and family needs.41 A third journalist was more direct when she wrote

The Modern Working Girl

that marriage to a wealthy man who would rescue the female worker from wage labor was a pipe dream. It was more realistic to think that one’s future husband would probably be an employee who could not afford the “little luxuries” the female worker was used to on his salary alone. She thus advised readers to take their chosen profession seriously, not as a pastime. “Nowadays we ask much more of life and we should also pay for those things,” this writer concluded unambiguously.42 There were even cases in which the marriage option was dismissed in favor of pursuing a career. According to a letter from a female employee, some women chose to stay single when asked to quit their jobs in order to get married and assume the duties of marital life.43 A questionnaire that determined whether women were fit for marriage concluded that there was a type of very independent woman who was happier working than being married. The questionnaire determined that for such women, the burdens of marriage would crush their personalities.44 For these journalists, the fact that certain women chose to work after getting married—or even chose work over matrimony—revealed that being able to fulfill material desires mattered as much to some women as the joys of marital life. Although these journalists endorsed the notion of young women working, they had a particular vision of female wage work, which they characterized as a gratifying and safe activity. This contrasted with more critical approaches of the day that denounced the poor working conditions and meager salaries earned by female workers, especially at factories.45 By considering female work a respectable and fulfilling occupation, the journalists adopted a rather middle-class perspective and justified employment as a decent way of satisfying women’s inclination to consume. Keeping up with all the latest goods was, however, costly. Female workers surely kept an eye out for department store sales and used the new credit system.46 If they exceeded their budgets, they probably turned to more risky ways of obtaining money to pay for desired items, perhaps pawning something of value, as depicted in one scene of the comic strip Mangacha, or asking for a loan.47 The problem was that, since interest rates on certain types of loans ran between 10 and 20 percent a month, clearing outstanding debts could prove very difficult. For this reason, socialist congressman Francisco Pérez Leirós presented a bill in 1932 that sought to safeguard the salaries of workers, especially female workers, against usury, proposing that salaries under AR$300 should not be subject to garnishment. Young female workers, according to Pérez Leirós,

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were the perfect victims for usurers, as they were the most tempted by expensive items like jewels and furs that they could not afford on their incomes.48 The idea that women were more prone than men to consumer excesses was widespread, and was also on the minds of many everyday men. Comments by male readers published in magazines highlighted a direct relationship between women and conspicuous consumption, and condemned those who had material ambitions as frivolous and materialistic. One male reader, for example, stated, “My advice to a woman is to steer clear of luxury and dancing.” Others linked material ambitions directly to the modern woman: “I hate the modern woman’s passion for luxury, dresses, and the pictures,” proclaimed one reader.49 When asked about the qualities of their ideal women, men usually praised thrift. “She should be an enemy of luxury, modest, educated, and hard-working,”50 said one reader, while another added, “I find fault with the dolls who stroll down Florida street, looking for the highest bidder, but worship those female workers who are willing to do without for the sake of their elderly parents and younger siblings.”51 Nowhere were these views of female consumption, especially those tied to lower-class women, more clearly expressed, and more moralistic, than in tango lyrics. Generally written from the viewpoint of men of humble origins, many tango songs described a man’s fears of losing control over his partner because of her attraction to expensive material objects, which, according to them, were no substitute for the devotion they professed for her. The milonguita, the female protagonist of many tango songs, was a sensual and self-assured young woman, born into a lower-class family in one of the city’s barrios, driven by consumerist excesses that proved to be her undoing.52 A prominent figure in Argentine popular culture, the milonguita might or might not be employed, but she unquestionably rejected a future as a poor housewife.53 As Anahí Viladrich has shown, milonguitas provoked either resentment or pity and an attempt at moral redemption in tango’s male narrators, and were always punished in tangos for choosing what was considered a corrupt lifestyle.54 The milonguita was also attached to specific material goods, usually expensive clothing and jewelry. These items were enumerated in almost every tango that mentioned her. In “De tardecita” [By Afternoon] (1927), for example, the narrator states, “downtown’s lights made you believe / that the joy you were looking for / was far from your arrabal / and you wore silk, not percale / expensive dresses and great luxury bewitched you with ambition.”55 In “Flor de

The Modern Working Girl

trapo” [Rag flower] (1920), the author asserts, “the influence of silk proved fatal / you turned your Eden into hell / when inebriated by orgies and luxury / you fell into the hands of that niño bien.”56 The milonguita’s journey from her quiet neighborhood (barrio/arrabal) to downtown Buenos Aires symbolized the gradual and inevitable loss of her innocence, a sad path marked by inevitable degradation and remorse. While this was the male songwriter’s position on the lives of milonguitas, some of the few women who wrote tangos instead argued that the prospect of a wealthy life could be satisfying enough for this daring female character. This idea is conveyed in the handful of tango lyrics penned and performed by women, challenging the victimization of lower-class women that most tangos reproduced.57 “Se va la vida” [Life Goes By] (1929), written by María Luisa Carnelli—whose tangos were published under the pseudonym Luis Mario—encourages poor young women to make the most of men who offer them a life of luxury and pleasure. The tango “Pipistrela” [Goofy Girl] (1933), performed by the popular Tita Merello, portrays a potential milonguita who, having tired of the poor suitors surrounding her, wishes she had the money to buy a pair of shoes and a hat in order to catch a gullible downtown man and leave behind the humble men of the suburbs. These tangos were expressing the centrality of consumption, and of the possibility of affording luxuries, to the lives of these young women, who were also well aware that their sexuality could be a ticket to a wealthy life.58 The alleged penchant for consumption among young lower-class women permeated not only the portrayals of the milonguita figure but also other representations of the modern working girl. There are few characters of this sort who exemplify this attachment to specific material goods better than Tillie, the protagonist of the Tillie the Toiler comic strip. Tillie was usually depicted at work wearing elegant over-the-knee dresses, big earrings, lace, and tippets. Moreover, as Tillie worked as a model in her spare time, American newspapers featured paper cut-out dolls of Tillie with the different outfits she wore in her fashion shows. In the case of Mangacha, la dactilógrafa (Para Ti, 1923), an Argentine copy of the original comic strip, the protagonist also showed off her loose-fitting clothing, tippets, and heavy makeup at the workplace, but, unlike Tillie, she wore longer dresses and did not work as a model. The differences between them were probably a way of toning down the protagonist’s appearance and activities in order to adapt them to Para Ti’s views on modern working women. This notwithstand-

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ing, the appeal of Mangacha in Argentina, and that of Tillie all over the world, was based on the glamour and fashionable style of their protagonists, and on the comic strips’ focus on values such as social mobility and individual status.59 It seems paradoxical that while comic strips featuring modern working girls reinforced this fashionable look, the wider popular media discouraged young female workers from wearing these new styles in the workplace. Working women were required to have a smart appearance (buena presencia), which consisted in looking attractive but not too sexy and avoiding any suggestive outfits.60 In various photos of real female workers taken by journalists and later published in magazines, female employees look solemn during working hours, lunch hours, or while running errands. They wear loose-fitting skirts and blouses, silk stockings and high-heeled shoes, and cloche hats, gloves and purses that generally match their outfit.61 Employees who had doubts on how to dress for the office could turn to practical handbooks and advice columns for help. The makers of Remington typewriters, for example, published a guide for typists containing a questionnaire that female employees were to take in order to discover whether they had buena presencia. The handbook posed several questions on how they looked, such as whether they wore loud clothing and over-accessorized or instead matched their accessories to the colors of their sober outfits, and whether they applied discreet or heavy makeup, in order to evaluate just how smart their appearance was.62 Advice columnists like the famous Dorothy Dix provided the reader with very detailed information on what was considered a proper look for employees. In an article published in Para Ti, she plainly stated: “A simple look is not at odds with elegance: wear the best quality dress and hat that you can afford, but remember that both should be dark-toned and plain.” Women workers were to avoid flashy colors and accessories like big flowers, flounces, and jewels, leaving them for other occasions. “If you consider makeup essential,” Dix continued, “wear it—but with discretion.” She also advised her readers to avoid long polished nails and perfume because men usually didn’t like them during working hours.63 Dix suggested that female employees dress with sobriety and elegance, and behave demurely in the workplace, in an attempt to minimize young working women’s potential appeal to male coworkers and employers. Through her advice columns, she was in fact popularizing certain mannerisms and morals such as the importance of respectability and moderation. These notions were key to the definition of the American middle classes,

The Modern Working Girl

as has been argued, but also proved important to the circulation of middleclass values on the transnational level.64 Although Dix advised the female worker to avoid items that could oversexualize her—too much makeup and perfume, and polished nails—the advice columnist also differentiated the clerk’s attire from what a working girl would wear on Sundays and at parties. While the office dress code allowed working women to combine notions of glamour and respectability, leisure wardrobes allowed them to play more freely with their looks, trying on different styles when attending dances, heading to the movies or going on picnics, as several articles by the poet and journalist Alfonsina Storni showed.65 It was no coincidence that the look deemed reprehensible during working hours was the visual marker of the global modern girl figure, a look that was a source of fascination among young working women. A bob hairdo, stylish clothes—usually short skirts and sleeveless dresses—and trendy makeup were the most common features of the modern girl look. Short hair in particular gave those who wore it not only a sense of belonging to the globally fashionable modern girl phenomenon, but also a feeling of freedom from old customs. For many working women, a bob was practical, as stated by a female reader who argued that it gave women who worked the possibility of going out without wasting as much time on their hair as they used to.66 The modern girl look was, overall, a fashion that transcended social classes. In fact, as a consequence of the democratization of fashion, working women could get a glimpse of the latest international collections in the shop windows of fancy downtown department stores or in the fashion and film sections of magazines and then replicate, or buy cheaper versions of, the new fashionable items, thus creating a very trendy look.67 The fact that a working-class woman could be mistaken for a wealthy woman was the direct consequence of the new consumer society, which created a certain uniformity in clothing and blurred existing indicators of class. This was a cause for celebration for many, but also a source of concern for some. The popular writer Emma de la Barra, for example, extolled the emergence of cheap versions of expensive products because now young working women could dress as well as or even better than their upperclass counterparts.68 Yet the conservative Roberto Gache yearned for the old times when a poor girl was easily recognized, complaining that now, “they all wear the same dainty shoe and the same delicate and indiscreet stocking,” making it difficult to distinguish the poor girls from the rich.69 When analyzing

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and criticizing young working women’s outfits, the focus was on signs of class distinction, which for many observers were getting lost under the pressure of consumer society. Nené Cascallar, the hostess of a popular radio advice program, also criticized young working women’s tendency to don cheap imitations of expensive clothing—but for a different reason.70 According to Cascallar, a fake fur coat or cheap piece of jewelry was easily recognized as a fake, bringing ridicule upon the woman who wore it.71 The implicit message the radio hostess transmitted to young working women was that they should dress in a modest and sober way, not pretend to be something they were not, and steer clear of looks they could not afford and that did not suit them. In a similar tone, but from a different perspective, Alfonsina Storni also found it bizarre that the poor girl would copy the look of wealthy women. According to Storni, she “will be so ridiculous as to [attempt to] give the newest forms to old and worn-out fabrics, exposing the sadness of her poor soul to the sharp gaze of the passerby.”72 While Cascallar was worried about young working women’s proclivity for deception, Storni was more concerned about the normative role that fashion had in women’s lives, highlighting the limitations that fashion codes imposed on women.73 For many contemporaries, young working women who dressed opulently aimed to look like socialites in order to conquer a wealthy man and clamber up the social ladder. In some of his short stories, Josué Quesada depicted young working women as deceitful beings capable of posing as something they were not in order to win the devotion of their paramours. In “Cuando el amor triunfa” [When love triumphs], the female protagonist ultimately conquers her wealthy lover by showing up for lunch dressed as an elegant and modern young upper-class woman, making a profound impression on him. Equally, the protagonist in “Melenita” [Hairdo] gets a bob because her upper-class lover asks her to, arguing, in order to convince her, that all the socialites are wearing their hair that way.74 Beneath this approach lay the belief that a trendy look could only emanate from the upper classes and that lower-class women’s role in fashion was merely to copy higher-class style. Storni, insightful enough to realize that fashion implied overlapping styles across social classes, was one of the few voices to question this assumption. Through her analyses of what she called the “impersonal” type of woman, present in every social class, she showed that fashion was a question of imitation. The “shop girl who wants to be taken for a rich girl,” was impersonal, but so was “the rich girl who dresses like her favorite

The Modern Working Girl

actress, and the actress who strives to look like a schoolgirl, and the schoolgirl who wears flowing hair and extremely high heels.”75 Although Storni highlighted the way different looks circulated among social classes, her analysis overlooked the fact that through imitation, young working women did not just mimic international or high-class feminine looks, but also transformed them in the process. This appropriation implied the re-creation of authenticity, which was expressed through the display of values and looks coming from the world of the poor. Actresses in variety shows, known as bataclanas, offered a national take on modern femininity. Ageeth Sluis has argued that in Mexico, bataclanismo brought with it a new transnational aesthetic for the female body—a long torso and limbs, short hair, and a slender physique—that allowed mestizo women to participate in this new beauty ideal, paving the way for the emergence of a kind of “mestizo modernity.”76 Argentine bataclanas played a similar role.77 Known for their provocative and open attitude toward sex and their emancipated conduct, they showed off their slim bodies in short flashy dresses and maillots, wearing high-heeled shoes, bobbed hair, and heavy makeup.78 They could have a dark skin tone or a whiter complexion, but were always associated with the world of the poor. Former bataclanas and tango singers such as Sofía Bozán and Rosita Quiroga, publicly considered young modern women, were often called la negra (dark-skinned woman) in order to connect them to the culture of poor people and to authenticity.79 The quintessential embodiment of the Argentine bataclana of these years was Tita Merello, a female tango star whose nickname, la morocha argentina, was associated with her dark skin tone as well as her impoverished origins. Born in a tenement house in the San Telmo neighborhood in 1904, she worked briefly as a dancer and singer at ill-reputed clubs and bars—such as the “Ba Ta Clán”—before becoming a famous tango singer and movie star. Unlike other performers, she did not forsake her humble background, opting instead to capitalize on her working-class origins in order to create a unique tango character, la vedette rea. Through this persona, she cultivated the image of an independent, smart, and funny lower-class woman.80 She was among the few female performers who broke free from the typical character of the sad working girl who got cheated out of love, or the fun-loving milonguita who abandoned the modest home where she lived with her doting lover. Key components of Tita Merello’s persona were her dark skin tone and her

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gaucho outfits, which were promoted as a marker of her authentic modernity. “In order to show us . . . that [Josephine] Baker is not the only pale-brown woman that the people of Buenos Aires have seen, she [Merello] sends us her photographs,” stated Atlántida’s journalist. In the portraits, Merello appears dressed as a modern girl in gaucho costume, adding a sexy rip to the loosefitting trousers typical of gauchos, high-heeled boots, and an exotic animal-print shawl. The characteristic gaucho’s hat, which didn’t quite cover her bobbed hair, framed her heavily made-up face.81 In creating this particular style, Tita Merello blended authenticity—her dark skin and gaucho culture—with the cosmopolitanism conveyed by the animal-print shawl and short hair, differentiating herself from other modern girls from around the world. The bataclanas’ style was so fashionable that Argentine upper-class young women often appropriated their looks in order to build their modern girl persona, as was the case with Beba, the protagonist of the serialized story published in Caras y Caretas, who was criticized for adopting low-cut dresses and tango jargon.82 While Tita Merello’s style mixed urban and countryside values, Niní Marshall, the famous comedy writer and performer, resorted to different elements of working-class culture to convey authenticity. Catita, her pompous pinkcollar character, became a rapid success. Although Marshall exaggerated Catita’s coarse manners, she also recalled in her memoirs modeling her on real young women, whom she described as nosy and tacky girls who dressed extravagantly and spoke in idiosyncratic Italian phrases.83 In order to create Catita’s character, Marshall not only copied their way of speaking, running words together and using lunfardo and uncouth phrases, but also adopted their apparel. For Catita’s outfit, she chose fabrics with big patterns and bright colors that she bought at La Piedad, a downtown department store targeting the working classes. She also added flowers, ribbons, and birds to plain hats, and bought a second-rate fur stole, which Catita wore all the time, even on her way to work.84 The combination of Catita’s cheap fur stole and colorful, embellished dresses created an exaggerated look. Although the fur stole was supposed to emulate upper-class fashions, the overall look conveyed a conscious rejection of the elite’s supposed elegance and simplicity, relaying instead a sense of unrefined ostentation. Catita appealed to a broad audience, especially young women. Just one year after Catita’s radio premier, she had already made her cinematic debut, performing for the first time in Manuel Romero’s popular 1938 film Mujeres que trabajan, which was followed by Divorcio en Montevideo (1939), Casamiento en

The Modern Working Girl

Figure 3.1. The actress Tita Merello in gaucho outfit. “El descanso de Tita Merello,” Atlántida, September 26, 1929, 34.

Buenos Aires (1940), Luna de miel en Río (1940) and Yo quiero ser bataclana (1941), all directed by Romero and starring Catita as a salesgirl, manicurist and bataclana. The character was so successful that the department store La Piedad, which also sponsored Marshall’s radio show, created and sold a Catita doll.85 Matthew Karush has noted that, although Catita was poking fun at a specific social type, her popularity among the lower classes indicated that the audience

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Figure 3.2. Niní Marshall as Catita in Casamiento en Buenos Aires. Courtesy of Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken.

related to her aggressive class pride. Cristine Ehrick has highlighted that the audience was divided not only along class lines but also by gender, noting that lower-class women were the ones who most enjoyed Marshall’s depiction of an irreverent young lady.86 Young female workers might also have been proud

The Modern Working Girl

of seeing their original garment combinations displayed on the big screen and magazine covers, recognizing through Catita’s character the centrality of fashion and consumption to the construction of their modern identity.

E The incorporation of women into the labor market altered their everyday lives and clashed with customary gender and class expectations. Among the most debated social and cultural effects of female employment, social commentators listed changing sexual mores and the emergence of materialistic consumerism. Popular culture widely disseminated images and arguments about female employment, alternately praising and condemning the impact that work had on women’s lives and gender relations. While some columnists and social commentators celebrated employment outside the home as an opportunity for women to interact with men without supervision, providing female employees with the skills to deal with new situations, folletines depicted the workplace as a dangerous environment, where naïve and romantic female employees were seduced by the charisma of wealthy manipulative men, or sexually harassed by evil employers and customers, becoming, in either case, fallen women. Similarly, women’s magazines tended to express a positive view of the new purchasing opportunities that earning a living provided to recently employed young women, acknowledging that some of them enjoyed shopping as much as or more than housework. Tango, however, entirely disapproved of these materialistic ambitions, accusing women of abandoning their partners and sacrificing a future of domestic happiness for the joys of conspicuous consumption, and forecasting a tragic and lonely future for them. Popular culture celebrated ideals of female independence, self-determination, respectability, and femininity, while also praising conservative gender notions. Some of the young women who decided to work indeed enjoyed new opportunities for socializing, gained economic independence, and took pleasure in buying things. Yet they were also affected by the popular media’s depiction of female work, which included issues like striking a balance between all that work provided and what family and society expected of them. While these young females explored the new sexual and romantic opportunities that the streets and workplace afforded, they also had to be careful when behaving in sexually assertive ways to avoid flying in the face of proper moral behavior. Earning a

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living allowed female employees to challenge their families’ expectations and learn to manage their pocket money. Still, they were also supposed to be moderate in their consumption and spending habits, as female excess in this regard was regarded as morally reprehensible. Similarly, while their salaries permitted them to experiment with their identities through fashion, trying on new images and roles, they were also expected to dress in a sober and simple way, as female workers seen as too trendy and attractive were accused of imitating the style of modern upper-class young women in an attempt to clamber up the social ladder. In other words, women had to learn how to express their modernity without being considered flappers. Pink-collar employees were often referred to as jóvenes modernas by the popular media. They were portrayed as rejecting strict sexual standards by consorting with members of the opposite sex without chaperones, enjoying the opportunity to socialize more freely with men, and seizing on the opportunity their salaries provided to shop at their discretion. However, they were not equated with the flapper figure, whose archetype was the pleasureseeking young woman of the upper classes. As shown in the last chapter, the oversimplified figure of the flapper served to alert the Argentine public to the dangerous effects of Americanization and consumer capitalism on gender and national identities and, as such, garnered much more disapproval than the figure of the modern working woman. Although these female wage earners did elicit some criticism, they were also praised for some of their modern traits. Young female employees were also far more than a product of the media. They had a concrete existence, adding complexity to the overall picture of the modern girl. The important presence of modern working girls in the Argentine popular media contrasts with the Cuban case. While Argentina and Cuba glorified modernity, which led them to emphasize their respective distances from their colonial heritage, their modern girl figures differed. The Cuban version of the modern girl—mainly portrayed as an upper-middle-class young woman, white, cosmopolitan and jobless—monopolized the representation of Cuban modernity. Argentine popular culture, instead, presented a more nuanced version of the modern girl figure.87 The cosmopolitan upper-class flapper coexisted with glamourized representations of young Argentine women working in offices and department stores, in contrast to Cuba, where representations of the female employee were scarce.

The Modern Working Girl

These wage earners, moreover, carried markers of cosmopolitanism, but also of authenticity. The modern working girl figure drew heavily from a transnational culture that highlighted the importance of respectability, femininity, and trendiness, spreading global middle-class values across nations. American comic strips and advice columns in particular played a key role in popularizing the figure of the modern female employee all over the world. This transnational dynamic created the need to distinguish the modern Argentine working woman from her global counterparts. Popular culture resorted to images and values associated with lower-class femininity in order to do so. Tita Merello, la morocha argentina, blended authenticity and modernity through her dark skin tone, her exotic gaucho attire, and her cosmopolitan look. Conversely, Catita, Niní Marshall’s determined character, personified the wannabe employee who, while craving material success and higher social standing, also mocked and rejected the upper-class lifestyle. By deploying race and class, these characters forged an alternative modern image for the global working girl figure.

