Hispanic Research Journal

Iberian and Latin American Studies

ISSN: 1468-2737 (Print) 1745-820X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yhrj20

Spanish American Women, 1790–1850: The

Challenge of Remembering

Asunción Lavrin

To cite this article: Asunción Lavrin (2006) Spanish American Women, 1790–1850: The Challenge
of Remembering, Hispanic Research Journal, 7:1, 71-84, DOI: 10.1179/174582006X86049

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1179/174582006X86049

Published online: 18 Jul 2013.

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Hispanic Research Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1, March 2006, 71–84

Spanish American Women, 1790–1850:

The Challenge of Remembering
Asunción Lavrin
Arizona State University, Tempe

This article will survey the contribution made by the most recent historiography on Spanish
American women in the period 1790 to 1850 and, in the light of this, examine two works written
by women in the 1840s that represent self-perception and the social expectations of women in that
decade. These are the diaries written by María Martínez de Nisser, from what today is Colombia,
and Agustina Palacio de Libarona, from Argentina. These texts provide insight into the thoughts
and motivations of men and women caught up in the political struggles of the first half of the
nineteenth century.

‘Sólo el que trabaja por el bien jeneral de la patria, debe esperar protección del cielo’
(Martínez de Nisser 1983: 82).1 This sentence, which could have been uttered by any of
the male leaders of the Wars of Independence in South America, was written by María
Martínez Nisser, an obscure woman from the small town of Sonsón in Antioquia Prov-
ince, New Granada (Colombia). María Martínez (see Fig. 1) became the official historian
of some of the events of a civil war carried out in the early 1840s in Antioquia between
the constitutional government in Bogotá and provincial caudillos, known as los supremos,
whose prestige dated to the Wars of Independence. The fact that María Martínez wrote
a historical opus is most unusual for the period and for the newly minted republic of
Colombia. Across Spanish America the first uncertain decades of the republican period
featured men constantly engaged in struggles for power. It was a world dominated
largely by a masculinist logic and masculine constructions of self, nation, and culture.
Women had little incentive to express themselves in writing and even less to participate
in events of a political nature. Thus, the writing of historical accounts by women was a
most unlikely endeavour. In this article I will examine the writings of two women who
achieved local and eventually national notoriety for contravening the usual expectations
of their contemporaries.
A review of the years 1790 to 1850 shows that in the last decades of the eighteenth
century women had only just begun to receive attention from the policy makers in
Madrid and the vice-regal capitals. The two key reasons for this attention were their eco-
nomic potential as workers in nascent industries, and the need for their education. Both
assumptions contained potentially disruptive consequences for family life and gender

1 I have kept the original spelling.

Address correspondence to Professor Asunción Lavrin, Department of History, Arizona State

University, Tempe, AZ 85287-4302, USA.

