Voces femeninas de la América decimonónica: Juana Manuela Gorriti, Soledad Acosta de Samper y Joséphine Marchand-Dandurand en sus diarios íntimos y publicaciones periódicas

The nineteenth century is a key period in the history of Western women. This is when a public female consciousness emerges for the first time and an incipient feminism can be observed. In this context, it is important to study how certain female public figures positioned themselves in their respective societies. During this period two genres of writing, journalism and the personal diary, were at their height, and allowed women to take the floor and enter the public sphere. These forms of writing can be regarded as discursive spaces arising from social conflicts and tensions, but they are also the product of an individual who comments daily, weekly or monthly on current events. The woman writer reconstructs events and facts from the past, and reveals her personal observations and opinions on various subjects. She also uses her own experiences and knowledge to cast doubt on normative institutional discourses. Journalistic and personal writing bear witness to the pluralistic worldview of these female intellectuals and to their participation in contemporary historical developments; hence the interest in studying them comparatively in this investigation. The main objective of this dissertation is to analyse, through the study of their journalism and diaries, the work of three female writers from the Americas—the Argentinian Juana Manuela Gorriti, the Colombian Soledad Acosta de Samper, and the Quebecer Joséphine Marchand-Dandurand—whose voices have been silenced by patriarchal culture. Fundamentally, this thesis asks to what extent their writing is inscribed in a collective project related to the advancement of women and the nation. This investigation’s hypothesis is that the authors develop and share a critique of both the situation of women and the nation, as well as calling for women's recognition. Starting from the basis that women's invisibility is universal, and that women were not recognised as subjects in nineteenth-century society, the study deploys the Foucault’s theory of genealogy, adding the gender variable, in order to rescue the traces of a counter-memory in the texts selected and to value the contributions of the authors. The analysis explores the dialogue between the discourse of women writers and male hegemony, restoring the social content of an ideological nature, pointing out the functions provided by the texts analyzed and carefully examining the contexts of their production, as well as the biographical experiences of the writers and their intellectual contributions. Even though Gorriti, Acosta de Samper and Marchand-Dandurand come from different cultures and epochs, the objective is to define the similarities in their personal and journalistic writing on both a thematic and strategic levels. This exercise allows us to verify if these female intellectuals expressed the same ideas in both public and private spheres with the same enunciative strategies; if there is continuity or rupture between autobiographical writings and public essays, which legitimize their worldview. At the same time, the study examines if there is any correspondence between the authorial self of the intimate writings and that of the periodical publications.

Keyphrases: Juana Manuela Gorriti, Soledad Acosta de Samper, Joséphine Marchand-Dandurand, Femmes actives, Diary, Press, Active women, Worldview, Public sphere, Discursive strategies