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4 Forging a Healthy and Beautiful Body

In May 1929, the women’s magazine Femenil published an article praising physical activity as crucial to the emergence of a new type of woman. Sports, stated the article, provided young women with “moral and material independence,” as well as “health, harmony and beauty.” These “strong, agile, graceful” females were those who would go on to “raise a happy family, know how to be excellent wives and engender strong and healthy children.”1 The modern young woman, attractive and independent, would then be a fit mother because she played sports. The article presented both female health and beauty and women’s improved reproduction capacity and mothering abilities as the two main reasons for celebrating the emergence of female sports. In the 1920s and 1930s, health and beauty became highly trendy. The term physical culture, which during these decades was used interchangeably with others like sports and exercise—meaning, broadly, any type of voluntary physical activity—was understood as crucial to a healthy and beautiful body. Based on popular ideas of health, dancing, outdoor exercise, gymnastics, sports and dieting were promoted as the main methods by which to achieve this. The diffusion of physical culture went hand in hand with the spread of English sports outside elite circles and the incorporation of gymnastics in schools.2 As scholars have shown, during the 1920s and especially the 1930s, physical culture and sport became a mass phenomenon.3 Men began exercising more, but an increasing number of women also participated in the various sports clubs and similar organizations that flourished at the time.4 Women could choose to join clubs associated with the workplace, like the co-ed Club Atlético Unión Telefónica, all-women clubs like Ima Sumac and Asociación Cristiana Femenina, and co-ed

Forging a Healthy and Beautiful Body

neighborhood organizations like the Belgrano Athletic Club, among many others.5 Female fitness activities became popular among young single and married women from diverse social backgrounds, ranging from those who were members at exclusive tennis and golf clubs to those who headed to more accessible athletic and physical culture clubs and organizations. Women began not only to exercise, either at these organizations or at home, but also started to train for competitions. Their participation in national and international tournaments increased in this period, and athletes excelled at the first women’s national track and field games organized in 1923, at the South American tennis tournaments of 1933 and 1934, and at the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936, where a Latin American woman won an Olympic medal for the first time.6 Sports and physical culture magazines (El Gráfico, Cultura Sexual y Física), popular medicine magazines (Viva Cien Años, Higiene y Salud), beauty handbooks, and sections on the same topics in weekly magazines targeting both men and women proliferated, especially in the 1930s. This was indicative of how important personal health and beauty had become to the population, especially in Buenos Aires and other large cities. These publications disseminated the views of physicians, health and social reformers, journalists and physical culturists, both foreign and Argentine. Among them, El Gráfico stands out as the magazine that emphasized most strongly the moral and educational aspects of exercising, especially for women.7 In fact, the media played an important role in promoting female exercise. According to Mike Featherstone, through the creation of “new standards of appearance and body representation,” mass culture promoted a critical attitude toward the female body. Having a slender, attractive, fit body became the aspiration of the everyday woman, which, in turn, stimulated the consumption of body improvement methods and products, making the modern female body essential to consumer culture.8 In Argentina, as elsewhere, many physicians and physical education experts, as well as reporters and commentators, were convinced that women needed physical activity more than men, and launched a campaign among the broader public regarding the beneficial effects of exercise. Among them, health and beauty were highlighted as the most appealing aspects for women. Through analysis of magazines that specialized primarily in physical culture, as well as general interest magazines, beauty handbooks, advertisements, and the few remaining voices of women who exercised, this chapter analyzes the campaign to convince women of the benefits of sports and the responses it generated

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from female audiences. More specifically, it analyzes how notions of health and beauty were used to promote and justify women’s exercise and how these conceptions redefined traditional ideas of femininity. The growing social attention paid to personal health and beauty was a response to anxieties regarding the future of the Argentine nation, but also to some of the liberating effects that this awareness of the body provided. Both arguments helped to turn female exercise into a socially accepted, fashionable, and popular practice, spreading new notions of what a healthy and beautiful body meant and the different ways to attain it. Tied to sports, these new conceptions of beauty and health affected both the representations of the female body and the actual experience of women who, through exercise, paved the way for the emergence of a modern, athletic female figure.

Health, Beauty, and Modern Life Exercise for women was usually justified by a litany of the positive personal effects it would have on young women’s lives. Popular media outlets promoted physical activity primarily as a matter of well-being, presenting it as an antidote to the health problems associated with the modern city. Usually known as “diseases of civilization,” issues such as stress, exhaustion, a sedentary lifestyle, physical and moral decay, and eating disorders were presented as new problems. While many of these were not exclusive to women, the popular press, and especially El Gráfico, did highlight that women needed exercise more than men.9 “The practice of physical culture, so useful to men, seems even more necessary to women, who are condemned to a lack of physical activity due to our mores and biases.”10 According to the press, exercise “activates women’s blood circulation . . . and boosts their metabolism . . . it balances their moral and intellectual energy and it commands the nervous system, frequently atrophied by the fatigue and overwork of life today.”11 Modern life’s health problems were, moreover, related to the social class to which a woman belonged, and therefore, to different lifestyles. While upper-class young women were described as having repetitive if frenetic lives—endless soirées and cocktail parties that left them with no time to exercise—pink and bluecollar female workers were depicted as suffering the physical consequences of sedentary labor. Physical activity could help all of these women live healthy lives, concluded the article.12 Smoking and drinking, viewed as the result of women’s newly acquired independence, were added to the list of the main health problems

Forging a Healthy and Beautiful Body

of young modern women, and particularly of the upper-class flapper.13 A journalist noted that while it was understandable, and even laudable, for young modern women to want to free themselves from old prejudices, they had gotten it wrong. The true principles for developing modern femininity were not the abuse of cigarettes and alcohol, but engagement in sports, which, according to the journalist, gave women a new and true sense of freedom.14 Socialist women could not have agreed more. Comparing young women who played sports with wealthy ones who drank and danced tango, Alicia Moreau de Justo deemed the female athletes to be the ones capable of living life with a free and daring attitude.15 A stressful and vice-ridden life not only altered people’s physical constitution but also affected their spirit. The motto mens sana in corpore sano, which became very popular in Argentina and in many parts of Europe and the Americas during this period, was based on the idea that the human body and mind were interconnected.16 Health, which had been typically associated with the prevention of mass disease during the nineteenth century, was increasingly linked to the development of individual assertiveness and happiness, especially during the 1930s.17 Physician Diego Grayson, among many others, stated that physical health and a balanced spirit depended on one other, and that the state of the body reflected and affected the condition of the mind and vice-versa. A healthy lifestyle implied not just preventing illness, but rather achieving physical vitality and mental energy, which resulted from a life free of irritability, nervousness, and worry.18 As a woman’s character was considered the projection of an active body, increased self-esteem, attractiveness, and optimism were typically enumerated as the positive mental outcomes of women playing sports.19 By targeting sports as a response to both the physical and spiritual problems of modern life, the press launched a campaign to convince young women to embrace physical culture. Besides counteracting the unhealthy consequences of modern life, exercise and physical culture for women were also celebrated as symbols of modernity.20 Sports were supposed to grant the young modern woman both physical fitness and beauty, two essential attributes that, in turn, were within any woman’s reach if she followed the experts’ advice.21 Mario Alzúa, one of the most important promoters of the healthy beauty discourse, stated that “every modern woman aspires to be beautiful, healthy, strong, admired, and youthful,” adding that “it is within their reach to accomplish” this. Lack of exercise, Alzúa went on, brought health and beauty problems for women, as they not only got sick more often and aged faster than men, but also had saggy stomachs, complexion problems, and

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bodies either too thin or too heavy.22 His advice to female readers was to follow the Herbert method, a one-hour daily exercise routine that he considered the best type of workout for women.23 Along the same vein, another article proclaimed that beauty was almost a duty for women. “Beauty is a cult! And it’s a woman’s duty to care for and improve it.”24 Many advocates of physical culture believed that the only way to achieve true beauty was through exercise, and aimed to teach women how to become physically healthy, fit, and beautiful by doing the right type of activity. Physical culture advocates often exhorted female readers to pursue physical beauty, promising that it guaranteed attractiveness and, consequently, a successful love life. An article praising the virtues of women’s sport, one of which was beauty, concluded that “after all, that is female beauty’s true objective: to get men to say what they’re feeling.”25 A beautiful figure combined with attraction and charm could even lead rich and famous men to marry outside their social class, stated another article.26 Besides increasing a woman’s appeal, exercise was also promoted as an enjoyable activity.27 Women who practiced sports tended to confirm these benefits. When asked by a magazine to name the best sport for women, female readers tended to highlight the enjoyment that the various sports provided them. Tennis, for instance, was cited among the favorites because it required agility, resistance, and technical skill; it was played outdoors; and it was a game for both women and men, providing an opportunity for social interaction as well.28 According to Jill Mathews, not only did physical activity give women healthy bodies, capable of bearing healthy children—the more conservative side of this discourse—but it also helped them catch or keep husbands and produced liberating and pleasurable sensations.29 Promoters of physical culture and exercise had a problematic relationship with cosmetics and toiletries, which also promised beauty and happiness to their consumers. For many of them, cosmetics were a guileful way to look appealing. According to a feature article in El Gráfico, some women continued to overlook true beauty and “deceive themselves by preferring the beauty that makeup and girdles simulate.”30 “Women have a tried and true method for being beautiful and strong which, unfortunately, they do not take advantage of. If instead of using makeup, they exercised regularly and in a disciplined fashion, they would be strong and beautiful,” concluded another article.31 Not only were cosmetics deceptive, they also altered authentic beauty traits. Physician Amanda del Valle, in her beauty advice book, affirmed that “the real path

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toward beauty is hygiene,” noting how advertising had spread the popularity of makeup and creams and artificially extolled some parts of the body, “at the expense of ruining authentic beauty.” Wearing heavy makeup was a new fashion that damaged women’s beauty and health by covering their skin with toxic ingredients. While the harm inflicted on beauty could be hidden under a layer of makeup, the damage to one’s health would eventually come to light, concluded the author.32 Notwithstanding these warnings, using makeup was becoming a very popular and respectable practice indispensable for articulating conventional femininity. Therefore, it was increasingly seen as the final touch on a healthy lifestyle as opposed to a way to disguise one’s true inner beauty. As Kathy Peiss has shown, the use of cosmetics changed in the U.S. in the early twentieth century, shedding its typical nineteenth-century association with artifice and prostitution and becoming a legitimate cultural practice among women. Thus, women’s beauty came to be seen as less dependent on personality and more on the visual aesthetics associated with marking and coloring the face.33 Several beauty selfcare manuals published during this period, for example, taught women a variety of strategies on how to acquire health and beauty. Tips ranged from the appropriate exercise for losing belly fat to the right makeup for day and night and the correct way to apply creams, depending on one’s complexion type.34 Cosmetics became crucial for attaining the modern girl look all over the world, and ads for cosmetics that promised to transform the existing quality and color of the skin increased during the 1920s and 1930s, as did the sales of these same products.35 While physical culture experts suggested that lack of exercise could cause skin problems such as acne and beauty spots, beauty advisors and advertisements promoted a simpler method for bettering the skin through cosmetics, and many customers probably appreciated their practicality. The beauty advice section of Para Ti, for instance, scoffed at the idea that the skin did not need cosmetic treatments as long as women exercised and ate right, arguing that that was typical male advice. Instead, the author recommended using protective lotion against the sun and wind when doing outdoor activities.36 The ads for cold cream, acne treatment, and vanishing and bleaching creams that promised to improve and whiten the skin were usually promoted as healthier than powder, as these creams were considered less deceptive and more “natural” than skin-masking cosmetics.37 The cleansing water Agua Blanca Dora, for instance, was purported to be “the ideal scientific

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product, which conserves, smooths and bleaches your skin, without the need for powder or other products.”38 Like physical culture advocates, beauty culture promoters held the anxietyinducing conviction that beauty was within every woman’s reach, but only if she followed the right advice.39 The author of a beauty advice book stated, “not all women are naturally beautiful, but if they try, any woman can become beautiful and pleasing insofar as they know how to leverage the art of beautification and its many artifices.”40 Beauty advice sections, with their detailed recommendations on makeup, exercise, dieting, and fashion, populated women’s magazines and, like magazines specializing in health and sports and beauty advice books, became a source of tips for women eager to look modern. The need to be healthy, fit, and beautiful—a need physical and beauty culture advocates agreed on—redefined both the representation of the female body and the actual experiences of women. A beautiful modern body was increasingly defined through two interrelated but different notions: slenderness and strength. An article praising a healthy type of beauty stated that “in order to wear the latest fashions in a distinguished way, the female body should have delicate and toned limbs, a slim waist, and round, firm breasts,” and provided a piece of advice on the type and quantity of exercise and food needed to keep one’s body slender.41 Promoters of female exercise usually cited the examples of the Venus de Milo and of Annette Kellermann, the famous swimmer, encouraging women to attain these female beauty ideals.42 Others put the ideal female form into numbers, stating that “a perfect height for a woman corresponds to eight times the length of her head and her breasts should be double the circumference of her head.”43 While slenderness was praised, extreme thinness in the pursuit of fashion was frowned upon. Physician Amanda del Valle claimed that excessive thinness, though trendy, could put female health in danger when women followed strict diets.44 Nucleodyne, a strength tonic, stated that the concern over weight caused “undernourished constitutions, in turn easy marks for any type of disease.” Instead, “the svelte and flexible modern woman should have a strong and healthy organism,” and Nucleodyne promised to deliver strength without causing weight gain.45 Strength as a positive female trait began to be particularly promoted worldwide during the 1930s, and the strong body gradually replaced the fragile and weak type of beauty once in vogue.46 When asked whether women should develop some sort of body vigor, physicians like Mario Alzúa responded affirmatively. Unlike the “fragile, weak, and sickly” women of yore, “modern

Forging a Healthy and Beautiful Body

women” were healthy, beautiful, and strong beings whose strength made them “resistant, moderately muscular, alert, and competent; resilient to cold, heat and the outdoors; and energetic and frugal.”47 Almost as a visual translation of these affirmations, pictures of strong sportswomen began to be published on the covers of sports newspapers and magazines. Portraits of Lilian Harrison and Anita Gutbrod swimming across Río de la Plata and its channels—setting female swimmer world records for both time and distance in the water—made the cover of El Gráfico several times. Women track and field winners also made the cover, where they usually appeared with a trendy bob, wearing a t-shirt, gym shorts and sneakers, proudly showing off their strong bare legs and sturdy bodies.48 These images functioned as a modern alternative to the flapper aesthetic, characterized by a thin woman wearing high heels and heavy makeup, who was often criticized for her unhealthy habits, like drinking and smoking. Photos of young Argentine women playing sports and displaying their slender, muscular bodies continued to populate sports publications and the press, but images of sportswomen became more sexualized during the 1930s. Portraits of important sportswomen, especially swimmers, generally emphasized the beauty and slimness of the woman posing for the camera by focusing on her legs or waist, turning female athletes into objects of desire.49 As Mark Dyreson has pointed out in his analysis of female athletes in the U.S., “athletes became the . . . heroines of the burgeoning consumer culture, arrayed for public display with movie actors and other ‘idols of consumption.’”50 In pictures portraying Jeanette Campbell, for instance, the Olympic swimming silver medalist often appeared coquettishly posing in a bathing suit, sitting on a diving board or standing near a statue instead of actually swimming.51 These sportswomen’s photos were frequently accompanied by texts that pointed out their “real women” qualities along with their records.52 Blanca Torterolo was described as a very feminine athlete despite her short hair and her penchant for sports, and the journalist who interviewed the runner praised her skills in the kitchen as much as the records she set.53 The achievements of sportswomen were also underplayed at international competitions. After Jeanette Campbell’s performance at the Berlin Olympic Games, where she won a silver medal for swimming, a journalist affirmed that “thanks to her exquisite femininity, her grace and her personal charm, she was the most captivating figure of the Olympic village,” capable of remaining graceful despite the harsh

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Figure 4.1. Athlete Hortensia Rodríguez of Club Racing. “Srita. Hortensia Rodríguez, del Club Racing; la mejor atleta argentina,” El Gráfico, October 18, 1924, internal cover.

Figure 4.2. Jeanette Campbell, winner of the South American swimming competition. “Jeanette Campbell, campeona nacional y sudamericana de natación en 100 metros libres, con 1 min. 15 seg.” El Gráfico, March 17, 1934, cover.

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competition.54 The press expected that sportswomen would beat their challengers in both performance and looks, merging nationalism and sexuality in their coverage of competitions.55 Although these images tended to sexualize female athletes’ bodies and the comments often downplayed their potential, actual sportswomen were proud of their fit figures and defended sports as a bold new female undertaking. Jeanette Campbell laughed when recalling how a local newspaper from Córdoba, a particularly prudish province, retouched a photo of her in a bathing suit, adding sleeves, shorts and a chaste collar.56 At the same time, these sportswomen often had to fight social discrimination in order to compete. In an interview, Blanca and Clotilde Torterolo, famous track and field athletes, remembered that members of their own family had been against the sisters training because they believed that women’s only motivation for running was to show off their legs. They also recalled people calling them machonas (tomboys) or calling out to them to go do the dishes while they were training. Ignoring their family’s preferences and those of society, they said, was unusual in that era.57 Olga Tassi was another example of a young woman who challenged social conventions through sports. A famous track and field sportswoman, she began using her mother’s last name when she competed, as her father refused to allow her to participate in competitive sports and prevented her from traveling to the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. After repeatedly lying to him, saying she was going to the movies or a birthday party when she was in fact going to train, she eventually convinced her father to let her compete and went on to win several South American competitions under her own name.58 By training and competing, these sportswomen contested the social rules that governed the behavior of so many young women during this period and became the embodiment of the athletic and modern young woman figure. As the press turned these women into popular icons, it also reassured its readers that, although they were breaking records, these athletes could still act feminine and look attractive, in a perfect combination of power and sex appeal.

Race, Nation, and Female Sports Women’s participation in sports was not only justified in terms of individual achievement, it was also generally accompanied by a description of the posi-

Forging a Healthy and Beautiful Body

tive effects it would have on the nation. “We must persevere with the campaign until sports have become a habit for Argentine women; then our race will have reached a milestone with wide implications for the future of the motherland,” proclaimed a feature article in El Gráfico.59 Another article in the same magazine stated that sports helped to improve the human body and “rectify its defects” and “its physical imperfections,” pointing out the “methodical improvement of the source of our energies and the enhancement and perfection of the race.”60 Women who played sports, who “sunbathed and inhaled pure air,” would turn into better mothers than those who drank their youth away. The children of these depraved mothers, added El Gráfico’s feature article, “are born degenerated and destined to suffer.”61 The magazine’s statements were in keeping with a popular viewpoint on female sports, especially among population experts, who defended them as a eugenic practice that served to improve women’s reproductive capacity and mothering abilities.62 There was a demographic concern behind this view. According to contemporaries, Argentina’s birth rate was dropping significantly, thus endangering the country’s future.63 If Argentina wanted to fulfil its destined role as the “protector of future civilizations,” stated an article, it should overcome its main potential problem: low population growth. As a young nation, Argentina was expected to have a high birth rate, but it did not. For Argentina’s sake, “its inhabitants should begin . . . to take care of their physical health, so that their children can become healthy and brave exponents” of a strong Argentine race, proclaimed the article.64 In fact, Argentina was experiencing a demographic change, especially in Buenos Aires and other export-oriented provinces such as Entre Ríos and Santa Fe, which were witnessing a fast decline in birth rates. This was coupled with a drop in immigration during the 1930s and beginning of the 1940s, which only exacerbated the population growth problem. Population experts—mainly health professionals and economists—were concerned about these rapid demographic changes, arguing that the country risked depopulation in the near future.65 Many believed that physical activity for women, if done under the right supervision, would increase women’s fertility and result in a generation of healthy, fit children, tackling the problem of the number of births and ensuring quality genes for the future population.66 If women worked to achieve a healthy and beautiful body as instructed by the advocates of female sports, they not only guaranteed the vigor of the generations to come, but also enhanced Argentina’s global status. Popular media outlets,

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especially El Gráfico, presented female physical culture as an appealing global trend, reprinting international stories and photos of young women who practiced sports around the world.67 The importance of keeping readers informed about developments in U.S. sports, and, “above all . . . to let the voice of the American woman, who knows about light, strength, and beauty, reach our fellow citizens,” was cited as one of the reasons why Atlántida, the publishing house behind El Gráfico, was opening an agency in the U.S.68 “We have reprinted articles about female physical culture practiced in foreign countries with the aim of awakening readers’ interest in this type of education,” affirmed another article of El Gráfico.69 Not only did the press publish foreign news about sports for women, it also encouraged its female readers to measure up to their northern sisters. Articles promoting female physical culture usually argued that European and U.S. women paid attention to their bodies and played outdoor sports thanks to their countries’ continuous promotion of exercise.70 They typically featured photographs of average young white foreign women in bathing suits and miniskirts or t-shirt and shorts, doing sports or just posing for the camera; the captions usually noted their fit and beautiful bodies.71 In an article promoting gymnastics for women, for instance, Ruth Schwarz de Morgenroth, a well-known advocate of female physical culture, published photos of foreign beauty contest winners posing in bathing suits and high heels. The captions read “slender legs, a harmonious body, and a smile revealing the vigor of a youthful spirit, whose home is a healthy body,” and the winners were described as beautiful and balanced because they did the right type of exercise.72 The press also featured images of Hollywood actresses and famous female athletes in order to reinforce the notion that sports were fashionable.73 “Metro star Anita Page has achieved a perfect body thanks to sports,” reads a caption below a photo of the actress, who posed in high heels, heavy makeup, and a miniskirt, while another article, featuring several Hollywood stars in bathing suits, boldly stated, “Encouraging Argentine women to get used to playing sports is an act of patriotism.”74 Trendy images of Suzanne Lenglen, “the winner of the lawn tennis competition,” and Annette Kellermann, “a famous swimmer whose body is considered one of the most perfect among her sex,” were presented in another article that promoted a special type of exercise routine for women.75 The press encouraged readers to see healthy, fit foreign women as a source of inspiration and a symbol of progress, implicitly suggest-

Forging a Healthy and Beautiful Body

ing that young Argentine women were lacking these qualities and should work hard in order to match these foreign standards. At no time was the lack of sports skills among young women more evident— or the patriotic aspiration to overcome that lack more focused—than when the press debated the recurring absence of Argentine women at the Olympic games.76 Once again, El Gráfico was one of the most fervent advocates of Argentine women competing in these international competitions. But not all sports were favored. While track and field was considered unsuited for women, swimming was viewed as one of the best female competitive sports, as it did not jeopardize the femininity of its practitioners.77 El Gráfico published several articles featuring successful foreign women’s swim teams while encouraging young Argentine women to engage in this sport.78 “We will study the style of California’s mermaids,” a leading article stated, “we will interview them . . . keeping the Argentine woman in mind.” According to the same article, Argentine youth “was beginning to feel inspired by the nations that have celebrated physical sacrifice,” and these efforts would guarantee that one day “our flag will proudly flutter near” the U.S. flag in Olympic competitions.79 The emulation of foreign sportswomen and foreign countries’ sports decisions was even more explicit in another feature article in El Gráfico, which praised the “civilized countries” whose women’s swim teams participated in the 1920 Antwerp Olympics. These countries, claimed the article, had understood “the important role that physical culture plays in the education of a nation” and, therefore, a national women’s swimming club was proposed to put Argentina on par with such countries.80 According to El Gráfico, as long as Argentina did not have a team of young men and women who could compete in the Olympic games, the nation would lag behind these pioneering countries. “Once Argentine youth has realized the importance of athletic games . . . it will not feel the pang of inferiority next to other nations that have found an endless source of vigor, balance and beauty in sports,” affirmed one article.81 It was a matter of national pride to be recognized by the international community, which, according to El Gráfico, tended to treat Argentine sports talents with contempt or indifference.82 By copying the role models from abroad proposed in popular magazines, young Argentine women would be able to compete with other nations, showing the world just how far the country had progressed. While magazines fervently encouraged Argentine women to learn from their foreign sisters, they also warned them against simply copying everything

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foreign women did and thus endangering their uniqueness and genuineness. El Gráfico, for instance, advised Argentine women to avoid the “extravagances” of French, English and American girls who played football and rugby. Argentine women “must not seek out sports that rob them of their charm, those graceful movements that are so appreciated and which so distinguish them,” concluded one feature article in El Gráfico.83 Enrique Tiraboschi, a famous swimmer and journalist, concurred, stating that although U.S. women were seriously committed to physical activity, he was pleased that Latin American women were different. “I would not like to see our women lacking that ardent passion, that emotion, which is the most exquisite affirmation of Latin femininity,” he admitted.84 Not only were competitive sports portrayed as a foreign import that threatened native femininity: dieting in the pursuit of fashion was also seen as the result of Argentine women’s exaggerated emulation of international models, especially those coming from Hollywood. The author of a beauty advice book stated that “Southern Cone women have lost their true beauty and health” by “taking a skinny Nordic type from California as their role model.” A typical attitude of “younger and less civilized countries,” this imitation “could be highly detrimental to the national [female] type, which depends on hereditary factors, the environment and habits.” Argentine women were taking dieting to an extreme because of this emulation, which, concluded the author, jeopardized their health.85 The problem of Argentine women becoming too similar to foreign ones went hand in hand with the concern that the female body could lose its attractiveness as a result of excessive exercise.86 While moderate female physical activity was widely recommended, the question as to whether competitive sports were compatible with femininity was a debated topic in popular magazines.87 Addressing the possibility that women disliked “the excessive violence inherent in almost any sport,” one article stated that, “Women’s growing fondness for sports must be properly channeled so that it does not diminish the beauty of the female body.”88 Despite being among the magazines that clearly advocated young women’s participation in competitive sports, especially swimming competitions, El Gráfico took a similar stance on the undesired effects of intensive sports on women’s physique. A feature article in the magazine pointed out that as the number of young women who played sports increased, guidance had become more urgent than ever. It was better for women to exercise in moderation

Forging a Healthy and Beautiful Body

and to practice physical culture for the beauty and health it provided, argued the magazine, than to seek the glory of breaking records.89 Ruth Schwarz de Morgenroth, an outspoken opponent of women’s involvement in competitive sports, was even more categorical. She stated that Argentine women should not make the same mistakes as U.S. and European women, as these foreigners became “amazons” or “athletes” by copying men. She illustrated her point through portraits of foreign swimmers whose caption read, “Men or women? All women, of course, even if they don’t appear to be. These are the consequences of ‘champion’s syndrome’ for female gymnastics. Mankind wants beautiful women, not athletes, women who are in perfect health and also offer the imponderable attractions of femininity.”90 Although some supported women doing sports like swimming, the prevailing point of view regarding competitive sports during this period was that they were too challenging for young Argentine women. Such women, according to this perspective, should be encouraged to practice moderate sports for the sake of the nation, not spurred on by images of foreign female champions.