© Queen Mary, University of London, 2006 DOI: 10.1179/174582006X86049

72 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL, 7.1, MARCH 2006

Figure 1. María Martínez de Nisser (1812–1872). (Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango del Banco
de la Républica de Colombia)
LAVRIN: SPANISH AMERICAN WOMEN 73
relations. Those writing on these topics tried to show how education was also a guaran-
tee of more harmonious families. Educated women would make their homes centres of
rational happiness and comfort for their husbands and their children. If their homes were
bereft of their male heads, women with working abilities could sustain them with honour
and responsibility and the State would not have to take charge of impoverished families.
Indeed, by 1790 some industries such as tobacco manufacturing were already hiring
women (Rodríguez Pero 1978, Fernández de Lizardi 1967, González Vigil 1976). Most
ideas about what women should or should not do, came from men’s minds and pens. To
be sure, there were a few educational works written by women, but there was nothing
untoward or unsettling in those writings about the nature of gender relations and place
of each sex in society and the family (Amar y Borbón 1790).
The Wars of Independence allowed some women an unexpected outlet for the expres-
sion of vigorous sentiments that had been tamed by propriety. Wars were masculine
events, and women who ventured into the political and military terrain during the years
of war were invading men’s space and, for all intents and purposes, were considered
super-females, closer to masculine or virile models than to feminine models. Some of
these women actually fought on the battlefield. Others held strong political convictions
that led them to support activities such as spying or gathering support for the troops.
Male patriots were willing to allow such outbursts of patriotic passion in women in such
periods of crisis because they served a just and ennobling cause. The behaviour of these
women heroes has remained the staple of national histories (Anon. 1972, Pérez 2003,
Wexler 2002). However, the shapers of the new nations had few ideas about what to
do with these heroic women after independence. As it happened, the first generation of
republican women would have nationality but no citizenship. Their political participa-
tion was precluded on account of their sex. Élite men’s control of society followed an
uninterrupted course between 1830 and 1850. They remained the legally acknowledged
pater familias at home, and exercised moral and political authority over other men and
most women as legislators and educators. There was great pressure for them to fulfil
their moral obligations and uphold the discourse over virginity, honour and marriage.
However, class differences and social pressure generated different perceptions of gender
behaviour. Recent historical research shows that gender construction was not solely
limited to the domain of the written words of educators, lawyers or published persons,
but also evident in the words and behaviour of the common people. Among these,
women tentatively voiced their concerns, taking advantage of the concept of citizenship,
as proposed by Arlene Díaz (2004), and struggling in their own many ways to carve
some form of independence within the boundaries of their allotted spaces. They had a
difficult but not insurmountable task ahead because this was a period of change and
contradictions.
The increasing, albeit slow, secularization of all Latin American nations began a
tendency towards a less rigid approach to gender relations and the beginnings of the
elaboration a new code of republican conduct. This may not have been substantially
different from that of the Old Regime, but it did reflect the new nations’ desire for laws
of their own making, a goal that was achieved as the new civil and penal codes began to
be formulated from mid-century onwards. Even in countries where secularization in the
second half of the century would not affect the tenets of family law, the education of
women would begin to create a base for changing attitudes about gender roles within the
family and society.
A multiplicity of scenarios should be envisaged between 1810 and 1850 in order to
imagine the experience of the women whom we have begun to encounter in historical
74 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL, 7.1, MARCH 2006
research. There are women of all types: women living in quiet homes or in nunneries,
secure places where they followed expected pattern of behaviour; there were others who
refused to follow traditional expectations and challenged society with their daring,
unpredictable conduct. Well-known women of this calibre in republican nineteenth-
century Spanish America included Mariquita Sánchez, Manuelita Sáenz, Marietta
Veintemilla, Francisca Zubiaga de Gamarra, Elisa Lynch and Manuelita Rosas, among
many others, who are still regarded as exceptional (Arciniegas 1961, Mármol 2001, Sáenz
de Quesada 1995, Valle-Arizpe 1960, Valdelomar 1915). On the other hand, there were a
greater number of women of humbler social extraction and with no social or political
leverage who lived ordinary lives, earning a living as domestics or market women,
toiling at home to make ends meet, sometimes fighting abusive husbands or masters,
or contrariwise, escaping beyond their radius of power as single mothers. The new
historiography questions the public representation of womanhood and manhood, and
searches for deeper meanings in men and women’s social and personal conduct. Even in
the midst of military conflict or the tumultuous years of early nation building, people
