page_title: Feminism in Argentina
section_title: First-wave
hierarchical_section_title: Feminism in Argentina / History / First-wave
caption_attribution_description: Español: "Julieta Lanteri - primera mujer que logró votar en Argentina y América Latina, quinta mujer en recibirse de médica, fundadora y candidata por el Partido Feminista Nacional -, llegando a los comicios para depositar su voto, 1911."
context_page_description: Feminism in Argentina is a set of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women in Argentina. Although some women have been considered precursors—among them Juana Manso and Juana Manuela Gorriti—feminism was introduced to the country as a result of the great European immigration wave that took place in the late 19th and early 20th century. The first feminists did not form a unified movement, but included anarchist and socialist activists, who incorporated women's issues into their revolutionary program, and prestigious freethinker women, who initially fought for access to higher education and, later, legal equality with men. Despite the efforts of the first-wave feminists, Argentine women did not acquire the right to vote until 1947, during Juan Perón's first government. His highly popular wife, Eva, championed women's suffrage and founded and ran the nation's first large-scale female political party, the Female Peronist Party. Although she refused to identify herself as a feminist, Eva Perón is valued for having redefined the role of women in politics.
context_section_description: Feminism in the country emerged at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, during the consolidation of the modern Argentine State. There was not a homogenous feminist movement, rather individual struggles carried out by women inserted in diverse political identities and different social classes. Women from the upper and upper middle class made important advances in the public space, although they did it fundamentally from the academic field. Working class women were organized under socialism and anarchism. A group of anarchist women headed by Virginia Bolten founded La Voz de la Mujer in 1896, the first feminist newspaper in Argentina. It defined itself as anarcho-communist and was released under the motto "No God, no master, no husband". As one of the first recorded instances in Latin America of the fusion of feminist ideas with a revolutionary and working class orientation, La Voz de la Mujer differed from the feminism found elsewhere in the region at that time, which focused on educated middle-class women and their concerns. By the end of the 19th century, these anarchists raised issues as free love, divorce and allegations of domestic violence, which would gain public prominence decades later.
  From the turn of the century on, a different variant of feminism emerged, that of the Socialist Party, with women such as  Cecilia Grierson, Alicia Moreau de Justo and Juana Rouco Buela; who "launched the struggle for equal rights, better educational opportunities, and reform of the civil code, and in so doing they radically redefined the politics, strategy, and terrain of feminist struggle." The first feminists of the country, both the reformists as well as the suffragettes and even those of more extreme positions, believed in a "maternal, morally superior, and pacifist feminine nature." Mayra Leciñana of Clarín wrote that "the theoretical alliances with socialism and the positivism of the moment enable a utopian bias that gives thickness to their demands and allows the production of new meanings for 'the new woman'." A "transcendental" figure in the history of Argentine feminism, Elvira López became one of the first women to graduate from the University of Buenos Aires' School of Philosophy and Philology. Her thesis, written in 1901 and titled "The feminist movement" (Spanish: "El movimiento feminista"), is considered a local landmark and meant the issue's entry into the Argentine academic field.
  In 1904, Julieta Lanteri, Cecilia Grierson, Sara Justo, Elvira Rawson de Dellepiane and sisters Ernestina and Elvira López created the Asociación de Mujeres Universitarias Argentinas (English: Association of Argentine University Women), whose positions were identified with those of the so-called "moderate feminism". On the occasion of the Argentina Centennial of 1910 and on the initiative of Lanteri, this association organized the First International Women's Congress (Spanish: Primer Congreso Femenino Internacional) in order to bring the situation of women and their rights to public debate. The association was then chaired by Petrona Eyle, and the organizing committee for the Congress counted among its members with distinguished professionals and activists such as Lanteri, Justo, Grierson, Irma Vertúa, Ada María Elflein, Moreau de Justo, Fenia Chertkoff, doctors Leonor and María Teresa Martínez Bisso, among others.
  On February 16, 1906, Rawson de Dellepiane founded the Feminist Center (Spanish: Centro Feminista) in Buenos Aires, joined by a group of prestigious women.
caption: Feminist activist Julieta Lanteri becoming the first Latin American woman to vote in 1911.
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