E The press’s campaign in support of women’s sport was based on the individual and national objectives that sports fulfilled. For many physical culture and sport advocates, achieving a slender, fit, and attractive body was a way of becoming modern. It was also a way to enhance the reproductive potential of Argentine women, who could, in turn, save the country from depopulation and racial decadence. Physical culture’s appeal was based on the fact that it reflected a modern agenda and also addressed nationalist concerns. At the personal level, physical culture promoters promised that exercise would bring women inner well-being and improve their appearance, helping to spread new conceptions of health and beauty. By following an expert’s advice, women would not only be able to deal with some of the negative effects that living in a modern metropolis had on their bodies and mental health, they would also gain both physical fitness and beauty, and therefore increase their chances for a happy love life. Although physical culture had a problematic relationship to beauty culture—the latter presented a much more pragmatic and easier way of achieving beauty than the former—both methods of beautification eventually merged into a single discourse on how women could become attractive. This

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same discourse flourished in advice manuals and the press during the 1920s and 1930s. The idea that physical culture could help achieve physical health, beauty and happiness implied a shift from a more defensive discourse of health understood as a collective notion based on national and racial survival. Women, it was argued, could be fit and beautiful for themselves and for their partners and not only for the sake of the nation, providing real women with an appealing justification for their enthusiasm for sports. Many of the women who followed the press campaign and began to participate in sports embodied the values promoted and proudly showed audiences the strength and fitness that sports provided them. Thus a new conception of the beautiful body as vigorous and healthy began to spread. The publication in popular magazines of portraits of female Argentine athletes posing with their bobbed hair and sportswear or in bathing suits while playing outdoor sports— or pretending to do so—functioned as an alternative to the thin and heavily made-up modern girl figure, usually criticized for her unhealthy lifestyle. From these sportswomen’s point of view, sport gave them the possibility to challenge the boundaries of what was considered acceptable female behavior. They embodied an assertive and vigorous notion of femininity, one that the press praised as a symbol of progress, provided these sportswomen could also show that they maintained their feminine traits to some extent. Advocates of female physical culture and sports emphasized the positive outcomes its practice would bring to the nation. For many of them, female sports would help the nation by raising a declining birth rate, helping women to bear healthy and fit children, and improving the image of Argentina abroad. They suggested that young Argentine women should not only be healthy, beautiful, and strong in order to become patriotic mothers and improve the Argentine race, but should also pursue this goal in order to measure up to women from other countries. The emergence of a “competitive” nation populated with healthy boys and girls would show the world Argentina’s progress. Paradoxically, while upper-class flappers were criticized for embracing foreign trends, these young Argentine women were encouraged to learn from and copy the achievements of their foreign counterparts. However, they were also alerted to remain truly authentic for the sake of their femininity. The fact that women could lose their physical attraction as a consequence of playing sports was a cause of much concern. Intense exercising was seen as a masculinizing practice that affected sexual difference, and therefore physical culture

Forging a Healthy and Beautiful Body

and sports promoters were much more inclined to defend moderate physical activity than competitive sports. Female sports had an emancipating potential, especially when exercising exceeded eugenic or maternal purposes. Women’s right to display their bodies in public, as well as their right to enjoy training, were the most challenging traits that sports brought to the gender order. If practiced under expert guidance and for larger collective goals, female sports had a chance of becoming socially accepted, though not highly popular. Its success among young women was achieved when physical culture combined its nationalistic concerns with the allure of modernity and promised that physical fitness and beauty were within every woman’s reach. It was then that exercise became a popular way of being a modern woman.

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5 Embodying the Nation

In February 1928, the magazine El Hogar sponsored the first Argentine national beauty pageant with a view to choosing the most beautiful woman and crowning her beauty queen. The contest was enormously popular, and President Marcelo T. de Alvear, the first lady, the defense minister, and other important members of the elite met with the final contestants at the beachside resort of Mar del Plata. According to a reporter who covered the event, the president thanked the young women for gracing the city with their beauty, noting that in Europe and the U.S., contests of this kind were becoming a popular tradition. The reporter ended the piece by describing how the sight of this group of young women, depicted as the female essence of the nation, visibly moved the country’s leader.1 The fact that the president of Argentina, along with politicians and elites, celebrated an event usually looked down on as one of the most nonpolitical and frivolous manifestations of popular culture points to the complex relations between pageants and national beauty politics. Competitive assessments of female beauty have been popular since the nineteenth century. Selecting a beauty queen based on beauty, youth, and virtue was part of festivals like the Crowning of the People’s Muse in France or May Day in the United States.2 However, modern beauty competitions had different, distinctive qualities. These pageants emphasized physical features in both photographs and contestants’ live performances, were sponsored by mass-circulation newspapers, magazines and commercial investors, and were generally promoted by entertainment and advertising companies.3 The Miss America contest, which from 1921 to 1927 was held in Atlantic City and then suspended until 1933, was among the first modern competitions, and introduced the bathing suit chal-

Embodying the Nation

lenge.4 By the 1930s, these contests had spread across the world along with their protagonist, the modern girl. Their success, in turn, favored the emergence of two parallel Miss Universe contests, in which international participants competed to be named the world’s most beautiful woman. The International Pageant of Pulchritude, held from 1926 to 1932 in Galveston, Texas, elected a Miss Universe; Maurice de Waleffe, a recognized French journalist, then organized a European-based Miss Universe contest, which was held in 1930, 1932 and 1935 in different cities of the world.5 Young Argentine women also competed in diverse beauty contests during the 1920s and 1930s, both nationally and internationally. Among the several beauty contests within Argentina organized since the beginning of the twentieth century, most of which were local or regional, the ones held by the magazine El Hogar stand out because of their national reach and the incorporation of the swimsuit competition.6 Held twice, in February 1928 and 1929, El Hogar crowned the most beautiful Argentine young women beauty queens. Concurrently, Argentina also participated in international pageants, but preferred to send its Miss Argentina to the European Miss Universe contest as opposed to the one held in the United States, since the European competition was perceived as more impartial; the jury of the American Miss Universe was accused of privileging U.S. candidates over international ones.7 Argentina sent its female representative to three Miss Universe pageants. The winner of Miss Argentina 1930, a competition organized by the newspaper Crítica, competed in the Miss Universe pageant held in the city of Rio de Janeiro, where Yolanda Pereira, Miss Brazil, was dubbed the world’s most beautiful woman. In 1932, the newspaper Noticias Gráficas organized its Miss Argentina pageant and the winner participated in the contest held in the Belgian city of Spa, where Keriman Halis, Miss Turkey, triumphed. In 1935, Miss Argentina, sent this time by the newspaper La Nación, went to Brussels, where Miss Egypt, Charlotte Wassef, was crowned Miss Universe. Historiography on beauty contests has traditionally focused on how pageants promoted particular versions of national identities while examining their contestants as the embodiment of national ideals of femininity and beauty.8 Recent scholarship on Latin America and the Caribbean has shifted the emphasis to two emerging topics. On one hand, several scholars have begun to analyze gender and beauty and their relation to racial projects, especially the historical configuration of mestizaje, the dominant racial discourse of Latin America.9 On

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the other, recent studies have looked at the way in which national beauty politics were performed in relation to transnational circuits of beauty.10 This chapter examines how Argentine beauty contests became fertile ground for defining the country’s national, racial, and ethnic identities, as well as an idealized feminine identity. Instead of focusing solely on the ways in which contests conveyed national values, this chapter combines the national dimension with an approach that situates the contests within the rise of an international consumer culture and transnational definitions of beauty and femininity, showing how the pageants became an arena for frictions between the two. Beauty pageants attracted a range of supporters, from intellectuals and reporters to ordinary readers and participants. During their preparation and the events themselves, these participants publicly debated the tensions among race, ethnicity, class, and decorum that were at the core of modern representations of the nation and its women. As contests invited “real” women to embody notions of modern beauty and femininity, this chapter also examines how they appropriated discourses about modernity, beauty, and morality that circulated in Argentine society and how they re-created the challenging figure of the upper-class joven moderna.

Beauty Contests and National Racial Identity Both the beauty contests held within Argentina and the Miss Argentina pageants organized to allow national beauties to participate on the international stage shared similar organizational practice and discourse. Both types of events presented a comparable format and democratic rhetoric, which aimed to promote them as an exercise of sovereignty, and a similar patriotic and eugenic discourse, which served to address the accusations that the contests instilled frivolous and materialistic values in young women. Both strategies ultimately worked to neutralize potential criticism of the pageants and were internalized by female contestants, who ostensibly participated in the contests as a service to the nation. The pageants followed a basic format common to contests all over the world. First, female candidates sent in their photographs to the editors of the magazines and newspapers organizing the event. These editors selected and published the photographs, encouraging readers to vote for the contestants they liked best. During the second phase, the selected candidates performed live,

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generally in bathing suits before a jury, which then chose the winners. Aside from Crítica, which accepted any candidate willing to participate, most organizers required that the candidates be single, young, Argentine-born women and not “professional beauties.” Some contests, such as that organized by El Hogar, asked potential contestants to meet specific physical requirements—a height between five-two and five-three, chest between 33 to 34 inches, and waist between 29 and 30 inches—while others only required the candidate’s picture. Prizes for winners included medals, jewelry, and bus, train or ship fare for both national and international competitions—not to mention fame and the possibility of pursuing a career in the entertainment industry. The first stage of the contests, based on the portraits candidates sent in, gave women who were hesitant about participating an initial boost, as appearing in photos was considered more respectable and less challenging than parading in front of judges.11 However, the final face-to-face encounter with the jury was also key, as argued by a reporter who added that it served to reassure observers that the beauty of the participants was as authentic as in their picture. In addition, during this stage, candidates were judged not only on their physical beauty but also on their personalities.12 Although these beauty pageants relied on both readers and experts to select the winner, the mass media outlets that sponsored them, especially Crítica, greatly emphasized the democratic workings of these events. Readers from diverse social backgrounds and different parts of the country were encouraged to vote because they were the ones entrusted with choosing Miss Argentina. Crítica presented the contests as an exercise of “universal suffrage,” specifying that the winner would be the candidate who obtained the most votes and that this guaranteed the “impartiality” and “neutrality” of the election.13 By presenting beauty competitions as democratic exercises whose results depended on the Argentine people, Crítica promoted a sense of collective union despite the country’s military dictatorship. While Crítica backed the 1930 coup d’état that overthrew President Hipólito Yrigoyen, the newspaper invited readers and contestants, both men and women, to vote for Miss Argentina, drawing disenfranchised Argentines into new circuits of citizenship. As Lynn Thomas has signaled in her work on South Africa, these circuits of citizenship were more about people’s ability to consume than about enfranchisement.14 “The election of Miss Argentina must awaken the same interest as a political election,” the newspaper stated unequivocally.15 Despite Crítica’s democratic rhetoric, how-

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ever, the popular vote only held sway in the initial stages of the contests, as ultimately it was a panel of “experts” who elected Miss Argentina. As Susan Besse has argued for the case of Brazil, however, this democratic discourse probably worked as a popular exercise of sovereignty at the local level.16 The Noticias Gráficas beauty contest had a slight variation on these dynamics of democracy, as each neighborhood chose its candidate for Miss Buenos Aires.17 Entrants were asked to send their photos in to the nearest cinema or theater, where the audience would vote. Correspondingly, queens for each of the capital city’s neighborhoods—Miss Belgrano, Miss Villa Crespo, Miss Palermo, Miss Once and so on—were named.18 The identity of the porteño people was deeply rooted in the barrio, and many believed that each barrio had its own type of girl, as reported by journalist Josué Quesada.19 In fact, beauty contestants were promoted as the equivalent of male sports champions, who awoke local passion as representatives of their neighborhoods. Crítica, for instance, stated that the neighborhood of Mataderos already had a famous boxing champion, Justo Suárez, and only lacked a beauty heroine to match him, encouraging readers to vote for María Elena Bravo, “the girl from Mataderos.”20 People who voted for the neighborhood’s candidate were defining their own version of a national beauty, one that they considered had chances of winning at the international level, but who represented their own local character.21 Despite the popular press’s proclaimed efforts to make the selection of candidates transparent through popular election, Crítica’s contest in particular was accused of corruption and bribery. Premiering in May 1930, a play written by Roberto Tálice and Raúl Valentini entitled Miss Argentina, Miss Universo, starring Olinda Bozán and Paquito Bustos, mocked the actual contest by portraying everything an Italian family was willing to do to ensure its daughter’s victory in the Miss Argentina contest. Ripollini, the father of beauty candidate Alcira, boasts how he upped the votes for his daughter by buying up copies of the newspaper and bribing a journalist. This, however, does not suffice to win her the crown, and Alcira’s opponent is ultimately named Miss Argentina.22 Accusations of this type reflected not only that the people’s will could be manipulated, but also that it was experts who ultimately settled the matter. Other critics of the contests chimed in, many of whom considered pageants to be frivolous events. An article published by the left-wing feminist journal Vida Femenina, for instance, stated that it was not appropriate for contests to limit their selection criterion to physical attributes, disregarding other qualities

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of Argentine women like their “moral beauty” or intelligence.23 Others highlighted the narcissistic and corrupting nature of beauty pageants. In a moralizing tale by literary critic López de Molina, a modest, nice girl is converted into a calculating, vain, and cold woman after winning a beauty contest.24 In his critique of beauty pageants, Joaquín Linares denounced their materialism, noting they were portrayed as the only chance for poor women to abandon poverty, since winners were offered jobs as tango singers or showgirls.25 Manuel María Oliver shared this view, adding that Argentine beauty contests did not pursue moral and racial objectives like European ones did, serving instead to spotlight poor and innocent young women, who had overcome their shyness, for the benefit of lascivious men.26 Despite the accusations of corruption and the moral objections to these contests, their success was undeniable. By July 1928, Crítica announced that it had received 3,000 photographs from young women from all over the country, while according to El Hogar, a total of 30,900 votes had been cast for the 81 participants in that year’s pageant.27 The sponsoring media, aware of the potential criticism that the beauty pageants could generate, justified the need for these competitions in eugenic and patriotic terms, in an effort to smooth over their most disturbing features.28 The newspapers sponsoring Miss Argentina, especially Crítica, viewed beauty pageants as eugenic exercises that contributed to the improvement of the race. Crítica explicitly announced that “besides the qualities of physical beauty,” the chosen candidate should display “grace, friendliness, elegance, and exquisiteness of sentiments, all of which are essential virtues of the modern woman.”29 According to the editors, beauty contests were “a production aimed at improving our race, a highly educational work . . . whose results we will see in the years to come, when a revitalized sense of beauty and a concern for human aesthetics will inspire future generations to focus on physical and spiritual improvement.”30 Much like physical culture advocates, beauty contests promoted women’s physical and spiritual fitness with the aim of reproducing beauty over generations, thus enhancing the Argentine “race.” In the view of Crítica, the beauty contest was much more than a mere exercise of vanity and diversion; it had become a way to evaluate the physical and spiritual qualities of Argentine women. Sponsoring newspapers not only promoted beauty contests as a way to improve the Argentine “race,” but also appealed to the patriotic sentiments of contestants and cast their participation as a service to the nation. Noticias Gráficas

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stated that women who were beautiful had the moral duty to participate in Miss Argentina.31 Crítica, in turn, exhorted female readers to fulfill their duty as Argentine women and send their photographs in to the newspaper, adding that female citizens should be aware that in “civilized nations” it was common for women, “faithful to the tradition of their respective motherlands and moved by a laudable nationalist sentiment,” to participate in beauty contests.32 Crítica’s editors added, “Our people . . . advanced and progressive, must honorably follow this example.”33 This patriotic mission acquired a global dimension when sponsoring newspapers justified sending candidates to compete in international beauty pageants. Miss Argentina would have to “prove abroad the degree of physical perfection that our people have achieved, and show that women of our country have nothing for which to envy the most civilized nations of the world in terms of elegance, spirituality, grace, femininity, and beauty,” stated Crítica.34 Noticias Gráficas shared this conviction, adding that it wished that Miss Argentina would be not only beautiful, but also “a refined, distinguished, and delicate young woman,” who could show foreign countries the physical and spiritual features of the Argentine nation.35 Newspaper editors promoted the beauty contests by stating that contestants were helping to build a beautiful and civilized Argentina. They were expected to show the rest of the world the physical and moral qualities of Argentine women and to prove that Argentina was a “civilized country” that had abandoned its backward moral prejudices and was now engaged in this modern type of contest, as the rest of the (civilized) world was. The contestants internalized this patriotic discourse. Miss Argentina 1930, Eugenia Vidal, declared, “Patriotism is what convinced me to participate in the contest. I received an award I had never thought I would deserve only because of my desire to fulfill my duty as an Argentine.” The journalist conducting the interview concluded it by adding that “she [Vidal] is no longer her own woman, but now belongs to the motherland.”36 Ana Rovner, a young blond who represented Buenos Aires in the 1932 Miss Argentina contest, stated that because she adored Argentina, she wanted to compete in the Miss Universe contest to dispel an apparently common assumption that South American women were black.37 As the organizers of the beauty contests promoted them as eugenic exercises, they highlighted that they were looking for a unique female type who could represent Argentina. The beauty of Argentine women was considered

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the direct outcome of the intermingling of diverse European “races.” Crítica stated, “Our Republic has been called a melting pot and it is logical to assume that different [beauty] types would result from the mixing of different nationalities from all over the world.”38 The editors of the sponsoring newspapers praised this diversity, encouraging female readers to send in their photos in order to guarantee that Miss Argentina would emerge from a large sample of Argentine women.39 Editors of Crítica were even more direct, stating that they were looking for candidates from every region and social class in the country.40 In contrast to beauty competitions that emphasized racial purity, such as the ones carried out in Japan, the Argentine pageants acknowledged, enthusiastically, that the European melting pot—though mostly limited to descendants of Spaniards and Italians—was at the core of what defined Argentine white beauty.41 While acknowledging that the melting pot produced a variety of types, there was also a claim that these different traits were fusing into a single beauty type. This was the case of Miss Argentina 1932, who was portrayed as the perfect combination of Argentine attributes. They could be traced in her “profound and suggestive green eyes, in her tiny and admirable mouth, in her dark complexion, and in her abundant dark hair, all features that fit in with her local type of beauty.”42 Equally important as inheritance were climate and social context for the emergence of the Argentine female type.43 Noticias Gráficas, for instance, portrayed Ana Rovner, Miss Buenos Aires, as a young, tall, lightskinned blond woman of German descent, casting her as “the best example of the melting pot of our developing race. She is the result of the Argentine sun, its blue skies, the modesty of its infinite plains, and the slenderness of its distant mountains, because every physical beauty is the logical outcome of the beauty of our nature.”44 By praising the local climate and landscape, the editors highlighted that the beauty of Argentine women reflected the geographical features of the country. While the rhetoric of the contests paid homage to an ethnically diverse Argentina, the photos of the entrants revealed an implicit understanding of what native beauty meant. Not surprisingly, mestizo, indigenous, and Afro-Argentine beauty was expressly absent. The claim of the existence of a national beauty type, unique and even superior to others because of the environment, education, and intermingling of different European “races,” was assumed to be white. In fact, by participating in international beauty contests, the organizers were tackling

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Argentine fears of being perceived as non-white, aiming to prove to the rest of the world that Argentina was an equal competitor in terms of Western beauty standards. Crítica’s editors were irritated by the fact that Argentina had been represented in a European parade by a “mulatto woman,” disregarding “the culture, population, and progress of our people” and hoped to demonstrate the inaccuracy of this through its selected candidate.45 From the point of view of the eugenic standards that the newspapers were promoting through their beauty contests, indigenous, black, and mestizo women were erased from the definition of what constituted national femininity. Not only were they themselves absent from the pageants, so was any indication of their ethnic identity, such as clothing. In Latin American countries like Mexico where mestizaje emerged as the dominant racial discourse, the mass media outlets that sponsored beauty contests were more inclined to praise Indian and mestizo contributions to the formation of a Mexican national identity, as did local intellectuals and government. Through the organization of indigenous beauty contests and of the transformation of mestizo clothing into fashionable outfits worn to represent Mexicanness, they managed, as Rick López has shown, to cast lower-class women from the countryside as the embodiments of the national essence.46 In contrast, Argentines, and particularly porteños, tended to be more identified with Europe and invested in ideals of whiteness. Therefore, beauty contests rejected mestizo identity and instead embraced European ones. However, certain ethnicities were more accepted than others. Italian, Spanish, and German candidates, for example, were celebrated by the pageant organizers, who underlined their roots as evidence of the rich mosaic of Argentine ethnicity.47 The identities of Middle Eastern and Jewish women, however, were more problematic, due to religious and racial prejudices. Sandra McGee Deutsch has analyzed the ambiguities regarding Jewish women by exploring the tension between their whiteness and attractiveness, which could help them be accepted by Argentine society, and their Jewishness, which could play as an excluding factor. Miss Buenos Aires, Ana Rovner, for instance, who had been chosen to represent Argentine womanhood, hid her Jewish roots and instead highlighted her German ancestry to participate in the contest.48 Argentine beauty contests celebrated the racial and ethnic diversity of the “white” nation, but embraced certain white ethnic identities while disregarding others. Moreover, by promoting the image of Argentine society as a melting pot in which ethnic identities dissolved into

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one, the pageants also re-created a homogenous Argentine racial identity based, among other notions, on a definition of national beauty as white.