had to go to the market, work for a living, marry, bear children, struggle for an education
or a job, and suffer diseases and political regimes with the same kind of stoic acceptance.
The result of new investigations encourages us to continue searching for the complexities
of gender relations in the spaces of personal histories, as examples of a universe that
may still bear the imprint of the values of the times (Ibarra 1995: 99–120, Arrom 1985,
Chambers 1999, González & Jefferson 1996, Hunefeldt 1994, 2000, Helg 2004, Dore &
Molyneux 2000, Rodríguez Sáenz 2000, Díaz 2004).
I turn now to my own exploration of two relatively unknown narratives of the 1840s
with which I hope to contribute to the ongoing analysis of the challenges to gender
representation and gender enactment posed by the transition from colony to nation. The
authors are two women living unexceptional lives interrupted by events that they trans-
lated into writing, a decision that makes it possible for us to revisit them today. Writing
by women in the early nineteenth century is exceptional, albeit not a rarity. Most of the
female writers belonged to an educated élite, though not necessarily a wealthy one.
These two women writers were members of an emerging urban middle class in which
education played an important part in the conscious effort to achieve a place of distinc-
tion in the community through the liberal professions. Women in such families benefited
from their parents’ choice to allow them to partake of the educational prerogative
previously conceded only to men. In that sense this was a liberal choice that gave a new
character to the nineteenth century. The first of these writings is the diary of María
Martínez de Nisser, written between 1840 and 1841. The second is another personal
history, a testimonial covering several months in almost the same period of time, by
Agustina Palacio de Liberona, another provincial woman living in the remote area of
Santiago del Estero in Argentina. The act of writing is itself the first evidence of a new
consciousness that personal experience had a value transcending the individual. This
was a new concept for women, and these two samples are among a small but significant
early generation of female writers awaiting further scrutiny by historians. Both women
were involved in the political struggle that characterized the history of these two regions.
Unlike the independence heroines, their activities were not planned as acts of political
challenge. They resulted from actions against their husbands, to which they responded in
a partially traditional manner although, paradoxically, creating new paradigms for their
respective societies.
LAVRIN: SPANISH AMERICAN WOMEN 75
Reputed to be the first book published by a woman in republican Colombia, María
Martínez’s Diario de los sucesos de la revolución en la provincia de Antioquia en los años de
1840–1841 is an unusual literary and historical document. A woman as the centrepiece of
a historical narrative in 1840, and a military narrative at that, did not conform to con-
temporary expectations. While the memories of the women heroes of the Wars of Inde-
pendence across Spanish America were fading by 1840, they still remained as models for
the likes of María Martínez, allowing her to become involved politically without raising
too many eyebrows. Her life, not her writings, reminded her contemporaries of historical
figures already in the process of becoming legends. Her re-enactment of those memories
found general applause and prolonged the mythical representation of the super-women
of the previous generation.
María Martínez is both heroine and wife; she was an educated married woman who
recreated the experience of the women living during the Wars of Independence. Pedro
Nisser, her husband, is well known to economic historians as a Swedish engineer,
committed to the development of Antioquia mines. At the age of thirty, in pursuit of his
interests, he passed through the small town of Sonsón, and met seventeen-year-old
María. Theirs was an apparently fast romantic engagement, with marriage following
soon, in the early 1830s. Like other women of her generation, she retained a vivid
memory of Simón Bolívar and others who forged the independence of her country. In
1841, when she finished the diary of her participation in the civil wars that took place in
Antioquia between 1840 and 1841, she was twenty-eight years old and had been married
for ten years. Civil war was caused by the revolt of Salvador Córdova and los supremos
seeking to unseat President José Ignacio de Márquez. Personalism and regionalism
remained key elements in the politics of a country of small cities and a weak central gov-
ernment (Sanders 2004, Jaramillo Castillo 1996). The political ambitions of departmental
governors, the constitutional weakness of the President, and the suppression of monas-
teries in Pasto, combined to ignite a civil war. María Martínez and her family belonged to
the provincial élite and supported the elected government. They strongly believed in the
sanctity of the law and the Constitution. The educated élite in many Latin American
countries hoped that respect for the law could sustain what Martínez refers to as a ‘social
order’ to guarantee their country’s peaceful evolution. What might her contribution be in
the case of a rebellion against the established constitutional order?
Martínez’s diary covers seven months between 11 October 1840 and 16 May 1841.
The province of Antioquia was torn by the rebellion and towns were taken and lost by
so-called armies, sometimes no more than a ragged contingent of volunteers and rapidly