Beauty Queens, Miss Argentina, and Modern Femininities Beauty contests not only tried to define Argentina’s ethnic and racial identity, but also looked for an idealized feminine identity to symbolize the nation. While it was argued that Argentine women were charming and beautiful thanks to the mixing of different races and Argentina’s fecund territory, sponsoring newspapers and magazines wondered who this young Argentine woman was and what she was like. Framed by this eugenic and nationalist discourse, the winners had to express enough cosmopolitanism to be considered modern beauties, but also authentic values that could represent the Argentine being. Although beauty queens and Miss Argentinas embodied different versions of the modern Argentine woman, notions of cosmopolitanism, respectability, and authenticity all came into play. The modern girl aesthetic defined the looks of almost all the pageant winners. In their published photographs, all are slim and have moderate to heavy makeup; three out of five have short hair and wear flapper-like dresses. They look like Argentine versions of Hollywood film stars and international socialites featured in magazines. Among the beauty queens and runners-up of the 1928 and 1929 contest, all unequivocally cast as modern girls, the 1929 winner stands out. With her waved hair, feather tippet, and dropped neckline, she was the perfect personification of the modern girl style. The same could be said about Eugenia Vidal, Miss Argentina 1930, who was presented as a typical modern, urban young woman of Buenos Aires. In the photo that introduced her to readers, she appears with bobbed hair and heavy makeup, wearing a trendy garment known as a Manila shawl. In the 1920s, this traditional wrap worn by Mexican and Andalusian women became a fashionable item worldwide and expressed exoticism and cosmopolitanism.49 Alongside this image, and in order to stress the winner’s modernity further, Crítica, the sponsoring newspaper, published an article featuring Miss Argentina as a “modern-day Eve.” Here Ms. Vidal appears in a series of photographs in a car, posing while driving or seated inside doing her makeup, this time wearing a less exotic and more urban outfit comprised of a white shirt and a black skirt.50 Crítica added that, since Miss Argentina was a modern young woman, she was

Figure 5.1. Winners of El Hogar beauty contest. “Final del II Gran Concurso de Belleza de El Hogar,” El Hogar, February 15, 1929, 27.

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fond of driving and sports, and was dedicated to both her body and beauty.51 The winner was described as an embodiment of porteño young women of the 1930s, who were “easygoing, optimistic, enthusiastic, active, agile . . . and with a cheerful heart,” and also city-savvy, accustomed to the sound of subways, buses, elevators, and airplanes.52 By positioning her next to these new machines, it seemed as if the paper were presenting Miss Argentina as just another urban novelty that denoted modernity. The exception to the predominant flapper aesthetic was Miss Argentina 1932, Alejandrina del Carmen Goñi, from Córdoba. When chosen as Miss Argentina, instead of the usual bob and the low-cut dress, she appeared wearing a simple evening gown with a necklace and earrings, her long hair combed in two braids crisscrossed over her head. Her loose-sleeved dress and peculiar hairstyle gave her a kind of antiquated but trendy style that stood in opposition to the flapper figure. Her different look did not go unnoticed. A caricature of the final parade shows Miss Buenos Aires on the left, with a flapper-style dress and a feather tippet, while Miss Córdoba stands in front of her in more traditional attire.53 In contrast with the other beauty queens and Miss Argentina 1930, she embodied a softer visual version of modern femininity. Liz Conor has shown how beauty contests, along with advertising, articles and handbooks on beauty, helped make beauty into a measurable and objective category. Young women, especially those who participated in these pageants, subscribed to a beauty culture regime that celebrated thinness and youth. They learned to self-evaluate their own bodies using standardized criteria, to compare their physical attributes to those of other women, and to invest in beauty aids to correct any imperfections that jeopardized their status as a modern female. It was not only a matter of contestants’ body measurements. Their expression, poise, and attire also aimed to render the candidates physically alluring and thus appealing to readers.54 Accordingly, the winners were usually portrayed in casual poses, smiling and looking directly at the camera, dressed in elegant and glamorous outfits. These young women’s bright smiles and relaxed postures were a characteristic of the modern girl figure worldwide, traceable also in film star portraits and toiletry product advertisements.55 As beauty and fashion trends were increasingly defined by an emergent global consumer culture that promoted a transnational model of femininity, the contestants’ faithfully modern bodies and looks were presented to readers as markers of a civilized society. Even if winners matched the flapper’s visual aesthetic, their geographical

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origin and their social behavior differed radically from the porteño upper-class joven moderna. In 1928, 1929, and 1932, the first prize went to young women from Córdoba, Santa Fe, and Córdoba, respectively. The fact that three out of five winners of both the internal beauty pageants and of the international Miss Argentina contests were provincianas—as women from the hinterland of the country were commonly referred to—seemed both unexpected and gratifying. Josué Quesada, who covered the pageants organized by El Hogar, remarked that porteño upper-class young women considered beauty and elegance to be part of their heritage, while “women of the provinces were regarded as inferior in terms of both fashion and good taste.” But provincianas had beaten porteño girls in two competitions and reversed this sense of social supremacy, concluded the reporter approvingly.56 The third winner of the 1929 contest—the only winner from a small town—concurred, adding that the outcomes defied the notion that only porteño high society could appear in this type of pageant.57 The winners from the provinces were also considered more genuine than those from the capital city, as it was commonly believed that environment played an important role in shaping the Argentine character and, consequently, people who lived close to the soil were thought to be more authentic. A journalist described Miss Argentina 1932, who hailed from Córdoba, as “an authentic beauty, a beauty of pure features,” who evoked “the magnificent women of Argentina’s past.”58 Although they were described as provincial beauties and thus different from the women of cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, winners like Miss Argentina 1932 actually belonged to the richer and more Europeanized capitals of Argentina’s provinces. Like Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Santa Fe, and La Pampa had welcomed a great number of immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century and were home to regional economies booming with large factories and strong commodity exports. However, many nationalists viewed these provinces as a repository of authentic Argentine values, where nature kept modernity in check.59 The preponderance of provincianas among the winners was combined with another factor that distanced them from the porteño upper-class flapper: all professed conventional morals. The press, through descriptions of the winners’ everyday lives, repeatedly highlighted the middle-class values the winners voiced: intrinsic modesty, innocence, and simplicity. In the articles portraying beauty queens and finalists, these calm young women were described as fond of staying at home, enjoying innocuous pastimes like reading, playing music, and playing sports.60 Miss Argentina 1932 told reporters she liked going to the mov-

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ies and playing tennis—especially Greta Garbo and Ramón Novarro films—and that she was finishing her studies as a piano teacher. One reporter stated that Miss Argentina “hides behind an unjustified modesty. She talks, but not about herself,” adding he had to remind her that the readers were expecting some personal details about her life.61 Even Eugenia Vidal, Miss Argentina 1930, presented as a very modern young woman to readers, was said to be the very picture of modesty, whose favorite pastimes were sewing, playing piano, reading, and going to the cinema.62 The respectability of a winner was also conveyed by showing her at home, where she usually appeared in simple attire, reading a book, playing an instrument, or just posing with family members.63 Such images stood in sharp contrast to photos of contestants taken during competition, in which they appeared in trendy outfits and heavy makeup—or parading in bathing suits— and the domestic shots served to reassure readers of the integral moral values of the winners.64 Sponsoring newspapers, while benefiting from the appeal of the modern girl look among readers, clearly dissociated themselves from the moral connotations of flapper behavior. When interviewed, winners tended to confirm the humility and innocence that reporters patronizingly conjectured about them, in parallel efforts to please and reassure readers. Many declared their surprise at having been chosen from among such a beautiful group of young women, while others affirmed that their altruistic desire to represent their neighborhood or province had driven them to participate.65 Presented to the public as a natural beauty, Miss Argentina 1932 confessed that after a lot of hesitation, she finally decided to enter competition because her friends almost begged her to. She added that she only wore lipstick on the final catwalk, after being compelled by the judges to put on some makeup.66 In contrast with the upper-class porteño flapper, these young women expressed humility, innocence and simplicity while being shown as devoted to their homes and families. Some contestants even directly addressed the joven moderna and stressed their distance from this figure. When reporters asked two of them for their opinions on the modern girl, one finalist answered, “I think well of her. In my opinion, it is even all right for her to smoke, provided it is an embellishment, not a vice,” while winner Nélida Rodríguez Aragón stated, “freedom, in the positive sense of the word, is good for women. I prefer today’s habits to those of twenty years ago.” She added that so long as women who smoke and drank did not abandon their femininity, she did not find such habits reproachable. Her

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one concern was women who drove, whom she defined as “savages.”67 Smoking and drinking seemed, at least for these two contestants, the defining activities of the flapper, and while they did not wholeheartedly condemn them, the winners tended to talk about the modern girl in a detached way. Even though they were comfortable admitting their modern habits to the press, and could dress in the flapper style, they wanted to distance themselves from actual flappers. It is interesting that while winners were represented as respectable and modest daughters, with no ambitions other than becoming dutiful housewives, and while almost all embodied a docile type of femininity while competing, several went on to pursue careers in the entertainment business. Tulia Ciámpoli, winner of the 1928 internal beauty contest organized by El Hogar, had become a popular actress by the mid-thirties. When interviewed before the opening of a film in which she was starring, she told the reporter that her calling had always been acting, leading her to abandon her pharmaceutical studies to pursue a career in the dramatic arts when she was quite young, and causing a scandal in her family.68 Other winners appeared in advertisements for beauty products, as it was the case of María Teresa Cunha, one of the finalists in the 1928 contest, who appeared in a Pond’s advertisement, or Nélida Rodríguez Aragón, winner of the 1929 El Hogar competition, who promoted Griet perfumes.69 Among the few winners who openly acknowledged her professional ambitions was Miss Argentina 1930, confirming the modern identity she and the newspaper had constructed. When interviewed, she told reporters that her greatest desire was to become a famous film star, a possibility she thought she could realize in Rio de Janeiro, where she hoped American film producers might offer her a contract.70 Other winners preferred to hide their ambitions under a layer of domesticity, but their occupations after pageant competition confirmed that for some women, the contests were meant to be a springboard to a movie career, independence, and fame. Despite their claims to the contrary, they were not so far from the controversial flapper figure after all. While young women mainly personified the visual markers of the modern girl figure during national beauty contests, when participating in international pageants they mounted a more complicated cultural stage. Maurice de Waleffe, the organizer of Miss Universe and several other pageants such as Miss France, Miss Europe and Miss France d’Outre-Mer, promoted racial regeneration and national pride. Fearful of European degeneration and depopulation, de Waleffe conceived of the Miss Universe contest as a litmus test

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for interracial mingling.71 Through the comparison of mixed and pure-race Misses, he aimed to determine whether racial purity was better than mixedraced unions.72 With a competition framed by this eugenicist concern, candidates participating in Miss Universe had to highlight their national specificities while also showing their modern femininity.73 Yet because of emerging international consumer culture, candidates tended to share modern girl aesthetics, appearing in photos in sophisticated evening gowns and heavy makeup. The only striking national particularity came with non-white contestants, though these were few and far between; in the 1932 pageant, the only competitor of color was Miss Antilles. The rest proudly displayed their white complexions and modern looks, thus making it nearly impossible to distinguish one from another among various nationalities.74 In order to highlight the uniqueness of each beauty type, de Waleffe decided to include a national costume event in Miss Universe 1935, giving the contest even clearer nationalist connotations. As one Spanish journalist stated, “the chosen misses . . . will not parade in bathing suits in front of the jury or the audience, but [will appear] dressed in their national costumes, in order to emphasize the unique beauty of their respective people. Twenty-eight misses will carry the ethnic responsibility of twenty-eight countries on their shoulders.” Twenty-four of these contestants were classified as Misses of the pure white race while Miss China, Miss Laos, Miss Haiti, and Miss Guyana were considered mixed race, the product of interracial marriages.75 Among the white participants, there was the porteña Anita de Zuviría, Miss Argentina, sent to Brussels by the newspaper La Nación.76 During the final event, all the candidates appeared in the traditional outfits of their respective countries, with the exception of Miss Argentina. She was the only contestant dressed in a pale fashion-conscious evening gown, which she accessorized with a pearl necklace and a red flower pinned over her cleavage. The other Misses wore typical peasant clothing, like Miss Mexico, who dressed as a china poblana; their heads were adorned with elaborated diadems, like Miss Siberia; Miss America, for her part, appeared dressed up as a fashionable nun. In fact, Miss Argentina wore a dama antigua dress (a costume worn by women in the colonial period) and a necklace with indigenous motifs during the contest, but decided to emphasize her cosmopolitan characteristics in the finale. A Belgian newspaper speculated that some Misses—like Miss Argentina, who had brought twenty-two outfits to Brussels—would say that their national

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Figure 5.2. Miss Universe contestants in their national costumes. Courtesy of the Centre for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Contemporary Society.

costumes had been delayed in customs in order that they might instead appear in front of the jury in evening gowns.77 While vanity may have played a role in Miss Argentina’s decision to appear with a modern look instead of wearing typical national outfits, as the other contestants had, her choice was also related to the more general question of how Argentina wanted to represent itself abroad. This issue had already arisen in the 1932 Miss Universe contest, when its organizers proposed but ultimately decided against an event in typical dresses. Noticias Gráficas, the sponsoring newspaper of Miss Argentina, analyzed the topic in an editorial, wondering what typical attire would suitably represent the nation abroad. “The outfit of the chinita, the only one allegedly our own, is not common enough across the nation to be considered an expression of our national customs,” stated the editorial, concluding that “Miss Argentina will not be able to shine with any authentically typical dress.”78 As the national costume

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event did not, in fact, materialize that year, the candidates for Miss Universe 1932 appeared in fashionable evening gowns. The debate over what Argentina’s national costume was—and whether Miss Argentina should wear it at international beauty pageants—was associated with Argentina’s broader refusal to embrace indigenous, black, and mestizo cultures and its eagerness to present the country’s population as being as similar as possible to European people.79 Unlike most Latin American countries, Argentina did not espouse the early twentieth-century ideology of mestizaje but, instead, promoted the myth of Argentine society as a melting pot of white European “races.” Facing rapid urbanization and the arrival of European immigrants en masse, Argentine nationalists embraced criollo identity and celebrated the lost, rural, masculine world of the gaucho as a symbol of national authenticity.80 Typically dressed in baggy trousers, a shawl-like hip covering, and a poncho, this famous cowboy was recognized worldwide as a symbol of Argentina, especially thanks to Hollywood movies.81 The china, the gaucho’s partner, was generally depicted in a plain cotton shirt and a loose dress, with long dark hair hanging in two simple braids, and sometimes a scarf over her shoulders. Unlike the gaucho, who was mainly portrayed as white by nationalists, the china tended to be more associated with mestizo or Indian roots, and had only a marginal role as a national and official emblem.82 Contrary to Mexico’s china poblana or the india bonita, mestizo female figures that represented authenticity, in Argentina it was mainly a man of humble origins, with no distinct reference to race or ethnicity, who officially stood in for tradition. Official discourses of the nation highlighted that Argentina was a racially white and ethnically European country. Hence, female mestizo figures had no place in the pantheon of tradition. Only as an unofficial national emblem could morochas—women who, as Ezequiel Adamovsky has stated, were not always dark-skinned—represent the quintessential Argentine woman, as some bataclanas and tango singers did.83 The morocha’s counterpart, also born of 1920s popular culture, was the modern girl figure, which also stood for Argentinity, but tended to embody forward-looking values like progress. Under the guise of white and trendy modern girls, Argentine beauty contestants were symbols that the country was increasingly civilized. By presenting themselves to juries and the public in elegant evening gowns and heavy makeup, they surely made a strong statement about Argentine women as modern cosmopolitan figures.

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E In the context of postwar fears of depopulation and anxiety over shifting gender roles, the media in several countries sponsored beauty contests and recruited beautiful young women in the service of nation building. In Argentina, sponsoring newspapers and magazines promoted beauty contests as patriotic and democratic exercises. With these competitions cast as plebiscites, their organizers claimed that the Argentine people were responsible for selecting the most beautiful young Argentine woman, encouraging them to exercise their democratic rights. In a moment of political turmoil, these contests helped create a sense of national unity and collective identity, while at the same time obscuring the real disenfranchisement of many Argentines. Concomitantly, while readers were called on to exercise their rights, young and beautiful women were asked to fulfill a service to the nation by participating in the contests. The sponsoring press stated that candidates and winners were responsible for proving to the world that Argentina was not only a morally evolved country, capable of engaging in such events, but also a white civilized nation. The Argentine beauty type was conceived as the outcome of the melting pot and of the country’s exceptional environment, and it was argued that these two factors meant that Argentine women could be just as beautiful as European ones. This eugenic discourse helped make these competitions more acceptable both to audiences and to the female participants themselves, reassuring them of the moral purpose of these events. In other words, the media promoted beauty contests by emphasizing their democratic character and their supposed eugenic role in improving the Argentine race, while projecting an idealized image of an inclusive and racially homogenous nation. It was an image that newspaper readers and pageant contestants shared and affirmed by voting and participating in these contests. Beauty contests not only defined an ideal racial and national identity, but also proposed an idealized Argentine female identity, characterized by its authenticity and modernity. Beauty contest winners shared the modern girl aesthetic, but dissociated themselves from the porteño upper-class figure. The winners redefined and re-created the flapper in terms not only of geography but also of morals and manners. They were fashionable young women, mainly from Argentina’s richer and more dynamic cities, who had preserved their country’s traditions and could show the world that Argentine women could be modern and yet still symbolize modesty, innocence, and respectability. While the beauty queens of

Embodying the Nation

1928 and 1929 and Miss Argentina 1932 all represented a type of provincial beauty described as fresh and genuine, Crítica’s Miss Argentina was presented as an innocent and joyful modern girl, the synthesis of all the best the city had to offer. The winners confirmed these representations by detaching themselves from the flapper figure and displaying for readers their middle-class aspirations—basically, life ambitions tied to the household, respectability, and modesty. However, the actual lives of many winners told another story. Many pursued careers in the entertainment business after their pageant wins, and although few succeeded at becoming famous, their attempts show that they dreamed of lives that afforded more independence and excitement than the docile, household-bound existences they described to reporters. The winners integrated the modern aesthetic as evidence of national progress and respectable manners as a marker of national morality and authenticity. Although this combination expressed a perfect national ideal of femininity to the Argentine public, this ideal proved problematic on the international stage, as contestants from various countries looked and behaved in very much the same way. To address this concern, the 1935 Miss Universe pageant asked contestants to parade in their typical dresses. Differently from most other countries, Argentina chose a modern outfit. Between progress and authenticity, sponsoring newspapers and Miss Argentina herself unequivocally chose the former over the latter. The look of Miss Argentina 1935 coordinated perfectly with the desire of many Argentines: for their country to be seen by the rest of the world as a civilized, white, cosmopolitan and modern nation.

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In 1935, the autographed portrait of a then-unknown Eva Duarte—the future Evita Perón—shows her with curly brown hair worn in a bob and heavy makeup. In a suggestive pose, her hand—with polished nails and two small rings—delicately rests on her naked left shoulder.1 Duarte, born an illegitimate daughter into a family of limited economic means, arrived in the capital city from a small town in the province of Buenos Aires in 1935. Her aim was to become a star. After a few rough years of occasional roles in comedic plays and films, she signed a five-year contract with the company Radical Soap in 1941 and became a renowned radio drama lead. Her photos began to appear in Sintonía, Antena and Radiolandia, the most popular theater and movie magazines.2 Duarte was among the many young women who searched for social and cultural options that went beyond what was expected of them in the 1930s. As a poor and ambitious girl from the provinces who had abandoned her hometown, her family, the possibility of an “honorable” occupation, and a future husband to pursue an acting career, she embodied the fantasy of the milonguita. Before moving to the big city, Eva had probably read women’s magazines and serialized novels and listened to tangos while dreaming of a different life. But Evita did not share the tragic fate of the tango’s usual female subject. Like other female artists and performers discussed in this book, she managed to achieve her goal of becoming a star. Duarte, however, also accomplished much bigger endeavors that she had probably never dreamed of undertaking. And that is where her life starts a new chapter and departs from the other protagonists of this book. In 1943, a military coup brought a group of nationalist right-wing military officers to power.

Epilogue

Among them was Colonel Juan D. Perón, whom Duarte had met and married before he became president in 1946. Eva Duarte quickly assumed the role of first lady and became Eva Perón, attending official state events and standing in as a representative of the Argentine state abroad. At the same time, she became Evita, a social and political activist who represented the descamisados (shirtless ones), as Perón’s followers were known.3 There is possibly no image of an Argentine woman more powerful than that of Evita. During her first years as the president’s wife, she continued to dress like a radio star. Her hair, now long and blond, was done in the queue curl style in vogue at the time, and she wore furs, big hats with feathers and veils, plenty of jewels, and diverse combinations of colors and textures.4 At a certain point, however, she also adopted the tailored suits she considered more fitting to her role as first lady, her hair pulled back into a Spartan bun. In the meantime, her conspicuous style, far from distancing her from her lower-class female supporters, allowed them to identify with her. This identification had myriad effects. Daniel James has suggested that the figure of Evita permitted poor women to express their desire for expensive consumer goods and legitimized feelings of resentment toward wealthy people.5 Other scholars have added that the great expansion of consumer power among the working classes during the Peronist administration, and lower-class women’s appropriation of goods and styles in particular, sparked anxiety among the middle classes, threatening their notions of class distinction and status.6 Popular culture of the 1950s was full of representations of manipulative and materialistic working-class young women who used wealthy men to ascend the social ladder rapidly. A way of denouncing social mobility, these images also symbolize the emergence of a self-conscious middle-class identity.7 Humble young women’s aspirations to live life differently and to be considered appealing and trendy, and the societal reactions it provoked, however, preceded Peronism. Bataclanas, tango singers, and many young working women aspired to different lifestyles than those into which they were born, particularly through the new possibilities that consumption offered them. This ambition was, in turn, alternately depicted as a way of gaining respectability and denounced as a strategy for achieving upward mobility. Many contemporaries interpreted these changes as a potential dissolution of class difference and a challenge to the advantages they had historically enjoyed. Those who opposed this transformation criticized female practices as deceptive, excessively crass, and tacky. Yet these women were

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in fact reinforcing rather than blurring their working-class identities. Niní Marshall’s Catita rejected elite notions of good taste while simultaneously pursuing the expensive things that wealthy people could afford. Her audiences, and especially women, probably cheered this irreverent attitude. The Peronism of the 1940s and 1950s is perhaps best comprehended in the context of these social and cultural changes and as a part of a broader cultural trend that emphasized the image of a polarized Argentine society. Matthew Karush has argued that Argentine mass culture of the 1920s and 1930s, and especially the populist melodrama at its core, provided key elements for Peronist ideology.8 The reformulation of gender identities that popular culture proposed during these years offers strong evidence in support of this thesis. As analyzed in chapter two, the archetype of the Argentine flapper, who was characterized as a rich, conceited, and frivolous young woman known for both foreign and national consumption patterns and her daring sexuality, was seen as a threat to national values. In fact, she was often contrasted with the humble and altruistic lower-class woman. In films of the 1930s, the joven moderna’s only chance of being saved from her frivolous existence was to join the world of the working poor. Led by paternalistic men, the snobbish upper-class modern girl turns into a dutiful and maternal Argentine woman. In other words, she becomes an exemplary Peronist woman. Several years later, Doña María, an emblematic working-class Peronist, described the opposition between poor and rich women in similar terms in a poem to her deceased factory worker friend Clarita, as Daniel James has persuasively argued.9 The confrontation between Evita and upper-class women during the Peronist period, epitomized in their dispute over the control of philanthropic institutions, was symptomatic of this viewpoint. Peronism drew on class struggle as a way of condemning wealthy people’s frivolity and cosmopolitanism and of emphasizing the altruism and authenticity of the poor. Besides appropriating the critical assessment of upper-class young women, Peronist ideology also re-created the gender dynamics at work in representations of the beauty contestant, female athlete, and modern working girl of the 1920s and 1930s. Beauty contest winners were presented as middle-class versions of the upper-class flapper figure—trendy and fashionable, but also modest, innocent, and authentic. They jibed effortlessly with Peronist gender ideology, which exalted housewives and stay-at-home mothers and praised the middle-class values of respectability and domesticity.10 Conversely, the ath-

Epilogue

letic female figure analyzed in chapter four was shown rejecting the decadent and artificial lifestyles of Buenos Aires, a modern metropolis that appeared to be populated by weak and fragile female workers and wealthy modern girls, and endorsing health as a path to beauty. A vigorous nation needed well-built, healthy and beautiful female bodies, claimed promoters of physical culture, especially during the 1930s, when the shrinking of the Argentine population sparked particular concern. Peronist ideology and policies promoting sports for women remained in tune with the characterization of female physical culture of the preceding years. The regime considered women’s sport a key component of civic education and promoted women’s participation in international competitions during those years.11 Peronism also re-created the gendered dynamics surrounding modern working girls, who had been portrayed as independent and fashionable employees during the 1920s and 1930s. Popular culture recognized pink-collar labor as particularly appealing to some young women, as it gave them the opportunity to interact with young men and to manage their own pocket money for personal expenses. In particular, women’s magazines promoted middle-class values such as respectability and femininity among their female wage-earning audience in order to, among other things, counterbalance the potential moral risks of these new gender dynamics. Alongside this innocent female figure, however, appeared tango’s daring and tragic milonguita, who was accused of class betrayal because of her yearning for the symbols of wealth. Her presence, as well as that of the bella pobre, served as cautionary tales for young women who asked too much of life. Such a complex dynamic was the product of mass culture, which praised female workers who strived for social mobility while also advocating for notions of working-class loyalty. These gender representations become key elements of Peronist ideology. Barbara Weinstein has argued that, in contrast to Brazil, where female labor was often seen as incompatible with images of femininity, lower-class women under Peronism asserted their femininity and respectability by appropriating tastes and styles associated with the middle class and transforming them into an alternative working-class identity.12 There is no better example of this alternative image of femininity than that provided by the working-class beauty queens elected as part of Peronist May Day celebrations. In their flimsy dresses and sophisticated jewelry, the winners were the perfect representation of the beautiful, trendy, and proud female worker endorsed by Peronism. The fact of

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being crowned by Evita, these humble young women’s princess, further legitimized their style. This celebration was a key component of Peronist ideology, which typically spotlighted workers’ well-being as one of the administration’s achievements.13 Peronism not only emphasized the extraordinary outcomes that its administration brought to workers’ standards of living, but also highlighted the importance of poor people’s culture in the making of argentinidad. This challenged the country’s long-standing self-representation as a principally white and European nation. During the 1920s and 1930s, Argentina fashioned itself as an “advanced” country, with its own distinctive characteristics. The cultural and political effort to forge a genuine and cohesive tradition was conceived as a way to counteract the alleged threat of cosmopolitanism embodied, among others, by the upper-class porteño flapper. The state, intellectuals, and mass culture promoted gaucho culture as representative of authenticity, while the identity of forward-looking agent of the nation was typically assigned to modern female figures. Fashionable female employees, athletic women, and beauty queens stood as the symbol of the nation’s newly acquired progress and vigor, and yet were perceived as more than just copies of other Western modern girls. While bataclanas and tango singers created their own style by adding gaucho accessories to their cosmopolitan outfits, and athletic young women retained their original marker of Hispanic charm despite practicing competitive sports, beauty queens professed the modesty and innocence that became the core principles of Argentine femininity. Even Beba, the ultra-modern girl, flirted with tango and transnational black culture in order to build her modern persona, though she was seen more as a threat than as a figure of progress. Nowhere was the desire to depict the country’s modernity more evident than in the Miss Argentina competitions, in which modern girls were called on to serve the nation. In forging an image of how Argentina should be perceived abroad, the winners embodied an ideal of whiteness. This ideal, in turn, was seen as the outcome of the melting pot of “European races” and the country’s environment, which shaped local women’s beauty as well as their “Argentine character.” These were images of nationhood that were more about Argentina’s progress and global potential than about its particular customs. This effort to appear as white and as modern as possible was first challenged by Peronism. The Peronist administration’s endorsement of new social rights

Epilogue

for internal migrants gave a positive connotation to cabecita negra, originally a racial slur the urban middle classes used for the brown-skinned working-class followers of Perón, both female and male.14 This change reflected the state’s embrace of rural criollo culture as the authentic manifestation of Argentine nationality, thus questioning the myth of Argentina as a “white” European nation and raising awareness of local prejudices based on skin color, as several scholars have argued.15 However, it seems that one variable remained unchanged. When an individual was needed to represent Peronist Argentina on an international tour, Evita was the one chosen. In photographs alongside important statesmen and clergy, Evita’s white complexion and dyed blond hair stand out as much as her ostentatious clothes and jewelry.16 She presented herself the way she and her country wanted, again, to be seen: as the princess of a rich, white, and socially advanced Argentina. Far from minor, the difference this time was that the princess hailed from a humble rural background. The popular culture explored in this book constructed an image of Argentina as a polarized society, one that Peronism, as argued, later re-created. Popular culture, especially in tango lyrics, serialized novels, and films, described female socialites as condescending and frivolous, and contrasted them with hardworking, honest, and woebegone lower-class young women. These cultural products consistently denounced the flapper’s participation in consumer culture as alien to her wealthy position and her national spirit. Her predominantly upper-class status and her life of leisure differentiated the Argentine modern girl archetype from its Latin American counterparts. In Cuban and Mexican popular culture, for example, the archetypal modern girl figures have been primarily presented as upper- and middle-class young woman framed within the trope of domesticity, fashion, and beauty. But Cuban and Mexican mass culture tended to overlook the class dynamics that characterized the portrayal of this archetype in Argentina, as well as the exaggerated leisure and cosmopolitanism depicted as part of the porteño flapper life. Polarized class divisions were not the only differences between the Argentine modern girl and her Latin American sisters. Representations of authenticity also varied. The uniqueness of the Argentine modern girl in her many guises came mainly from the world of the urban poor, particularly in the form of tango culture. In contrast, Mexican popular culture was populated with modern girls who blended rural and Indian fashions with modern looks, and in the Cuban mass media, the presence of traditional representations was

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scarce. Argentina was somewhere in the middle. Like Cubans, Argentines embraced modern values and identified themselves as citizens of a cosmopolitan nation. But this did not translate into a total absence of traditional representations within the mainstream media, as was the case with Cuba. Like Mexicans, Argentines also embraced the uniqueness of their nation, but they chose male figures over the more common female ones to symbolize tradition. The transnational dynamics of popular culture, and the ways in which it was appropriated and transformed in order to respond to the social, gender, and racial politics of each country, molded how the leading modern girl figure was nationally defined.17 Buenos Aires, however, was much more than the static and polarized society described in popular culture. There was a growing segment of the population that was neither rich nor poor, one that pursued the opportunities that economic development provided and believed in the possibility of upward mobility. The “real” modern young women studied in this book lived in this heterogeneous conglomerate. Within the constraints and opportunities in their lives, especially in terms of class and ethnicity, female audiences had many ways of relating to the representations of women disseminated by popular culture. Women did not simply become the characters of the serialized novels they read or the women they saw in magazines or on the silver screen. The fact that upper-class young women were identified as the quintessential jóvenes modernas did not imply that all of them were, in fact, flappers or that women from other backgrounds could not become flappers. There were multiple ways of becoming a modern young woman, and multiple femininities. Discourses about beauty, health, and fashion that circulated both globally and locally presented diverse attitudes toward the modern girl. There is no doubt that popular culture offered young women the possibility of thinking about themselves beyond the socially expected role of dutiful and patriotic daughter. But young women reproduced, debated and appropriated these discourses in diverse ways. Some young women probably identified with the bella pobre character, her moral issues, and her tragic destiny. But they were just as likely to embrace the new possibilities that beauty or consumption seemed to offer. If they had doubts, they could consult the advice columns of women’s magazines regarding relations with male coworkers or dating, or for fashion tips on how to dress for the office or special occasions. Young women who participated in sports competitions and in beauty pageants probably felt they

Epilogue

had gained political legitimacy as symbols of the nation in a period in which women—and, for a brief time, between 1930 and 1931, men as well—were excluded from national politics. Undoubtedly they felt empowered by their participation in an international consumer culture that offered them a life of independence and excitement, or at least, for the majority of women, the possibility of dreaming of such a life. These young women surely learned how to walk the fine line between expressing their independence and self-assurance and being considered too modern.

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Notes

Introduction 1. “Ayer y hoy,” El Hogar, 1000, December 14, 1928, internal cover. 2. “La porteña de ayer en la calle,” “La porteña de hoy en la calle,” El Hogar, 1000, December 14, 1928, 104, 105 respectively. 3. “El saludo,” El Hogar, 1000, December 14, 1928, 113. 4. Weinbaum et al., “The Modern Girl as Heuristic Device,” 1–23. 5. On Buenos Aires in the 1920s and 1930s, see Caimari, While the City Sleeps. 6. Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 3–8. 7. Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” For a discussion of Frankfurt’s school assumptions regarding mass consumption and femininity, see Nava, “Modernity’s Disavowal,” 38–76. 8. For recent statements of this position, see Wolf, The Beauty Myth. 9. McRobbie, “The Es and the Anti-Es,” 180. See also Hollows, Feminism, Femininity, and Popular Culture, 30–32. 10. Hollows, Feminism, Femininity, and Popular Culture, 21–24. 11. Banner, American Beauty, 14, 16. 12. Rapp and Ross, “The Twenties: Feminism, Consumerism and Political Backlash in the United States,” 52–61. 13. Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover, 11–12. 14. Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover, 129–32. See also Ryan, Womanhood in America, 77–91. 15. Peiss, “Girls Lean Back Everywhere,” 351. 16. Leach, “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption”; Nava, “Modernity’s Disavowal,” 38–76. 17. De Grazia, “Empowering Women as Citizen-Consumers,” 275–78. 18. Peiss, Hope in a Jar; Thomas, “The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability.”

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Notes to Pages 8–14

19. Roberts, “Samson and Delilah Revisited,” 684. 20. On feminism, see Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change. On female workers, see Lobato, Historia de las trabajadoras en la Argentina. See also Nari, Políticas de maternidad. 21. Pite, Creating a Common Table in Twentieth-Century Argentina, 55–119; Bontempo, “Para Ti: una revista moderna para una mujer moderna.” 22. Milanesio, Workers Go Shopping in Argentina; Pérez, “Modern Kitchens in the Pampas.” 23. Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina; Cosse, Pareja, sexualidad y familia en los años sesenta. 24. Miller, Reinventing Modernity in Latin America, 3, 6. 25. Miller, In the Shadow of the State, 3; Miller, Reinventing Modernity in Latin America, 1–21; Wade, “Modernity and Tradition,” 55. 26. The paradigmatic case is Mexico. See Knight, “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico”; Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution; Vaughan and Lewis, The Eagle and the Virgin. For Argentina, see Chamosa, The Argentine Folklore Movement. 27. Orlove, The Allure of the Foreign; Orlove and Bauer, Goods, Power, and History, chapters 5–6. For the emergence of a Latin American identity in the mid-nineteenth century, see Gobat, “The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of AntiImperialism, Democracy, and Race.” 28. López, “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America,” 52, 53 and 61. For a similar approach regarding popular music, see McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil, 129–59. 29. Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons,” 13–15. 30. See Seigel, Uneven Encounters; Zolov, Refried Elvis; Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina, 69–96 and 123–57. 31. See the pathbreaking work of Felski, The Gender of Modernity. 32. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 7. 33. Kandiyoti, “Identity and its Discontents”; Sinha, “Gender and Nation.” 34. See, among others, Zavala, Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition; López, “The India Bonita Contest of 1921”; Gutiérrez Chong, “Patriotic thoughts or intuition.” 35. Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots, 189–204. For a critical discussion of the role of the morena, see Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism, 1–42. 36. Mestizaje manifested itself in diverse ways, from praise for Indian-white or blackwhite racial mixtures to an exaltation of the pure Indian. See Miller, Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race; Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt, Race and Nation in Modern Latin America. 37. Alberto and Elena, “Introduction: The Shades of the Nation,” 1–22. 38. Pite, Creating a Common Table, pp. 19–21; Adamovsky, “A Strange Emblem for a (Not So) White Nation.” 39. For an overview of different notions of agency, see Thomas, “Historicising Agency.”

Notes to Pages 18–21

Chapter 1. Building a Modern Nation 1. Rocchi, Chimneys in the Desert, 1. In 1914, 80 percent of the Argentine population was composed of immigrants and the descendants of those who had immigrated since 1850. After the end of massive immigration in 1930, the proportion of immigrants in the Argentine population began to fall, dropping to 26 percent in 1947. Rock, Politics in Argentina, 1890–1930, 166–67, 220. 2. Zanoni, Migrant Marketplaces, 139. 3. For U.S. investments, see Palacio, “La antesala de lo peor: la economía argentina,” 137–38; Rocchi, Chimneys in the Desert, 85–124. For local industry, see Rocchi, “Consumir es un placer: la industria y la expansión de la demanda,” 536–41. 4. Korol, “La Economía,” 24, 38–42. 5. Rouquié, Poder militar y sociedad política en la Argentina, 32–35; Romero, “La ciudad burguesa,” 9–17. 6. By the 1930s, two-thirds of the population of Buenos Aires was native-born. On the growth of the barrios in the 1920s and 1930s, see González Leandri, “La nueva identidad de los sectores populares,” 213–15. 7. As electricity was rather expensive, coal continued to be the most popular energy source. Liernur, “Casas y Jardines: la construcción del dispositivo doméstico moderno,” 99–137. 8. Scobie, Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburbs, 196–207. 9. Rocchi, Chimneys in the Desert, 50. 10. Although inflation and unemployment had their impact, salaries still continued to increase by 7.5 percent annually between 1918 and 1930. Rocchi, Chimneys in the Desert, 117 and fig. 2.1. 11. Rocchi, “La americanización del consumo,” 154; Rocchi, Chimneys in the Desert, 62. 12. For the development of urban leisure, see González Velasco, Gente de teatro. Ocio y espectáculos, 21–53; Goldberg, Entertaining Culture: Mass Culture and Consumer Society, 74–92, 104–16; Montaldo, Museo del consumo. Archivo de la cultura de masas, 75–165. 13. Rocchi, “Consumir es un placer,” 547. 14. Rocchi, “La americanización del consumo,” 154–56. 15. Karush, Culture of Class, 33–34; Tossounian, “Milonguitas: Tangos, Gender and Consumption.” 16. Miller, “Latin American Consumers, British Multinationals, and the Merchant Houses.” 17. Rocchi, “La americanización del consumo,” 157–58, 63, 80–82; Rocchi, “Inventando la soberanía del consumidor,” 313. 18. Rocchi, Chimneys in the Desert, 62. 19. Gutiérrez and Romero, “Sociedades barriales y bibliotecas populares,” 72. 20. Szuchman, “The Limits of the Melting Pot in Urban Argentina”; Samuel L. Baily, “Marriage Patterns and Immigrant Assimilation in Buenos Aires.”

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Notes to Pages 21–24

21. Míguez et al., “Hasta que la Argentina nos una: reconsiderando las pautas matrimoniales,” 807–8. 22. Gutiérrez and Romero, “Introducción,” 10–11. For a recent summary of this historiographic approach, see González Leandri, “La nueva identidad de los sectores populares,” 201–37. 23. Karush, Culture of Class. 24. Adamovsky, Historia de la clase media en Argentina, 53–117. 25. Míguez, “Familias de clase media: la formación de un modelo.” 26. Torrado, Historia de la familia en la Argentina moderna, 84–87, 240–54, 323–41; Mazzeo, “Situación demográfica de la Capital Federal,” 12; Nari, Políticas de maternidad, 278, 281; Cosse, Estigmas de nacimiento: Peronismo y orden familiar, 26–34; Sánchez Albornoz, “The Population of Latin America, 1850–1930,” 121–53. For contraceptive methods, see Barrancos, “Contracepcionalidad y aborto en la década de 1920,” 75–86 and Nari, “Las prácticas anticonceptivas, la disminución de la natalidad y el debate médico.” 27. González Bollo, “Recepción argentina de una obsesión demográfica occidental.” 28. For a view that highlights the dominant profile of Argentine eugenics, see the pioneering work of Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics. See also Nari, Políticas de maternidad y maternalismo político; Zimmermann, Los liberales reformistas; Armus, The Ailing City: Health, Tuberculosis, and Culture. For a perspective that emphasizes its repressive profile, see, among others, Vallejo and Miranda, “Los saberes del poder: eugenesia y biotipología” and Reggiani, “Depopulation, Fascism, and Eugenics.” 29. Zimmermann, “Racial Ideas and Social Reform.” See also Alberto and Elena, “Introduction: the Shades of the Nation,” 1–22. 30. Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt, “Introduction: Racial Nations,” 1–31. 31. Garguin, “Los Argentinos Descendemos de los Barcos.” See also Quijada, “Introduction.” 32. Nari, Políticas de maternidad, 28–34, 71–77, 190–207. See also Aguilar, El hogar como problema y como solución, 155–216. 33. Rocchi, “La americanización del consumo,” 177–80. 34. Bontempo, “Para Ti: una revista moderna para una mujer moderna 1922–1935”; Pérez, “Modern Kitchen in the Pampas”; Pérez, “Comfort for the People and Liberalization for the Housewife”; Pite, Creating a Common Table. For the modern woman figure in the 1960s, see Cosse, “Claudia: La revista de la mujer moderna en la Argentina.” 35. Torrado, Historia de la familia, 211–15. See also Lobato, Historia de las trabajadoras en la Argentina, 37–74; Rocchi, “Concentración de capital, concentración de mujeres.” 36. Due to their lower salaries and supposed better manners, female employees tended to replace male in the service sector. See Queirolo, Mujeres en las oficinas. Trabajo, género y clase. 37. For primary and professional schools, see Torrado, Historia de la familia, 199–200. For female university education, see Lorenzo, Que sepa coser, que sepa bordar, 21–44. 38. Mead, “Beneficent Maternalism: Argentine Motherhood,” 121; Tossounian, “Women’s Associations and the Emergence of a Welfare State.”

Notes to Pages 24–26

39. Women were allowed to take any job they chose without their husbands’ consent, to do what they wished with their earnings, to retain their own properties even if they were married, and to retain parenting rights if they were unwed mothers. Giordano, “La ampliación de los derechos civiles de las mujeres.” 40. Among others, there was the Asociación de Universitarias Argentinas, Partido Feminista Nacional, Asociación Pro Derechos de la Mujer. Barrancos, Mujeres en la sociedad argentina, 156–71. 41. Feminists joined the struggle of socialists and conservatives to protect the offspring of working mothers. The legislation on maternity protection, approved in 1934, forbade women from working four weeks before and six weeks after childbirth and established a subsidy for mothers. Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change, 80, 2, 209–11; Nari, Politicas de maternidad, 227–66. 42. Hammond, The Women’s Suffrage Movement and Feminism in Argentina, 120–32. For women’s political rights, see also Palermo, “El sufragio femenino en el Congreso Nacional.” 43. Barrancos, “Moral sexual, sexualidad y mujeres.” 44. Plotkin, “Tell Me Your Dreams: Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture,” 609–10; Sarlo, El imperio de los sentimientos, 25. 45. Moreau de Justo, La mujer en la democracia, 110. On socialist feminists and commodity culture see Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism, 165–200. 46. Miller, Reinventing Modernity in Latin America, 3–6. 47. Delaney, “Imagining El Ser Argentino,” 625–26. The literature on cultural nationalism is vast. See Altamirano and Sarlo, “La Argentina del centenario: campo intelectual, vida literaria y temas ideológicos,” and Devoto, Nacionalismo, fascismo y tradicionalismo en la Argentina, 47–119. 48. For literature on the gaucho and national identity, see Delaney, “Imagining El Ser Argentino”; Delaney, “Making Sense of Modernity”; Slatta, “The Gaucho in Argentina’s Quest for National Identity”; Cattaruzza and Eujanian, “Héroes patricios y gauchos rebeldes: tradiciones en pugna.” For criollismo, see Prieto, El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argentina moderna, 168–87; Adamovsky, “La cuarta función del criollismo y las luchas por la definición del origen.” 49. Delaney, “Imagining El Ser Argentino,” 657. 50. For a debate on the connections between conservative and cultural nationalism, see Delaney, “Imagining El Ser Argentino,” 648–58. 51. Goebel, Argentina’s Partisan Past, 23–55; Devoto, Nacionalismo, fascismo, 121–42, 178–231. See also Spektorowski, The Origins of Argentina’s Revolution of the Right. 52. For a comparative perspective on the complex and changing relationship between Latin American intellectuals and the state, see Miller, In the Shadow of the State, 43–94. 53. Bertoni, Patriotas, cosmopolitas y nacionalistas, 79–120. 54. Gutiérrez y Romero, “Sociedades barriales y bibliotecas populares,” 72. 55. Casas, La tradición en disputa, 143–81.

127

128

Notes to Pages 27–29

56. For the gaucho culture, see Slatta, “The Gaucho in Argentina’s Quest,” 108–11. For the folklore movement, see Chamosa, The Argentine Folklore Movement, 117–32. 57. Salvatore, “Yankee Advertising in Buenos Aires”; Rocchi, “La sociedad de consumo en tiempos difíciles.” 58. Other subsidiaries of foreign advertising agencies based in Buenos Aires were the American Ayer & Son (1929), and the British Lintas (1931). Rocchi, “La sociedad de consumo en tiempos difíciles,” 96. For a study of Argentine advertisements, see Borrini, El siglo de la publicidad. 59. For the Odorono and Pond’s advertising campaigns, see Weinbaum et al., “The Modern Girl Around the World,” 25–54 and Sutton, Globalizing Ideal Beauty, 159–60. 60. On the universal values of JWT and its expansion in Argentina, see Sutton, Globalizing Ideal Beauty, 133–48; De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 231–37. 61. Rocchi, “La americanización del consumo.” 62. Salvatore, “Yankee Advertising.” On JWT in Mexico and Brazil, see Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home!, 152–71 and Woodward, “Marketing Modernity.” 63. Some two million newspapers and magazines were printed daily in 1935. Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica, 21. 64. Caras y Caretas had a print run of 150,000 issues by 1920. For an extensive analysis of the magazine, see Rogers, Caras y Caretas. Cultura, política y espectáculo. 65. See Eujanian, Historia de las revistas argentinas 1900–1950; Bontempo, “Editorial Atlántida. Un continente de publicaciones.” 66. In 1928, Para Ti had a print run of 150,000 issues. See Bontempo, “Para Ti: Una revista moderna para la mujer moderna.” 67. Bergel and Palomino, “La revista El Gráfico en sus inicios: una pedagogía deportiva.” Less popular than El Gráfico, Cultura Sexual y Física and Viva Cien Años also addressed physical culture and emphasized values such as individual fulfillment and happiness. See Vezzetti, “Viva cien años: Algunas consideraciones sobre familia y matrimonio.” 68. Crítica had a daily print run of 300,000 copies by the end of the 1920s. Saítta, Regueros de tinta: El diario Crítica en la década de 1920, 73, 55–92. 69. See Ford and Rivera, “Los medios masivos de comunicación en la Argentina,” 24–52. 70. Tor, Casa Maucci and the left-wing Claridad were the most important publishing houses for affordable books. Romero, “Una empresa cultural: Los libros baratos,” 49–54, 62–63. 71. La novela semanal was among the most popular serial novels published during the 1920s, and had a weekly print run of 200,000 copies by the end of the decade. Pierini, La Novela Semanal, 41–57. 72. For gender characters in tango, see Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires, 146–50 and Archetti, Masculinities: Football, Polo and the Tango 136–60. For an approach that contends that tango’s success was due less to its sanitization and more to tango’s capacity to offer an alternative modernism, see Karush, Culture of Class, 43–60, 87–105 and Garramuño, Modernidades primitivas: tango, samba y nación.