trained men with a limited number of firearms. Hardly any help was offered from
Bogotá to those defending the constitutional government. Towns were left to their own
devices and the wherewithal of their leading citizens.
Martínez’s political acumen was based on a solid education, including Roman history,
and she read French. Her diary indicates how even in provincial towns there were
educated women who, despite their conventional lives, were capable of understanding
politics and public affairs. She wrote entries in her diary every day or two, analysed the
events thoughtfully, and expressed her own feelings and opinions in great detail and a
sprightly style. She recorded details with the accuracy of someone who had participated
in all the meetings organized by the defenders of constitutionalism, and who knew about
their military and political plans (Martínez de Nisser 1983: 10, 26, 27, 35, 37, 41–42,
47–48). The men who led the defence of the constitutional government in Sonsón did not
exclude her. Did she have a voice in those meetings? Was anything expected of her? This
76 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL, 7.1, MARCH 2006
is not apparent from the outset, but it apparently did not worry her. She wrote in the first
person plural, as if she belonged in the group, and it is obvious that she was deeply
involved in the politics of her town and province. In fact she was known to the rebels
as an active and perhaps even dangerous civilian (Martínez de Nisser 1983: 35). Her
convictions show that she had a mature sense of civics. For her,
La libertad, este bien inevitable de la naturaleza y la sociedad, es una prerrogativa que
se debe recobrar a cualesquiera precio que sea, sin omitir sacrificio alguno; i no hai vida
que yo no espusiera, por ver restablecido el órden público, i levantados altares a la
constitución. (Martínez de Nisser 1983: 45)
She believed in the ‘sanctity of institutions’ and in times of doubt she meditated on the
reasons that men had to support the cause and impelled them to fight. She concluded
that
cada uno tenía un objeto amado a quien defender, i que como habían recibido menos
cuidados en su educación, relucía en sus pechos el escudo de la moral, único i principal
resorte que los había movido a presentarse en defensa de un gobierno que aprecian, por
el título de su lejitimidad. (Martínez de Nisser 1983: 62)
Her aspiration was to see ‘la restitución del órden público, a que imperen la constitución
y las leyes, i no la arbitrariedad ni los caprichos de los hombres, i que proteja los
derechos de los granadinos’ (Martínez de Nisser 1983: 39). Not everything was perfect in
Colombia, but she thought that,
si este sistema establecido por la razón para vivir en sociedad tuviese sus defectos, que
debe mejorarse para mejorar de esta manera nuestra situación política, que siempre deseo
se le considere separadamente de todo lo que se pueda llamar individualidad. (Martínez
de Nisser 1983: 39)
In other words, the rule of personalities had no place in the social order she envisioned.
We can see here echoes of the Enlightenment and the political construct of the men of
Bolívar’s generation, which women like her shared and understood. Declaring she knew
little about politics, a statement belied by her own activities, she reasoned that a legiti-
mately established government was always better than civil war, because the latter broke
the social pact ‘formed by the will of the people legally represented’ (Martínez de Nisser
1983: 21). Yet women of Martínez’s education were denied political rights for another 136
years.
After sharing the vicissitudes of local warfare, her husband was taken as a hostage and
then imprisoned by the Antioquian rebels. At that point Martínez joined the battalion
that was seeking the final battle to return the province to freedom. Dressed as a man she
participated in the battalion’s march and was present at Salamina on 5 May 1841, the
battle that decided the struggle in favour of the Constitutionalists. Although not allowed
to fight, she was close to the line of fire and willing to use her lance if she was forced
to defend herself from the enemy. After the victory, she rejoined her husband and they
returned to Sonsón to share the general celebrations. She was commended by the central
government and encouraged to publish the diary she had kept throughout the civil war.
It is apparent that nobody else had thought of keeping a record of the conflict, and her
diary would serve as the basis of a public record. She went ahead and wrote the history
of the events, dedicating it to the soldiers and commenting on the reasons why they
should preserve the memory of their actions. Thus, she became their historian.
Pedro Nisser accepted without reservations his wife’s close involvement in the politics
of Antioquia, perhaps lacking the inhibitions and prejudices of Colombians. They were
LAVRIN: SPANISH AMERICAN WOMEN 77
apparently a happily married couple and he did nothing to dissuade her from her opin-
ions, which must have been voiced in the same fashion as they were written. She was no
ordinary woman, and he must have known it. Thus, after once refusing to allow her to
accompany him in one of his nocturnal forays, he relented and promised her she would
accompany them in a plot to take over the enemy military post in town. She recorded
their dialogue agreeing to her participation in that event:
‘Pues yo espero que UU. tengan a bien que los acompañe, para tener el gusto de ayudar a
asegurar a nuestros supremos.’ Entonces se sonrió creyendo que era chanza; pero viendo
que estaba resuelta me dijo: ‘aunque U. se espone, permitiré que nos acompañe’. (Martínez
de Nisser 1983: 37)