Notes to Pages 29–34 129

73. For the development of the radio, see Claxton, From Parsifal to Perón; Matallana, “Locos por la radio.” 74. Over a hundred Argentine silent films were produced between 1915 and 1920. De Núbila, La época de oro, 11–50. 75. While in 1933, 13 local films were released, in 1939 that figure had climbed to 50. Ford and Rivera, “Los medios masivos de comunicación en la Argentina,” 39. Among the nine film studios that existed in 1937, the most important ones were Lumiton, Estudios Baires and Argentina Sono Films. See España, “El modelo institucional: formas de representación.” 76. In 1929, 30 million people visited the country’s 972 movie theaters, including 152 in the city of Buenos Aires alone. In 1936, there were 1,425 theaters in the country, giving Argentina more theaters per capita than any other country in Latin America. The theaters in the city center were often expensive, while the barrio cinema houses were much cheaper, with tickets selling for as little as AR$0.20. Rocchi, “Inventando la Soberanía del Consumidor,” 311; Karush, Culture of Class, 73–84. 77. For serial novels’ melodramatic structure, see Sarlo’s pioneering study, El imperio de los sentimientos, 22, 229, 62–63, 165–67. For gauchesca radio serials, see Rea, Argentine Serialised Radio Drama in the Infamous Decade. 78. Karush, Culture of Class. 79. For a broader transatlantic history of the transformation of the gaucho and the tango into Argentine icons, see Bockelman, “Between the Gaucho and the Tango.” 80. Archetti, “Masculinity, Primitivism, and Power.” 81. Karush, Culture of Class, 167–76. 82. Adamovsky, “A Strange Emblem for a (Not So) White Nation.” 83. Pite, Creating a Common Table, 19–21.

Chapter 2. The Flapper and the Joven Moderna 1. Gálvez, Una mujer muy moderna, 7. 2. Weinbaum et al., The Modern Girl Around the World. 3. Peiss, “Girls Lean Back Everywhere,” 348; Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 213–16. 4. On Cinegraf magazine’s critical approach to Hollywood, see Morales, “La revista Cinegraf (1932–1937).” 5. De Córdova, “The Emergence of the Star System in America”; Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, especially chapter 3. 6. Crítica, December 8, 1919, 5; Alejandro Villalobos, “Lo interesante y pintoresco del divorcio son los motivos que invocan los que se divorcian,” Mundo Argentino, February 28, 1934, 52, 53, 65. For Hollywood and the modern girl, see Sharot, “The ‘New Woman,’ Star Personas, and Cross-Class Romance.” 7. Graciela Madero, “Los peligros del modernismo,” Para Ti, August 13, 1935, 85.

130

Notes to Pages 34–39

8. Alejandro Sux, “Cherchez la femme,” El Hogar, January 20, 1933, 68. See also “¿La mujer argentina se masculiniza?,” Aconcagua, July 10, 1935, 117. 9. Arlt, “El cine y las costumbres”; Arlt, “Parecidos con el artista.” For the impact of Hollywood stardom on modern Chinese femininity, see Edwards, “Localizing the Hollywood Star System in 1930s China.” 10. “La mujeres modernas,” Caras y Caretas, September 10, 1927, n.p. 11. El Hogar, October 5, 1928, 41. See also “En las playas americanas. Concursos de belleza,” Atlántida, July 7, 1927, 62–63. On European beauty contests, see El Hogar, March 15, 1929, 37; “Bellezas Europeas,” Atlántida, September 19, 1929, 32–33. 12. On the role of women in Argentine advertising, see Rocchi, “La americanización del consumo,” 181–82. 13. Pepsodent ad, Para Ti, December 15, 1931, 34. For the JWT agency’s international advertisements and their global appeal to beauty, see Sutton, Globalizing Ideal Beauty, 149–70. 14. Weinbaum et al. “The Modern Girl Around the World: Cosmetics Advertising,” 28–31. 15. Sylvia Sidney, Lux ad, Para Ti, July 2, 1935, 31; Claudette Colbert, Lux ad, El Hogar, June 2, 1939, 31; Lupe Vélez, Lux ad, Para Ti, July 23, 1935, 31. 16. Crítica, March 2, 1926, 16. See also “El grupo de mujeres más frescas del mundo,” Crítica, February 22, 1922, 5. 17. See Rinke, “Voyeuristic Exoticism.” 18. Zulema Ramos Pacheco, “Pst, pero no digan que yo se los dije,” El Hogar, June 23, 1933, 12. 19. “Opiniones femeninas,” Para Ti, February 17, 1925, 9. 20. Horacio Quiroga, “Las amazonas,” El Hogar, January 17, 1930, 8. See also “¿Hacia la supresión de los encantos femeninos?,” Caras y Caretas, February 5 1927, n.p. 21. Villalobos, “Lo interesante y pintoresco del divorcio,” 52, 53, 65. 22. Manuel Rey, “El noviazgo es en Estados Unidos una amistad exenta de romanticismo,” El Hogar, October 8, 1937, 14. 23. Manuel Rey, “En los Estados Unidos la mujer es una peligrosa competidora del hombre,” El Hogar, November 5, 1937, 14. 24. Lilia Davis, “Las niñas argentinas tienen un gran sentido de la feminidad,” El Hogar, April 21, 1933, 17, 67. For a similar view of well-off Argentine women, see Gómez Carrillo, El encanto de Buenos Aires, 85–95. 25. Lilia Davis, “Los maridos argentinos no son lo más perfecto del mundo,” El Hogar, April 28, 1933, 17. 26. José Manuel Madariaga, “Contestando a un artículo de Lilia Davies: ¿Somos peores que otros, los maridos argentinos?,” El Hogar, May 5, 1933, 17, 80. 27. For a similar analysis of the flapper in China, see Edwards, “The Shanghai Modern Woman’s American Dreams.” 28. This was the case of the Don Jacobo in Argentina comic strip. See Svarch, “‘Don Jacobo en la Argentina’ Battles the Nacionalistas.” Los amigos de Isidora—the local title of Merely Margy, an Awfully Sweet Girl, created by John Held Jr.—was another flapper-

Notes to Pages 39–42

centered comic strip that was translated and published in Argentina. Gené, “De la flapper norteamericana a la ‘morocha argentina.’” 29. Para Ti, several issues. Mecha was replaced by the comic strip Un matrimonio como hay muchos, which appeared on and off throughout the 1930s, and featured a married modern woman mistreating her husband. 30. Atlántida, September 12, 1929, 19. See also “Entre tu y yo,” Atlántida, January 3, 1929, 18. 31. For other works on the modern girl and comics, see Dong, “Who is Afraid of the Chinese Modern Girl?”; Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation, especially chapter 2. 32. José De España, “Velocidad y Modernismo,” El Hogar, March 24, 1933, 64, 80. For a similar perspective, see also Martínez Estrada, Radiografía de la Pampa, 327–29. 33. Luis María Jordán, “De la vida Nacional. El espíritu femenino,” El Hogar, March 29, 1918, n.p. 34. “La Beba: Historia de una vida inútil,” Caras y Caretas, June 11, 1927, n.p. Consuelo Moreno de Dupuy de Lôme wrote for several magazines under the pseudonym of Roxana. A journalist, she also worked as a high school inspector and in the Consejo Nacional de Mujeres on charity activities. Sosa de Newton, Diccionario Biográfico de Mujeres Argentinas, 427. For other tales by Roxana, see Ariza, “Bellezas argentinas y femmes de lettres.” 35. “La Beba ya está en sociedad,” Caras y Caretas, July 2, 1927, n.p. 36. Physical mobility was a characteristic shared by different versions of the flapper worldwide. Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 215. 37. “Beba regresa del crucero,” Caras y Caretas, October 22, 1927, n.p. 38. “Beba es ahora una señora casada,” Caras y Caretas, March 24, 1928, n.p. 39. For a similar approach, see “Entre tu y yo,” Atlántida, July 18, 1929, 18. 40. “Beba va al cine por la tarde,” Caras y Caretas, July 30, 1927, n.p.; “Beba va a comprar libros,” Caras y Caretas, November 5, 1927, n.p. 41. “Beba se baña en el mar,” Caras y Caretas, January 26, 1928, n.p.; “Beba aprende a bailar el Charleston,” Caras y Caretas, September 10, 1927, n.p. 42. “La Beba se presenta en sociedad,” Caras y Caretas, June 25, 1927, n.p. 43. “Beba asiste a lecciones de baile,” Caras y Caretas, October 29, 1927, n.p.; “Beba aprende a bailar el Charleston,” Caras y Caretas, September 10, 1927, n.p. 44. For a similar critique of the role of U.S. mass culture in female gender roles, see Graciela Madero, “Los peligros del modernismo,” Para Ti, July 9, 1935, 30; Rosa Blanca, “Ejemplos inconvenientes,” Para Ti, October 26, 1937, 101. 45. For a similar critique of the joven moderna’s embrace of tango, see Mama Justa, “Ecos de sociedad,” El Hogar, March 15, 1918, n.p; Delfina Agostelli, “Charlas femeninas,” Mundo Argentino, September 18, 1940, 28; Enrique Ruas, “La decencia en el lenguaje y otras decencias,” Mundo Argentino, September 27, 1922, n.p. 46. Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots, 51–70. 47. Lunfardo is understood as a set of words coined by the wave of immigration at the turn of the twentieth century and used by the working classes of Buenos Aires.

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Notes to Pages 42–51

48. “Beba canta tangos,” Caras y Caretas, December 3, 1927, n.p. 49. Nava, “The Cosmopolitanism of Commerce and the Allure of Difference,” 179; Gorsuch, “The Dance Class or the Working Class,” 188. See also Matallana, El tango entre dos orillas. Representaciones en Estados Unidos. 50. “Beba. Comienzan los ensayos para la fiesta de caridad,” Caras y Caretas, December 31, n.p. 51. On the international vogue of blackness in Brazil in the 1920s, see Seigel, Uneven Encounters, ch. 3. 52. Karush, “Blackness in Argentina.” 53. For complaints about the new habits of elite women during this period, see Losada, “Convenciones culturales y estilos de vida.” For the Nicaraguan elite’s similar critical reaction to Americanism and to the modern girl phenomenon, see Gobat, Confronting the American Dream, 175–76, 184–92. 54. Elsa Norton (Josué Quesada), “La casa de soltera,” La Novela Semanal, 222, 1922, n.p. See also Elsa Norton (Josué Quesada), “El escándalo de la avenida Alvear,” La Novela Semanal, 178, 1921, n.p. For an analysis of the short story “La casa de soltera,” see Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism, 170–71; Pierini, La Novela Semanal, 104–5. 55. See, among others, Luis Cané, “La patotera,” La Mejor Novela, 7, 1928, n.p.; Elsa Norton (Enrique García Velloso), “Un casamiento en el gran mundo,” La Novela Semanal, 15, 1918, n.p. Patotera is a lunfardo word that denotes membership in a gang composed of wealthy young men who generally meet on the streets and attack or mug passers-by for fun or out of sheer boredom. 56. Marpons, “Satanás.” See Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism, 185–87. 57. Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism, 168. 58. Augusto González Castro, “Una niña fifí,” El Hogar, December 14, 1929, 33. Fifí is a lunfardo word used with a certain disdain to refer to a person who belongs to the upper classes. 59. Simón Palacios, “La crisis beneficia al hogar y prolonga la vida,” Mundo Argentino, October 19, 1932, 10, 13, 27. 60. Karush, Culture of Class, 166–75. 61. Raúl Apold, “¿Qué rol nuevo desearían interpretar?,” Fémina Ilustrada, May 24, 1935, 96, 97, 133. When interviewed, Paulina Singerman was performing the role of a modern girl who defended divorce in a play titled “Amor.” 62. See Karush, Culture of Class, 172. 63. For the emergence of a postive view of the United States in Argentine mass culture at the end of the 1930s, see Ubelaker, “Popular Pan Americanism, North and South.” 64. Karush, Culture of Class, 172–73. 65. Karush, Culture of Class, 166–75. 66. Lotz, “Leading the Life of a Modern Girl,” 44–70. 67. Hershfield, Imagining la Chica Moderna, 5–6. On tango, see Garramuño, Modernidades Primitivas.

Notes to Pages 53–59

Chapter 3. The Modern Working Girl 1. “Confidencias,”Atlántida, October 1, 1925, 47–48. For Cuban women’s personal ads, see Lotz, Leading the Life of a Modern Girl, 151–58. 2. For the conflicting views on the class status of female employees, see Porter, From Angel to Office Worker. 3. Queirolo, Mujeres en la oficina, 93–94. See also Torrado, Historia de la familia, 211–15. 4. See El consejero social; “El consejero de los novios,” Mundo Argentino, several issues. 5. Cosse, “El modelo conyugal en la ciudad de Buenos Aires”; Barrancos, “Moral sexual, sexualidad y mujeres trabajadoras.” 6. Arlt, “El amor en el subterráneo.” 7. Among others, see the folletín by Quesada, “La vendedora de Harrods,” Labeur ed., La Novela Semanal, 13–35 and the 1922 film by director Juan José Ferreyra, “La chica de la calle Florida.” 8. Gloria Alba, “Divagaciones,” Para Ti, March 15, 1927, 36. 9. “Epistolario sentimental,” Para Ti, June 19, 1923, 17. On this female readers’ section of Para Ti, see Bontempo, “La publicidad de lo íntimo.” 10. “El subterráneo y el tren resultan más eficaces que San Antonio,” Atlántida, September 1, 1927, 18. 11. Arlt, “Una hermana fea y otra linda no deben salir juntas,” El Mundo, July 16, 1928, quoted in Zunino Singh, “A Genealogy of Sexual Harassment.” 12. Juan Curuchaga Hernández, “Las costumbres actuales no favorecen la sociabilidad,” El Hogar, November 5, 1937, 8. 13. “¿Qué tal el asunto de su matrimonio?” Fémina Ilustrada, March 8, 1935, 14–15, 115. 14. “Epistolario sentimental,” Para Ti, February 1, 1927, 17. 15. See, for example, the campaign against the practice in Noticias Gráficas, June 6, 1935, 2. See also “El piropo no es un homenaje a la mujer,” Femenil, September 28, 1925, 18. 16. For examples of popular “acceptable” piropos, see “A punta de lápiz,” Caras y Caretas, March 28, 1925, 30. 17. On Silvia Guerrico depicted as a modern girl, see Ehrick, Radio and the Gendered Soundscape, 33–68. 18. Silvia Guerrico, “Divagaciones sobre el piropo,” Atlántida, September 19, 1929, 53, 61. 19. See Lotz, Leading the Life of a Modern Girl, 121–50. 20. Sarlo, El imperio de los sentimientos, 62–63, 22–25. 21. Armus, “Tango, Gender and Tuberculosis in Buenos Aires.” See also Queirolo, Mujeres en las oficinas, 209–36. 22. Barrancos, “Moral sexual, sexualidad y mujeres trabajadoras,” 208. 23. Lobato, “Afectos y sexualidad en el mundo del trabajo.” 24. Barrancos, “Vida íntima, escándalo público.”

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Notes to Pages 59–64

25. In Chile, Tillie the Toiler came out in the 1940s and was published as Cuquita, la mecanógrafa in Pulgarcito magazine. Rojas Flores, “Imágenes de la mujer en la revista Okey.” 26. See Gené, “De la flapper norteamericana a la ‘morocha argentina’”; Bontempo and Queirolo, “Las chicas modernas se emplean como dactilógrafas.” 27. The characterization of the typist as a flirt went far beyond comic strips. See also Tao Lao (Alfonsina Storni), “La perfecta dactilógrafa,” La Nación, May 9, 1920, 1; Jacqueline, “La joven que trabaja,” Para Ti, March 1, 1927, 39, 56; Cartas de Jacqueline, “El hada del teclado,” Para Ti, January 20, 1925, 22. 28. Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 69–76. 29. Golia, “Advising America: Advice Columns and the Modern American Newspaper,” 62. 30. Dorothy Dix, “A la joven que desea trabajar,” Para Ti, October 5, 1937, 20. Golia, “Advising America,” 152. 31. “Escollos (a una joven que empieza a trabajar),” Para Ti, August 2, 1938, 18. 32. “Epistolario sentimental,” Para Ti, February 8, 1927, 14. 33. Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure, 62–63; Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure, 17–46. 34. C. Muñoz Díaz, “La chica del centro,” El Hogar, January 9, 1931, 10, 57. 35. “Mama es demasiado exigente conmigo,” Para Ti, March 1, 1927, 40. This letter was probably written by an editor of the magazine. 36. Elena Camper, “La empleada que se casa,” Para Ti, October 24, 1939, 17. 37. Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure, 17–46. 38. Carlos Montes, “¿Cómo vive la gente útil?,” Mundo Argentino, October 2, 1929, n.p.; Carlos Montes, “¿Cómo vive la gente útil?,” Mundo Argentino, October 16, 1929, n.p.; Carlos Montes, “¿Cómo vive la gente útil?,” Mundo Argentino, October 30, 1929, n.p.; Carlos Montes, “¿Cómo vive la gente útil?,” Mundo Argentino, November 27, 1929, n.p. 39. Montaldo, Museo del consumo. Archivo de la cultura de masas, 286–88. 40. Noemí Ronoe, “¿Vale la pena casarse para seguir empleada?,” Mundo Argentino, June 6, 1928, 14. 41. Camper, “La empleada que se casa,” 17. 42. Ursula Bloom, “Suponiendo que os caseis,” Para Ti, April 7, 1931, 33. 43. Arlt, “Opina una soltera,” 83–87. This letter was probably written by Arlt himself. 44. “¿Qué tal el asunto de su matrimonio?,” Fémina Ilustrada, March 8, 1935, 14–15, 115. 45. See Bergero, Intersecting Tango: Cultural Geographies of Buenos Aires, 217–60. 46. For department stores’ credit systems, see Rocchi, Chimneys in the Desert, 60–61. 47. Bontempo and Queirolo, “Las chicas modernas se emplean como dactilógrafas,” 70. 48. Bergero, Intersecting Tango, 192–95. 49. “Observaciones, advertencias y comentarios del hombre a la mujer,” Atlántida, February 12, 1920, n.p. 50. “Carta de lectores: ¿cuál es su mujer ideal?,” Mundo Argentino, January 14, 1920, n.p.

Notes to Pages 64–68

51. “Observaciones, advertencias y comentarios del hombre a la mujer,” Atlántida, February 12, 1920, n.p. 52. On the milonguita, see Armus, “Tango, Gender and Tuberculosis,” 101–29 and Gobello and Barcia, Tango y Milonguita. 53. Archetti, Masculinities, 139–40, 146–47. 54. Viladrich, “Neither Virgins nor Whores,” 277. 55. La luz del centro te hizo creer, / que la alegría que vos querías / estaba lejos de tu arrabal / y vestías sedas, y no percal / Ir bien vestida, llevar gran lujo, / era el embrujo de tu ambición. 56. De las sedas fatal fue su influjo / y trocaste en infierno tu edén / pues borracha de orgías y lujo / diste en manos de aquel niño bien. 57. Most tangos were written by men and, with some variations, described the destiny of the milonguita in fatalistic terms. On female tango singers, see Viladrich, “Neither Virgins nor Whores.” 58. See Tossounian, “Milonguitas: Tango, Gender and Consumption.” 59. Masotta, La historieta en el mundo moderno, 39–41. 60. For schoolteacher fashions, see Caldo, “El ‘hábito’ hace a la maestra.” 61. “Homenaje a la belleza,” Caras y Caretas, several issues, 1936; “Las midinettes porteñas,” Caras y Caretas, December 2, 1922, 86, 87, 88. 62. Nuevo manual de dactilografía para máquinas Remington, 35. 63. Dix, “A la joven que desea trabajar,” 20. 64. Golia, “Advising America,” 110. On the influence of American mass culture on the formation of an Argentine middle class, see Ubelaker Andrade, “La revista más leída del mundo. Selecciones del Reader’s Digest y culturas de la clase media.” For a transnational approach to the Latin American middle classes, see López and Weinstein, The Making of the Middle Class. 65. Storni, “Un baile familiar,” 34–37; Storni, “La costurerita a domicilio,” 112–16. 66. “Opinión de las lectoras. ¿Que piensa usted de la idea de cortarse el cabello?” Mundo Argentino, May 27, 1924, 27. 67. See Kaczan, “Estampas del deseo y del desear”; Guy, “Producción, ventas y consumo.” 68. César Duayen (Emma de la Barra), “La frivolidad se democratiza,” El Hogar, January 6, 1933, 80; Muñoz Díaz, “La chica del centro,” 10, 57. For a study of Emma de la Barra’s position regarding fashion, see Berg and Lehman, “La ciudadana modelo,” 118–37. 69. Gache, Glosario de la farsa urbana, 10. 70. The radio program Esas cosas de mamá ran from 1944 to 1946. See Ehrick, Radio and the Gendered Soundscape, 169–98. 71. Cascallar, Estas cosas . . . de mamá, 268–70; Milanesio, Workers Go Shopping, 155. 72. Kirkpatrick, “The Journalism of Alfonsina Storni,” 120–21. 73. See Storni, “Los detalles, el alma,” 76–82. While some feminists dismissed fashion as trivial, Storni was interested in its power. See Kirkpatrick, “The Journalism of Alfonsina Storni”; Unruh, Performing Women and Modern Literary, 30–51.

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Notes to Pages 68–77

74. Josué Quesada, “Cuando el amor triunfa,” La Novela Semanal, 79, May, 1919; Quesada, “Melenita.” For a different view on this topic, see Montes, “¿Cómo vive la gente útil?,” Mundo Argentino, November 27, 1929, n.p. For a different approach to the bella pobre character, see Milanesio, Workers Go Shopping in Argentina, 161–68. 75. Quoted in Kirkpatrick, “The Journalism of Alfonsina Storni,” 120–21. 76. Sluis, Deco Body, Deco City, 61–99. See also Rubenstein, “The War on las pelonas.” 77. For bataclanas, see Prestigiacomo, En busca de la revista perdida. For an analysis of the career of Tania, Sofía Bozán and Tita Merello, see Dos Santos, La Historia del tango, 2362–84. 78. “Va a iniciarse, caballeros, la temporada de las bataclanas,” Crítica, March 6, 1926, 9; “La Turgenova,” Crítica, December 14, 1924, 11; “La justicia y las bataclanitas,” El Hogar, May 1, 1925, 39; Adelardo Fernández Arias, “¿Cómo se prepara una revista teatral?,” Caras y Caretas, 1398, July 18, 1925, n.p. 79. Karush, “Blackness in Argentina”; Adamovsky, “A Strange Emblem for a (Not So) White Nation.” 80. Viladrich, “Neither Virgins nor Whores”; Dos Santos, La historia del tango, 2372–77. 81. “El descanso de Tita Merello,” Atlántida, September 26, 1929, n.p. For another image of Tita Merello in gaucho costume, see “De nuestros escenarios,” El Gráfico, August 28, 1926, 30. On other bataclanas as gauchos, see “De nuestros escenarios,” El Gráfico, October 9, 1926, 30; “Por los teatros de revistas,” Atlántida, August 1, 1929, n.p. 82. “Beba se baña en el mar,” Caras y Caretas, January 26, 1928, n.p.; “Beba aprende a bailar el Charleston,” Caras y Caretas, September 10, 1927, n.p. 83. Ehrick, Radio and the Gendered Soundscape, 152; Marshall and D’Anna, Niní Marshall. Mis memorias, 75. 84. Marshall and D’Anna, Niní Marshall, 80. 85. Marshall and D’Anna, Niní Marshall, 82. 86. Karush, Culture of Class, pp.126–30; Ehrick, Radio and the Gendered Soundscape, 150–57. 87. Lotz, Leading the Life of a Modern Girl, 25–31.