The plan was aborted, however, and she had no chance to share in the attack. This
exchange illustrates etiquette among married couples in 1840: she must ask his permis-
sion; he must give it.
After her husband was removed from town, Martínez could not adopt the traditional
behaviour of a suffering wife at home. She entertained the thought of travelling to
Rionegro, where her husband was imprisoned, to keep him company, but she concluded
that such an action would be useless for her husband and country. She would rather
fight to contribute to the freedom of the motherland. She decided to join the army that
was heading towards a confrontation with the enemy commander, and to dress up as
man to be able to do so. She was persuaded that her example would strengthen the
resolve of those willing to fight for the constitutional government. This was an uncom-
mon decision but not without precedent, thanks to the women who had joined the pro-
independence armies. On the verge of following their example, Martínez balanced the
old and the new. Traditional social values such as a woman’s honour were still strong
enough to be considered a deterrent to their action in public places. She consulted a
trusted male friend before confronting her family with her decision. He advised that her
decision was heroic but dangerous. Her main concern, however, was not the danger but
whether her decision would damage her honour; that would be her only deterrent, inso-
far as her dishonour would also extend to her family. Her male friend reassured her that
her plan was not dishonourable. On the contrary, it was virtuous, but he advised her to
seek her father’s consent (Martínez de Nisser 1983: 49). This exchange underlines the
patriarchal nature of gender relationships. Still assessing her decision, when she went to
her parent’s home, she first sought and received her mother’s consent. At first, her father
opposed her plan, arguing her poor health, which he claimed would not sustain the
physical strain involved in being a member of the troops. However, with the persuasive
help of a patriotic male friend, he acceded to her request. Braulio, one of her brothers,
and the next in the male hierarchy, opposed her decision, but in view of her tenacity he
also relented. In fact, her two brothers and her father accompanied her on her horse ride
to the camp and delivered her to Major Henao, the military commander. This demon-
strates that women with a strong resolve could have their way, and this was also the case
of Agustina de Libarona, discussed below.
Martínez’s story reveals contradictory values. After being accompanied and delivered
to the army she was welcomed by the soldiers, to whom she gave an impassioned speech
explaining that her presence was due to her love for the motherland and her husband.
Major Henao, with tears in his eyes, praised her heroism. He addressed his troops and
used Martínez as a feminine emblem and a rallying point:
78 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL, 7.1, MARCH 2006
‘Mirad a esta señora, dijo, en un traje ajeno de su sexo, que pide una lanza i está resuelta
a acompañarnos en nuestras fatigas. El triunfo es nuestro. Viva nuestra justa causa! Vivan
las leyes! Viva la heroina que nos acompaña!’ (Martínez de Nisser 1983: 50)
A woman cross-dressing as a soldier recalls the seventeenth-century Lieutenant Nun, but
in 1840 cross-dressing had gained a new purchase.2 Women fighters using male uniforms
during the wars of independence validated Martínez’s desire to become a soldier, despite
it being considered unnatural for a woman to wear men’s clothing. What made it accept-
able was a new sentiment: patriotism. Martínez came to symbolize liberty, law and the
just cause encapsulated in a female body. She was a virtual banner for the troops. Having
her as an emblem the men felt secure in their convictions and the meaning of her pres-
ence among the troops was recognized by the enemy. The rebel commander promised to
capture her alive so that she could witness her husband and brother’s death. In this story,
and in the one to be discussed, gallant men honour a woman’s body and a woman’s
wishes, even though they may be using them for their own purposes. Ungentlemanly
villains denigrate women, in flesh or in spirit.
Martínez did not disappoint the troops; she shared all the discomfort of travelling with
them in heavy rains on poor roads. At one point, under the stress of the march she was
advised to return. She took offence if the belief was that because she was a woman she
was unable to be firm in her resolutions; she stated that she possessed sufficient valour
to face all dangers and to withstand the same fatigues as everybody else (Martínez de
Nisser 1983: 52). Here is evidence of the self-assurance of women of that period. Martínez
provides an excellent example of the many ways women broke through the boundaries
that society marked out for them, either in daily life or, as in this case, in the battlefield.
This diary points to women emerging as protagonists of the nation’s history before
mid-century. Because Nisser, the husband, is not the narrator, he appears as a loved
object about whom Martínez worried for a good part of the narrative while he was a
prisoner. He is not the centrepiece of the diary. Its central themes are the war, the reasons
for war, and the belief that only by respecting the law could one love the motherland, all
of which sustained Martínez’s convictions and patriotism. After the war was over, we
find her addressing the issue of memory and how remembering the sacrifice of those
upholding the elected government might serve New Granada. For years, she wrote, the
nation had suffered the worst plague it could endure: the disrespect for the lawful gov-
ernment. Thus, the memory of how a group of valiant men had fought for the restoration
of public order should help establish the difference between the splendour of virtues
shown by some men, and the iniquity of those whose only principle was their pride and
their self interest. There were no middle options: it was the bad against the good, and
María Martínez offered her writing to the memory of the good.
She wrote immersed in the diminutio principle that still lingered in women’s writing as
part of the colonial intellectual inheritance. In dedicating her diary to the senators and
deputies of her country, she begged their indulgence, given her lack of writing skills, and
shielded herself behind the thought that she had simply done what was her duty. She
quoted Simón Bolívar: ‘ningún esfuerzo por la patria es sacrificio, solo se cumple con una