Chapter 4. Forging a Healthy and Beautiful Body 1. “Los deportes femeninos,” Femenil, May 6, 1929, 102. 2. See, among others, Aisenstein and Scharagrodsky, Tras las huellas de la educación física escolar argentina; Scharagrodsky, Gobernar es ejercitar. Fragmentos históricos de la educación; Mangan, “The Early Evolution of Modern Sport in Latin America.” 3. Archetti, El potrero, la pista y el ring. Las patrias del deporte; Frydenberg, Historia social del fútbol; Hora, Historia del turf argentino. 4. See Elsey and Nadel, Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports, 22–31. 5. For women’s participation in associations and clubs, see Anderson, “Deporte y civismo femenino en la Asociación Cristiana Femenina”; Anderson, “Sporting Women and Machonas.”

Notes to Pages 77–80

6. El Gráfico, April 21, 1923, 12, 13; “El atletismo femenino,” El Gráfico, January 5, 1924, 26; “El sport femenino nacional progresa lentamente,” El Gráfico, October 25, 1924, 26; Reglamentos oficiales de juegos atléticos, 115; “Leónida Giusti, tres veces campeona,” El Gráfico, November 21, 1936, 37, 38; “Argentina. Segunda en 100 metros estilo libre,” Caras y Caretas, August 28, 1936, n.p. 7. Archetti, Masculinities: Football, Polo and Tango, 53–57; Bergel and Palomino, “La revista El Gráfico en sus orígenes.” 8. Featherstone, “The Body in Consumer Culture.” 9. “Nota de la semana,” El Gráfico, April 23, 1921, 4; Mario Alzúa, “¿Como ser la más bella?” Viva Cien Años, March, 1937, 376–79, 430. 10. “Cultura física femenina,” El Gráfico, January 6, 1923, 4. 11. Mlle. Bourrache, “Las mujeres deben preocuparse por la cultura física,” El Gráfico, November 15, 1919, n.p. 12. Mlle. Bourrache, “Las mujeres deben preocuparse por la cultura física.” 13. Leandro Verdier, “La infidelidad femenina,” Viva Cien Años, March, 1940, 804–7. See also Enrique Tiraboschi, “Sport y maternidad,” El Gráfico, December 6, 1919, n.p. 14. “La mujer de sport,” El Gráfico, January 9, 1926, 44. 15. Alicia Moreau de Justo, “Muchachas modernas,” Vida Femenina, January 12, 1935, 5, 6, 16. 16. On the Argentine case, see Anderson, “Mens Sana in Corpore Sano: Debating Female Sports in Argentina.” 17. Vezzetti, “‘Viva cien años. Algunas consideraciones sobre familia.” See also Armus and Belmartino, “Enfermedades, médicos y cultura higiénica.” 18. Diego Grayson, “Tan importante como su salud física es la de su espíritu,” Viva Cien Años, November, 1935, 92–95. See also Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane, “La influencia de las emociones sobre la salud,” Higiene y Salud, October, 1938, 15–20. 19. C. Fernández Riera, “Un físico atrayente crea personalidad,” Viva Cien Años, October, 1936, 54. See also “La personalidad champagne: atractivo magnético de una vida sana,” Cultura Sexual y Física, September, 1938, 71–72. 20. On Argentina, see Archetti, “Estilos y virtudes masculinas en El Gráfico”; Bergel and Palomino, “La revista El Gráfico en sus orígenes.” 21. On the healthy and beautiful body discourse, see the pioneering study by Matthews, “Building the Body Beautiful”; Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “The Making of a Modern Female Body”; Stewart, For Health and Beauty, 1–16. On Argentina, see Bontempo, “El cuerpo de la mujer moderna” ; Kaczan, “La práctica gimnástica y el deporte.” 22. Alzúa, “¿Cómo ser la más bella?,” 376–79. See also Heinz Pfaude, “Salud y belleza mediante la práctica de ejercicios físicos,” Viva Cien Años, April, 1936, 443–46; Heinz Pfaude, “El derecho de toda mujer: una figura hermosa,” Viva Cien Años, August, 1936, 714–17, 19; “La base de la belleza es la salud,” Higiene y Salud, October 1938, 3–4. 23. Mario Alzúa, “¿Debe o no la mujer desarrollar su fuerza?” Viva Cien Años, April, 1937, 444–45, 496. 24. “¡La belleza es un culto! Y es la mujer la única que tiene obligación de cuidarla y

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Notes to Pages 80–82

mejorarla,” El Hogar, March 2, 1923, 31. See also “¿Por qué no ha de ser usted tan fuerte como los demás?” El Gráfico, November 8, 1924, 25; Leandro Verdier, “Arreglarse no es pecado sino deber,” Viva Cien Años, October 4, 1939, 28–30. 25. “La mujer de sport,” El Gráfico, 44. See also Fernández Riera, “Un físico atrayente crea personalidad,” 54. 26. Pfaude, “El derecho de toda mujer: una figura hermosa,” 714–17, 19. 27. “Las mujeres valientes,” El Gráfico, September 7, 1935, 12–15, 28. 28. “La opinión de nuestras lectoras,” Mundo Argentino, May 27, 1924, 27. 29. Matthews, “Building the Body Beautiful,” 26. 30. “Nota de la semana,” El Gráfico, May 7, 1921, 4. See also Dorotea Pearl Buchanan, “La salud y la belleza en la mujer,” El Gráfico, March 20, 1920, 9, 27. 31. Young Liederman, “Fuerza y belleza,” Cultura Sexual y Física, April, 1938, 531–32. 32. Amanda P. del Valle, Como destruyen su belleza las mujeres, 5–8, 14, 169. 33. Peiss, “Making up, Making over,” 330. 34. Ellsworth, El arte femenino de agradar; De Feiwel, Tratado de belleza y cultura física para la mujer. 35. Weinbaum et. al., “The Modern Girl Around the World. Cosmetics Advertising.” On Argentina, see Ariza “Mentoneras radioactivas, cría senos y otras formas de embellecimiento.” 36. “Secretos de belleza,” Para Ti, May 22, 1928, 58, quoted in Bontempo, “El cuerpo de la mujer moderna,” 92–93. 37. See Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 24–43. 38. Agua Blanca Dora ad, El Hogar, June 4, 1920, 10. On ads promoting lotions, see also Vindabona ad, Para Ti, July 27, 1926, 86. On ads promoting vanishing creams, see Polvo Graseoso Leihner, El Hogar, June 4, 1920, 33; Crema Lechuga, El Hogar, June 4, 1920, 42; Bleach cream de. . . . Elizabeth Arden, Para Ti, April 2, 1940, 29. 39. See, among others, Peiss, Hope in a Jar; Weinbaun et al., “The Modern Girl Around the World: Cosmetics Advertising and the Politics of Race and Style”; Nicholas, The Modern Girl, 23–61. 40. Dr. Iannette, Manual de Belleza Femenina, 10. 41. “La base de la belleza es la salud,” Higiene y Salud, October, 1938, 3–4. See also “Como conservar la belleza,” Higiene y Salud, October, 1938, 23–24; Dorotea Pearl Buchanan, “Como combatir la obesidad,” El Gráfico, June 19, 1920, 26–27; Gofredo Grasso, “El peso y sus variaciones,” Viva Cien Años, 1941, 788. 42. Bourrache, “Las mujeres deben preocuparse por la cultura física.” See also Kaczan, “La visualización de la belleza.” 43. “El ideal de belleza física,” El Hogar, August 3, 1917, quoted in Anderson, “Mens Sana in Corpore Sano,” 648. 44. Del Valle, Como destruyen su belleza las mujeres, 14, 147. 45. Nucleodyne ad, Ahora, October 14, 1935, 7. See also the Bioforina Líquida de Ruxell ad, Para Ti, April 2, 1940, 34; the Leche de Magnesia Phillips ad, El Hogar, February

Notes to Pages 82–87 139

17, 1933, 37. For body representations in Argentine advertising, see Traversa, Cuerpos de papel. Figuraciones del cuerpo en la prensa. 46. See Cahn, Coming on Strong. 47. Alzúa, “Debe o no la mujer desarrollar su fuerza,” 444–45, 496. See also Liederman, “Fuerza y belleza,” 531–32; Gofredo Grasso, “Atletismo femenino,” El Gráfico, June 2, 1923, 5; “Los deportes femeninos,” Femenil, May 6, 1929, 102. 48. On female swimmers, see El Gráfico, February 10, 1923, cover picture of Lilian Harrison; El Gráfico, March 24, 1923, cover picture of Anita Gutbrot; Gofredo Grasso, “Consideraciones técnicas sobre la preparación y raid de la Srita. Anita Gutbrod,” El Gráfico, March 24, 1923, 5. For female athletism, see El Gráfico, May 26, 1923, cover; El Gráfico, October 18, 1924, inside cover; “Campeonas,” ¡Aquí Está!, July 16, 1936, inside cover. See also the sports sections of several general interest magazines for more pictures of athletic women. 49. See Morgan, “Aesthetic Athletics: Advertising and Eroticizing Women Swimmers.” 50. Dyreson, “Icons of Liberty or Objects of Desire?” 51. “Argentina. Segunda en 100 metros estilo libre,” Caras y Caretas, 22 August, 1936, 80; “Jeanette Campbell,” El Gráfico, March 17, 1934, cover. For similar images of other sportswomen, see also “Irma y Alicia Hirr,” El Gráfico, November 10, 1934, cover; ¡Aquí Está!, March 11, 1937, inside cover. 52. Hargreaves, Sporting Females: Critical Issues, 163. 53. “Blanca Torterolo, la mujer más veloz de Sudamérica,” Fémina Ilustrada, May 28, 1934, 20. 54. “Jeanette, la gran revelación de los juegos olímpicos,” El Gráfico, August 29, 1936, 12. 55. Dyreson, “Icons of Liberty or Objects of Desire?” 56. Morelli, Mujeres deportistas, 43. 57. Morelli, Mujeres deportistas, 27–29 58. Morelli, Mujeres deportistas, 53–55. 59. “Nota de la semana,” El Gráfico, April 23, 1921, 4. 60. “Los sports y el porvenir de la raza,” El Gráfico, August 30, 1924, 4. See also “El mejoramiento de la raza,” El Gráfico, September 13, 1924, 4. 61. “Nota de la semana,” El Gráfico, May 7, 1921, 4. 62. On the relation among physical culture, gender, and eugenics in Argentina, see Anderson, “Mens Sana in Corpore Sano”; Reggiani, “Fitness and the National Body”; Scharagrodsky, Mujeres en movimiento. 63. Rafael Ramallón, “El rechazo de los hijos,” Viva Cien Años, 1938, 244–45. 64. “América debe adquirir una conciencia de su responsabilidad,” Viva Cien Años, January, 1939, 511. 65. González Bollo, “Recepción argentina de una obsesión demográfica occidental”; Reggiani, “Depopulation, Fascism, and Eugenics in 1930s Argentina.” 66. This view was due to the prevalence of a soft approach to eugenics in the Argentine medical community. See, among others, the classic work by Stepan, The “Hour of

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Eugenics”: Race, Gender and Nation; Reggiani, “Depopulation, Fascism, and Eugenics in 1930’s Argentina.” 67. Archetti, “Estilo y virtudes masculinas en El Gráfico”; Bergel and Palomino, “La revista El Gráfico en sus orígenes.” 68. “Nuestra agencia general en Norteamérica,” El Gráfico, June 19, 1920, 11. 69. “Sistema alemán de cultura física femenina,” El Gráfico, March 27, 1920, 25. 70. “La cultura física se difunde entre las mujeres alemanas,” El Gráfico, March 9, 1929, 23. 71. On the same phenomenon in China, see Gao, “Nationalist and Feminist Discourses on Jianmei.” 72. Ruth Schwarz de Morgenroth, “¿Un trofeo deportivo o de belleza?” Viva Cien Años, October, 1938, 20–23. See Reggiani and Scharagrodsky, “Circulación, difusión y apropiación de saberes y prácticas corporales.” 73. See Addison, Hollywood and the Rise of Physical Culture, 69–113. 74. “La mujer y la educación física,” El Gráfico, September 28, 1928, 27; “Bellezas de la pantalla cuyo papel es puramente decorativo,” El Gráfico, February 23, 1924, 18. See also “Las artistas en el sport,” El Gráfico, May 14, 1921, 19; “Para alegrar la vista,” El Gráfico, December 17, 1921, 21. 75. Bourrache, “Las mujeres deben preocuparse por la cultura física.” See also “La mujer en la gimnasia y en el deporte,” El Gráfico, June 4, 1932, 50; “La mujer europea en el atletismo,” El Gráfico, December 17, 1921, 7. 76. For Argentina’s participation in early Olympic Games, see Torres, “Tribulations and Achievements”; Torres, “The Latin American ‘Olympic Explosion’ of the 1920s.” 77. On early Olympian women, see Hargreaves, Sporting Females, 209–34; Dyreson, “Icons of Liberty or Objects of Desire?” 78. “En las playas de Miami,” El Gráfico, April 5, 1924, 31; Aníbal Vigil, “La natación en la VIII olimpíada,” El Gráfico, August 30, 1924, 10–11; “Notas extranjeras,” El Gráfico, January 10, 1920, n.p.; “La mujer en el sport,” El Gráfico, April 29, 1922, 19. For a defense of Argentine female swimming competitions, see “Nota de la semana,” El Gráfico, March 11, 1922, 4. 79. “Nuestra agencia general en Norteamérica,” El Gráfico, June 19, 1920, 11. 80. “Nota de la semana,” El Gráfico, February 26, 1921, 4. 81. “Nota de la semana,” El Gráfico, April 2, 1921, 4. 82. “Nota de la semana,” El Gráfico, March 25, 1921, 4; “La ignorancia que inspira lástima,” El Gráfico, April 21, 1923, 4. 83. “Nota de la semana,” El Gráfico, February 26, 1921, 4. See also Alemandri, Moral y deporte, 36. 84. Tiraboschi, “Sport y maternidad.” See also Josefina Crosa, “El culto de la forma,” Caras y Caretas, November 26, 1927, n.p. 85. Del Valle, Como destruyen su belleza las mujeres, 14, 143–44. 86. See Anderson, “Sporting Women and Machonas.” 87. On the same concern in Great Britain, see Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “The Making of a Modern Female Body.”

Notes to Pages 90–98

88. “Los deportes y belleza de la mujer,” Femenil, September 14, 1925, 18. 89. “La mujer y el sport,” El Gráfico, June 13, 1925, 6. 90. Schwarz de Morgenroth, “¿Un trofeo deportivo o de belleza?” See also Liederman, “Fuerza y belleza,” 531–32.

Chapter 5. Embodying the Nation 1. “El Presidente de la República felicita personalmente a las bellezas de El Hogar,” El Hogar, February 17, 1928, 35; “Del gran concurso de belleza de El Hogar,” El Hogar, February 24, 1928, 4. 2. Banner, American Beauty, 250–61; Pomfret, “‘A Muse for the Masses’: Gender, Age, and Nation.” 3. Nicholas, The Modern Girl, 125. 4. Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, 31–42. 5. Luciano Prados, “La Elección de Miss Universo,” Estampa, October 5, 1935, 3, 4. 6. For previous contests, see “Un concurso de belleza,” Caras y Caretas, May 17, 1902, n.p., Caras y Caretas, April 15, 1905, n.p., Caras y Caretas, January 27, 1912, n.p. In 1925, Caras y Caretas organized the first nation-wide photograph-based beauty contest, and over the course of a year it published photos of beautiful women from all over the country. See Caras y Caretas, March 28, 1925, n.p. 7. “De todas partes del país llegan fotografías del certamen de belleza,” Crítica, March 31, 1930, 15. 8. See the classic work by Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, and Banner, American Beauty, 249–70. For Latin America, see Besse, “Defying a ‘National Type’”; Lobato (ed.), Cuando las mujeres reinaban. Belleza, virtud y poder; Stanfield, Of Beasts and Beauty: Gender, Race, and Identity, 73–104. 9. Moreno Figueroa and Rivers-Moore, “Beauty, Race and Feminist Theory in Latin America”; López, “The India Bonita Contest of 1921”; Gackstetter Nichols, “Decent Girls with Good Hair.” For a pathbreaking approach on the importance of race and class in definitions of beauty, see Leeds Craig, “Race, Beauty, and the Tangled Knot.” 10. Ochoa, Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens. 11. Ballerino, Wilk and Stoeltje, “Introduction: Beauty Queens on the Global Stage,” 3–4. 12. Madouka, “Confidencias femeninas. Comentarios sobre la belleza,” Caras y Caretas, February 20, 1932, 6. 13. “De todas partes del país,” Crítica, 15; “Ser Miss Argentina no es privilegio de determinada clase social,” Crítica, March 30, 1930, 24. 14. Thomas, “The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability.” 15. “Debe interesar tanto como una elección política, la elección de Miss Argentina,” Crítica, April 15, 1930, 13. 16. Besse, “Defining a ‘National Type.’” 17. In Spanish, the title was Miss Capital Federal, in reference to Buenos Aires’ status as the seat of federal government.

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Notes to Pages 98–101

18. Noticias Gráficas reported that once, instead of the district’s audience, a jury made the selection. See “La señorita Carmen Alarcón es Miss Caballito,” Noticias Gráficas, June 8, 1932, 15. 19. Josué Quesada, “Charlas intrascendentes sobre naderías sociales,” El Hogar, April 7, 1933, 17. 20. “Srita. Mataderos,” Crítica, April 21, 1930, 1, front cover. 21. Besse, “Defining a ‘National Type.’” 22. Roberto Tálice and Raúl Valentini, “Miss Argentina, Miss Universo,” Bambalinas, August 2, 1930, 2–21. For similar corruption accusations in an Argentine beauty contest, see also Alejandro Berruti, “Concurso de belleza,” Bambalinas, April 2, 1921, n.p. 23. “Miss Argentina,” Vida Femenina, February 15, 1935, 8. 24. López de Molina, “La reina de la belleza,” Mundo Argentino, July 23, 1930, n.p. See also Juan Carlos Valiente, “Un nuevo peligro. Las reinas de belleza,” Mundo Argentino, November 20, 1929, n.p. 25. Joaquin Linares, “El sentido estético y los concursos de belleza,” El Hogar, June 16, 1933, 65. 26. Manuel María Oliver, “Los concursos de belleza femenina son un fracaso en Buenos Aires,” Ahora, August 22, 1935, 28–29; Manuel María Oliver, “El sexualismo disminuye la belleza de las mujeres argentinas,” Ahora, September 30, 1935, 44–45. 27. “Se reunirán las candidatas finalistas de nuestro gran concurso de belleza,” Crítica, June 28, 1930, n.p.; El Hogar, November 2, 1928, 10. 28. “De todas partes del país,” Crítica, 15. 29. “En fecha próxima se cerrará el plazo de recepción de foto,” Crítica, April 11, 1930, 5; “El moderno concepto de belleza,” Crítica, August 11, 1930, 20. 30. “Miss Argentina tiene chance en el torneo internacional de belleza,” Crítica, August 11, 1930, 20. See also, “De todas partes del país,” Crítica, 15. 31. “Muchas jóvenes bellas aspiran a ser Miss Capital,” Noticias Gráficas, May 14, 1932, 4. 32. “Bella lectora: cumpla su deber de Argentina enviándonos su fotografía,” Crítica, April 7, 1930, 5; “En fecha próxima,” Crítica, 5. 33. “Si es hermosa y Argentina, cumpla con la patria enviándonos su foto,” Crítica, April 12, 1930, 7. 34. “En fecha próxima,” Crítica, 5. 35. “Hasta el 18 de junio se reciben fotos para el concurso,” Noticias Gráficas, May 30, 1932, 2; “El concurso tiene genuino carácter nacional,” Noticias Gráficas, 19 May, 1932, 9. 36. “Jamás esperó obtener el título,” Crítica, August 9, 1930, 9, 15, here 15. 37. “Ana Rovner, Miss Capital, sintetiza todas las gracias de las chicas porteñas,” Noticias Gráficas, June 21, 1932, 11. 38. “Los más diferentes tipos de belleza se exhibirán en la galería de nuestro concurso,” Crítica, April 3, 1930, 13. 39. “El concurso tiene genuino carácter nacional,” Noticias Gráficas, 9.

Notes to Pages 101–107

40. “En fecha próxima,” Crítica, 5; “Ser Miss Argentina no es privilegio de determinada clase social,” Crítica, 24. 41. Robertson, “Japan’s First Cyborg? Miss Nippon, Eugenics, and Wartime Technologies.” 42. “Miss Argentina nos representará dignamente,” Noticias Gráficas, June 29, 1932, 14. 43. “Los más diferentes tipos de belleza,” Crítica, 13. 44. “Ana Rovner, Miss Capital,” Noticias Gráficas, 11. 45. “En fecha próxima,” Crítica, 5. See “Yo soy la morocha,” Mundo Argentino, December 11, 1929, n.p., on the news of a black woman representing South America in a London parade. 46. López, “The India Bonita Contest of 1921.” See also Ruiz, “La India Bonita”; Hershfield, Imagining la chica moderna, 128–32, 159. 47. “Conversando con nuestras triunfadoras del gran concurso de belleza,” El Hogar, February 22, 1929, 8, 68; “Miss Argentina nos representará dignamente,” Noticias Gráficas, 14; “Ana Rovner, Miss Capital,” Noticias Gráficas, 11. 48. McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation, 68–69. For Jewish beauty contests, see Brodsky, “Electing ‘Miss Sefaradí’ and ‘Queen Esther.’” 49. Randall, “The Traveller’s Eye: Chinas Poblanas and European-inspired Costume”; Hershfield, Imagining la Chica Moderna, 6, 59, 150. 50. “Miss Argentina es también una entusiasta automovilista,” Crítica, August 17, 1930, 17. 51. “Resultó Miss Argentina la Srita. Basavilbaso,” Crítica, August 27, 1930, 9. A couple of weeks before the international pageant, Crítica discovered that Eugenia Vidal was married and stripped her of the title, naming another Miss Argentina. 52. “Eugenia Vidal fue elegida Miss Argentina,” Crítica, August 9, 1930, 9. 53. “Miss Córdoba ganó el concurso,” Noticias Gráficas, June 29, 1932, 10. 54. Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 146–47, 172. 55. Weinbaum et al., “The Modern Girl as Heuristic Device,” 1–24. 56. Josué Quesada, “Después del gran triunfo,” El Hogar, February 15, 1929, 8, 68, here 8. See also Josué Quesada, “Mar del Plata, la playa de todos,” El Hogar, January 18, 1929, 8, 50. 57. “Conversando con nuestras triunfadoras,” El Hogar, 8, 68. 58. “Miss Argentina nos representará dignamente,” Noticias Gráficas, 14. 59. Among others, see Delaney, “Imagining El Ser Argentino.” 60. “La reina de la belleza en su hogar: entrevista con Tulia Ciámpoli,” El Hogar, March 2, 1928, 27; “La reina de la belleza en su hogar,” El Hogar, February 22, 1929, 9, 53; “Conversando con nuestras triunfadoras,” El Hogar, 8, 68. 61. “Miss Argentina nos representará dignamente,” Noticias Gráficas, 14. 62. “Eugenia Vidal fue elegida Miss Argentina,” Crítica, 15; “Miss Argentina es también una entusiasta automovilista,” Crítica, 17. 63. “La reina de la belleza en su hogar: entrevista con Tulia Ciámpoli,” El Hogar, 27; “La reina de la belleza en su hogar,” El Hogar, 9, 53; “Conversando con nuestras triunfadoras,” El Hogar, 8, 68.

143

144

Notes to Pages 107–111

64. “Las bellezas de El Hogar en las playas,” El Hogar, February 24, 1928, 46; “Las vencedoras del Segundo Gran Concurso Nacional de Belleza de El Hogar en Mar del Plata,” El Hogar, February 15, 1929, 38–39. 65. “Conversando con nuestras triunfadoras,” El Hogar, 8; “Jamás esperó obtener el título,” Crítica, 9, 15; “Ana Rovner, Miss Capital,” Noticias Gráficas, 11; “Eugenia Vidal fue elegida Miss Argentina,” Crítica, 15; “Miss Argentina es también una entusiasta automovilista,” Crítica, 17. 66. “Miss Argentina nos representará dignamente,” Noticias Gráficas, 14. 67. “Conversando con nuestras triunfadoras,” El Hogar, 8, “La reina de la belleza en su hogar,” El Hogar, 9. 68. “Tulia Ciámpoli pudo ser farmacéutica, pero prefirió hacerse estrella,” Crítica, November 18, 1934, 16. 69. El Hogar, October 19, 1928, 60; El Hogar, March 8, 1929, 43. 70. “Eugenia Vidal fue elegida Miss Argentina,” Crítica, 15. 71. See Velmet, “Beauty and Big Business: Gender, Race and Civilizational Decline.” 72. Maurice de Waleffe, “L’exposition vue de l’étranger,” Le Dernière Heure, August 3, 1935, 1; Maurice de Waleffe, “Pourquoi Miss Egypte fut élue Miss Univers?” Le Dernière Heure, October 5, 1935, 1. 73. Grout, “Between Venus and Mercury. The 1920s Beauty Contest in France and America.” 74. “La proclamación de ‘Miss Universo 1932,’” Mundo Gráfico, August 10, 1932, 4 and Concours Mondiale de Beauté, 63. As far as my research shows, there was no non-white candidate in Miss Universe 1930. 75. “La Elección de Miss Universo,” Estampa, 3. 76. “L’élection de Miss Univers 1935. L’arrivée des candidates à Bruxelles,” L’Independence Belgue, September 25, 1935, 6. For Miss Argentina 1935, I rely on foreign newspapers as I was not able to find references to this beauty contest in La Nación or any other Argentine newspapers. 77. “Pour le titre de Miss Univers faites vos jeux . . . rien ne va plus!” L’Independence Belgue, September 26, 1935, 1. 78. “Miss Argentina parte mañana para Europa,” Noticias Gráficas, July 1, 1932, 9. 79. Earle, “Nationalism and National Dress in Spanish America.” 80. For criollismo and the gaucho phenomenon, see, among others, Prieto, El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argentina moderna; Cattaruzza and Eujanian, “Héroes patricios y gauchos rebeldes,” 217–62; Adamovsky, “La cuarta función del criollismo,” 50–92. 81. Archetti, “Gaucho, Tango, Primitivism, and Power.” 82. Marre, Mujeres Argentinas: las chinas, 257–75. For an analysis of the china representation in mass culture, see Ariza “Las otras. Presencia de lo oriental, lo afroamericano y lo indígena en la representación de mujeres.” For nativist portrays of the china, see Penhos, “Nativos en el Salón. Artes plásticas e identidad.” 83. Adamovsky, “A Strange Emblem for a (Not So) White Nation.”

Notes to Pages 114–120

Epilogue 1. Fernández, “Evita: cuerpo y política,” 106. 2. Navarro, Evita, 33–48. 3. Fraser and Navarro. Evita: The Real Life of Eva Perón, 101. 4. Fraser and Navarro, Evita, 136–37. For Evita’s fashion style, see André, “New look, melodrama y poder,” 202–13. 5. James, Doña María’s Story, 240. 6. Milanesio, Workers Go Shopping, 149–57. See also Elena, “Peronism in Good Taste.” 7. Milanesio, Workers Go Shopping, 149–57. See also Adamovsky, Historia de la clase media en Argentina; Garguin, “‘Los Argentinos Descendemos de los Barcos.’” 8. Karush, Culture of Class. See also James, Doña María’s Story, 253–60. 9. Daniel James develops this argument when analyzing the poem for Clarita written by Doña María during the Peronist era. James, Doña María’s Story, 245–47. 10. Gené, Un mundo feliz, 130–40. 11. Orbuch, “El rol del deporte en la formación de la mujer peronista”; Elsey and Nadel, Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports, 27–28. 12. Weinstein, “‘They don’t even look like women workers.’” 13. Lobato, Damilakou, and Tornay, “Working-class Beauty Queens under Peronism.” For working-class beauty contests during the 1930s, see Tossounian, “Feminidad y movilidad social en las representaciones de mujeres trabajadoras.” 14. Milanesio, “Peronists And Cabecitas. Stereotypes and Anxieties.” 15. Chamosa, “Criollo And Peronist. The Argentine Folklore Movement”; Adamovsky, “Race and Class through the Visual Culture of Peronism”; Elena, “Argentina in Black and White. Race, Peronism and the color of politics.” 16. Valeria Alcino, “Cinderella from the Pampas: Eva Perón, ícono de la Argentina,” 86–166. 17. Hershfield, Imagining la Chica Moderna, 5–7; Lotz, “Leading the Life of a Modern Girl,” 3–6.

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Index

Page numbers in italics denote illustrative material. Adamovsky, Ezequiel, 21, 31, 111 Adorno, Theodor, 6 advertising: for cosmetics, 81–82; image of modern American women in, 35–36; for overseas commodities, 27–28. See also consumer culture advice columns, 54, 56, 60–61, 66–67 Alvear, Marcelo T. de, 94 Alzúa, Mario, 79–80, 82–83 America. See U.S. popular culture Los amigos de Isidora (comic strip), 130– 31n28 Antena (magazine), 30 Aragón, Nélida Rodríguez, 107–8 Argentina: demographic change, 21–25, 87; economic growth, 19–21; historiography of national identity of, 11–12. See also national identity Arlt, Roberto, 13, 34–35, 55–56 L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (film), 30 athleticism. See physical culture and exercise; sportswomen Atlántida (magazine), 28, 34, 53 Atlántida (publishing house), 28–29, 88 authenticity, 11–12, 25, 35, 43, 49, 69–70, 80–81, 106, 111, 119–20 Ayer & Son (marketing agency), 128n58

Baker, Josephine, 70 Banner, Lois, 6–7 Barra, Emma de la, 67 Barrancos, Dora, 59 bataclanas (variety show actresses), 40, 41, 42, 69–70, 71, 118 beauty: of bataclanas, 69–70; and flapper aesthetic, 34–35, 103–5, 107–8; and physical culture, 76, 77, 79–83, 88, 90–91 beauty contestants, 94–113; American, 35; criticism of, 98–99; format of pageants, 96–98; historical overview, 94–95; and modern feminine identity, 103–8; in Peronist ideology, 116; and promotion of exercise, 88; in racial and patriotic discourses, 99–103, 108–11, 110 “La Beba: Historia de una vida inútil” (Moreno), 40–43, 42, 70 Besse, Susan, 98 Betty (comic strip), 38–39, 60 blackness, 22, 41–42, 43 bobs (hairstyle), 24, 33, 39, 53, 67, 68, 69 Bontempo, Paula, 23 Bow, Clara, 34 Bozán, Olinda, 58, 98 Bozán, Sofía, 69 Bravo, María Elena, 98 Bustos, Paquito, 98

168 Index

Campbell, Jeanette, 83, 85, 86 Caprichosa y millonaria (Santos Discépolo), 45, 47, 48, 49 Caras y Caretas (magazine), 28, 34, 35, 40, 128n64, 141n6 Carmen Goñi, Alejandrina del, 105 Carnelli, María Luisa, 65 “La casa de soltera” (Quesada), 43 Casamiento en Buenos Aires (Romero), 70–71 “Un casamiento en el gran mundo” (short story), 43–44 Cascallar, Nené, 68 catcalling, 57–58 china (the gaucho’s partner), 31, 111 Ciámpoli, Tulia, 108 Cinegraf (magazine), 34 cinema: domestic modern girls in, 45–50; emergence of, 30, 129nn74–76; popularity of Hollywood films and stars, 30, 34–35, 88 class: and beauty competitions, 97–98, 106–7; dynamics in popular culture, overview, 4–5; in flapper representations, 38, 40, 43, 45–50; middle class values, 21, 66–67, 106–7; in Peronist ideology, 116–19; and physical culture, 78–79; social climbing, 19–21, 114–15; and target audience for popular culture trends, 28–31; in working class personas, 69–73; in working women dynamics, 56, 57, 58–59, 60–61, 65, 67–69 clothing. See fashion Colbert, Claudette, 36 Conor, Liz, 4, 60, 105 consumer culture: democratizing impact of, 19–21; gendered view of, 20, 64–65; historiography, 5–8, 10–11; materialism, 38–40, 63–65, 99; of working women, 61–65. See also advertising cosmetics and makeup, 24, 33, 39, 66, 80–82, 103, 107 courtship, 53, 55–61 Crawford, Joan, 34 Crítica (newspaper), 29, 34, 36, 95, 97–101, 103–5, 128n68, 143n51 Cuban modern women, 51, 74, 119–20 Cultura Sexual y Física (magazine), 77, 128n67 culture industry theory, 6 Cunha, María Teresa, 108

dance. See tango dark skin tone, 69–70 dating, 53, 55–61 Davis, Lilia, 37–38 Delaney, Jean, 25 democratization, 19–21 demographic change, 21–25, 87 depopulation, 22, 87 dieting, 90 Dietrich, Marlene, 34 Divorcio en Montevideo (Romero), 70 Dix, Dorothy, 60, 66–67 domesticity: of beauty contestants, 107, 108, 116; domestication of joven moderna, 44–50; motherhood and maternal instinct, 21, 23, 44–45, 48, 76, 87; and transformation of family model, 21–23. See also marriage Doña María, 116 drinking and smoking, 33, 37, 78–79, 107–8 Duarte, Eva (Evita Perón), 114–15, 118, 119 Dyreson, Mark, 83 economic growth, 19–21 education, 23, 26 Ehrick, Cristine, 72 Elvira Fernández, vendedora de tiendas (Romero), 45, 47, 48–49 Enstad, Nan, 61, 62 ethnicity. See race and ethnicity eugenics, and depopulation, 22–23, 87. See also race and ethnicity European ethnicity, 23, 102–3, 108–9, 111 exercise. See physical culture and exercise; sportswomen family, modern transformation of, 21–23. See also domesticity; marriage fashion: bataclana style, 40, 41, 42, 69–70, 71, 118; and beauty competitions, 103–5; bobbed hair, 24, 33, 39, 53, 67, 68, 69; flapper aesthetic, 35, 39–40, 41, 103–5; historiography, 6–8; makeup and cosmetics, 24, 33, 39, 66, 80–82, 103, 107; and sports, 88; working women personas, 69–73, 71, 72; working women’s appearance, 65–68 Featherstone, Mike, 77 Femenil (magazine), 29, 76

Index 169

femininity. See beauty; domesticity; fashion feminist cultural studies, 5–8 feminists and feminism, 24, 98–99, 127n41 Ferreyra, Agustín, 45 film. See cinema fitness. See physical culture and exercise; sportswomen flappers, 32–52; aesthetic in beauty competitions, 103–5, 107–8; American, 34–38; critical representations of, 38–44, 42; criticizing health of, 78–79, 83; domestication of, 44–50; in Peronist ideology, 116; as term, 36 flirting, 33, 36, 53, 56, 57, 58, 60 “Flor de trapo” (tango song), 64–65 Gache, Roberto, 67 Gálvez, Manuel, 13, 25, 33 Garbo, Greta, 34, 107 gaucho culture: in bataclana style, 69–70, 71, 118; overview, 3–4; as symbol of national identity, 12, 25, 26–27, 28, 31, 111 gender: consumption practices attributed to, 20, 64–65; dating practices, 55–61; expectations of contributing earnings to household, 60–61; flappers’ impact on relations, 36–38, 40–41; masculinity, 12, 31, 34, 36, 38, 92–93, 111; motherhood and maternal instinct, 21, 23, 44–45, 48, 76, 87 El Gráfico (magazine), 29, 77, 78, 80, 87, 88, 89 Grayson, Diego, 79 Guerrico, Silvia, 57–58 Gutbrod, Anita, 83 hairstyles, 24, 33, 39, 53, 67, 68, 69 Halis, Keriman, 95 Hansen, Miriam, 10 Harrison, Lilian, 83 health culture. See physical culture and exercise; sportswomen Held, John, Jr., 130–31n28 Hernández, José, 27 Hershfield, Joanne, 51 Higiene y Salud (magazine), 77 El Hogar (magazine), 1, 28, 34, 57, 94, 95, 97, 99, 104

Hollywood films and stars, 30, 34–35, 88 Horkheimer, Max, 6 immigrants: national integration of, 20–21; population statistics, 18, 125n1, 125n6 international beauty competitions, 95, 108–11, 110 Isabelita (Romero), 45, 47 James, Daniel, 115, 145n9 Jewish ethnicity, 102 Jordán, Luis María, 39–40 joven moderna (modern girl): American influence, 34–38; as concept, 2–3; critical representations of, 38–44, 42; domestication of, 44–50. See also beauty contestants; flappers; sportswomen; working women J. Walter Thompson (marketing agency), 27, 35–36 Karush, Matthew, 21, 30, 48, 49, 116 Kellermann, Annette, 82 Kitch, Carolyn, 7 Korn, Julio, 29 Lenglen, Suzanne, 88 Linares, Joaquín, 99 Lintas (marketing agency), 128n58 literacy campaigns, 26, 28 lived experience concept, 6 Lobato, Mirta, 59 López, Ana, 10 López, Rick, 102 Lugones, Leopoldo, 25 Luna de miel en Río (Romero), 71 lunfardo (jargon), 42, 70, 131n47 makeup and cosmetics, 24, 33, 39, 66, 80–82, 103, 107 Mangacha, la dactilógrafa (comic strip), 63, 65–66 Marpons, Josefina, 44 marriage: benefits of exercise for, 80; and domestication of joven moderna, 46–47; flappers as threat to, 36–37, 40–41; and motherhood, 21, 23, 44–45, 48, 76, 87; working wives, 62–63. See also domesticity

170 Index

Marshall, Niní, 70–73, 72, 115 masculinity, 12, 31, 34, 36, 38, 92–93, 111 Masiello, Francine, 44 mass culture. See popular culture materialism, 38–40, 63–65, 99. See also consumer culture maternity legislation, 127n41 Un matrimonio como hay muchos (comic strip), 131n29 McCann Erickson (marketing agency), 27 McGee Deutsch, Sandra, 102 McRobbie, Angela, 6 Mecha y su sombra (comic strip), 38–39, 60 melting pot discourse, 23, 101–3, 111 mental health, 79 Merello, Tita, 65, 69–70, 71 mestizaje (racial mixing), 11, 95, 101–2, 111, 124n36 Mexican modern women, 51, 119–20 Mexicanness, 102 middle class values, 21, 66–67, 106–7 Miller, Nicola, 9 Miller, Rory, 20 milonguitas (female tango protagonists), 64–65, 135n57 Miss America contest, 94–95 Miss Argentina, Miss Universo (Tálice and Valentini), 98 Miss Universe contests, 95, 108–11, 110 modernity: historiography of Latin American, 9–12; in popular culture transformations, 27–31; reconciled with national identity, 25–27 modern women. See beauty contestants; flappers; joven moderna; sportswomen; working women Molina, López de, 99 Montaldo, Graciela, 62 morality: of beauty competitions, 98–99, 106–7; and exercise, 77; of flappers, 37, 40–41, 43–44; in tango lyrics, 64–65 Moreau de Justo, Alicia, 79 morena (dark-skinned singer/dancer), 11 Moreno de Dupuy de Lôme, Consuelo, 13, 40, 41, 131n34 Moss, Ellen, 7

motherhood and maternal instinct, 21, 23, 44–45, 48, 76, 87. See also domesticity Mujeres que trabajan (Romero), 70 Mundo Argentino (magazine), 28 music. See tango La Nación (newspaper), 29, 95, 109 national identity: in beauty competition discourse, 99–103, 108–11; class divisions intensified by, 30; the gaucho as symbol of, 12, 25, 26–27, 28, 31, 111; historiography of modern Latin American, 9–12; immigrant national integration, 20–21; joven moderna as incompatible with, 41, 43, 44–45, 49–50; in Peronist ideology, 118–19; in physical culture discourse, 86–90; state campaigns to mold modern, 25–27 Noticias Gráficas (newspaper), 29, 95, 98, 99–100, 101, 110 Novarro, Ramón, 107 La novela semanal (pulp fiction), 29, 128n71 Odorono advertising campaign, 27 Oliver, Manuel María, 99 Olympics, 77, 83, 86, 89 Page, Anita, 88 Para Ti (magazine), 28–29, 38–39, 56, 57, 60–61, 65, 81, 128n66 “La patotera” (short story), 43–44 patriotism. See national identity Peiss, Kathy, 7–8, 33, 61, 81 Pepsodent advertising campaign, 35 Pereira, Yolanda, 95 Pérez, Inés, 23 Pérez Leirós, Francisco, 63–64 Perón, Evita, 114–15, 118, 119 Perón, Juan D., 115 Peronism, 115–19 Petrona, Doña, 31 physical culture and exercise, 76–93; and beauty, 76, 77, 79–83, 88, 90–91; vs. cosmetics industry, 80–82; emergence as trend, 76–78; ideal body types, 69, 82–83, 88; and moderation, 90–91; and national identity, 86–90; in Peronist ideology, 117; promoted

Index

benefits of, 78–80; social conventions challenged by, 86 La Piedad (department store), 70, 71 “Pipistrela” (tango song), 65 piropos (catcalls), 57–58 Pite, Rebekah, 23, 31 Plus Ultra (magazine), 29 Pond’s advertising campaign, 27 popular culture: agency and intent in production of, 13–14; construction of modern Argentine identity, overview, 27–31; historiography, 5–8, 10–11. See also U.S. popular culture population decline, 22, 87 publishing industry, modern transformation of, 27–29 Puente Alsina (Ferreyra), 45, 47, 49 Queirolo, Graciela, 54 Quesada, Josué, 43, 68, 98, 106 Quiroga, Rosita, 69 race and ethnicity: in Argentine national identity, 11, 23; in beauty competition discourse, 99–103, 108–11; blackness, 22, 41–42, 43; in depopulation discourse, 22–23, 87; in flapper representations, 41–42, 43; mestizaje, 11, 95, 101–2, 111, 124n36; in Peronist ideology, 118–19; whiteness, 23, 101–3, 111, 118–19 radio, emergence of, 29–30 Radiolandia (magazine), 30 Radio Nacional (later Radio Belgrano), 29–30 Rapp, Rayna, 7 Rey, Manuel, 37 Roberts, Mary Louise, 8 Rocchi, Fernando, 19, 20 Rodríguez, Hortensia, 84 Rojas, Ricardo, 25 Romero, Alberto, 21 Romero, Manuel, 45, 70–71 Rovner, Ana, 100, 101, 102 La rubia del camino (Romero), 45, 46, 47, 48, 49–50 salaries, 19, 61–63, 125n10 Salvatore, Ricardo, 28

Santos Discépolo, Enrique, 45 “Satanás” (Marpons), 44 Schwarz de Morgenroth, Ruth, 88, 91 “Se va la vida” (tango song), 65 sexuality: of flappers, 37, 43–44; of sportswomen, 83, 86; in workplace, 58–59 Sidney, Sylvia, 36 Singerman, Paulina, 45, 46 Sluis, Ageeth, 69 smoking and drinking, 33, 37, 78–79, 107–8 social class. See class sportswomen: contribution to national identity, 86–90; ideal body types of, 83, 88; moderation advised for, 90–91; social conventions challenged by, 86. See also physical culture and exercise Storni, Alfonsina, 67, 68–69, 135n73 Suárez, Justo, 98 suffrage, 24 swimming, 83, 88, 89 Tálice, Roberto, 98 tango: emergence of, 29; female representations in lyrics, 64–65, 135n57; flappers associated with, 40, 41–43, 118 “De tardecita” (tango song), 64 Tassi, Olga, 86 tennis, 80 Thomas, Lynn, 8, 97 Tillie the Toiler (comic strip), 59–60, 65 Tiraboschi, Enrique, 90 Torterolo, Blanca, 83, 86 Torterolo, Clotilde, 86 track and field, 89 Última Hora (newspaper), 29 U.S. popular culture: advertising in Argentina, 27–28, 35–36; American flappers, 34–38; health and fitness, 88–90; Hollywood films and stars, 30, 34–35, 88; positive views of, 48 Valentini, Raúl, 98 Valle, Amanda del, 80–81, 82 Vélez, Lupe, 36 Venus de Milo, 82 Vida Femenina (journal), 98–99

171

172

Index

Vidal, Eugenia, 100, 103, 107, 143n51 Viladrich, Anahí, 64 Viva Cien Años (magazine), 77, 128n67 Voight, Charles A., 38 Vosotras (magazine), 29 voting rights, 24 wages, 19, 61–63, 125n10 Waleffe, Maurice de, 95, 108–9 Wassef, Charlotte, 95 Weinstein, Barbara, 117 Westover, Russ, 59

whiteness, 23, 101–3, 111, 118–19 women’s rights, 24, 127n39, 127n41 working women, 53–75; appearance of, 65–68; dating practices, 55–61; maternity legislation, 127n41; occupations, 23, 126n36; in Peronist ideology, 117–18; personas of, 69–73, 71, 72; salaries and spending practices, 61–65 Yo quiero ser bataclana (Romero), 71 Yrigoyen, Hipólito, 97 Zimmermann, Eduardo, 22

Cecilia Tossounian is a researcher at Argentina’s Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and at Universidad de San Andrés. Her work focuses on gender studies, modern Argentine history, nationalism, and consumer culture. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the European University Institute and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Free University of Berlin. She has published articles in journals including Gender & History and the Journal of Latin American Studies and chapters in books such as Consuming Modernity: Changing Gendered Behaviours and Consumerism before the Baby Boom, in addition to coediting the book América Latina entre espacios: Redes, flujos e imaginarios globales.