2 The Monja Alférez was Catalina de Erauso, a seventeenth-century Spanish woman who at the age
of fifteen escaped from a convent dressed as a man and lived an adventurous life in the Viceroyalty of
Peru serving the Crown as a second lieutenant in the Araucanian wars in Chile. She obtained papal
permission to dress as a man although she had to disclose she was a woman. See Valbona 1992.
LAVRIN: SPANISH AMERICAN WOMEN 79
lei natural’ (‘A los Honorables Senadores i Representantes’, Martínez de Nisser 1983:
n.p.). Here is a clue that provides some explanation of why many women like María
Martínez disappeared from the historical scene. They were imbued with the concept of
self-sacrifice as a noble gesture that required no compensation. They were taught that in
fixing one’s eyes on the heights of morality and the example of great men, one should
forget oneself. While assuming a protagonist’s role, they were not yet fully secure in their
right to do so. Fortunately, convinced of their cause, they spoke openly, forgetting their
inhibitions, which only came afterwards.
María Martínez was not a woman of letters. While bright and expressive in her writ-
ing, she was a provincial matrona, still living in a world in which her bold actions, while
recognized as noble, were assumed to shine best in moments of danger but to be tamed
and confined to the protection of home and husband in times of calm and normality.
She did just that, after enjoying her brief encounter with historical fame. In Colombia
it would be many years before women would assert themselves beyond the realm of
their families. They could act with resolve if love and duty called them, but they were
also willing to be satisfied with the verbal expression of admiration of the men of their
generation.
As a comparison with this narrative, I will briefly address the story of the so-called
heroina del Bracho, Agustina Palacio de Libarona, which was first published in various
newspapers, then as part of the travel memoirs of Benjamin Poucel in 1856, and later in
book editions, printed in 1925 and 1946 in Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile respec-
tively. This work is well known by historians of women in Argentina and has generated
several studies, the most recent published by Mary Berg in a book on women’s testimo-
nials (Berg 2004) and by Laura Demaria (Demaria 2004). In September 1840, the province
of Santiago del Estero in northern Argentina was shaken by an attempt to unseat Felipe
Ibarra, its governor for twenty years. Ibarra was a gaucho-style caudillo who ruled the
province as his property and enjoyed the favour of the Federalist governor of Buenos
Aires, Juan Manuel de Rosas (Sarmiento 1976). The rebels succeeded temporarily and,
once Ibarra left town, they wrote a statement demanding the election of a new governor.
Assisting, albeit reluctantly, in the writing of their proclamation was José María de
Libarona, husband of Agustina Palacio. The coup failed when Ibarra returned to the city
and captured all those involved in it, putting some of the leaders to death. Libarona was
among those whose lives were spared but who were punished with protracted and cruel
imprisonment. He remained in the hands of a roving gauchesque armed band for several
months, dragged by Ibarra’s troops in their meandering through the remote and isolated
northern lands of el Bracho. El Bracho was still the domain of rebellious Indians whose
raids were feared by all. Exposing the hapless prisoners to them, as well as giving them
no humanitarian treatment was a form of slow death.
What is Agustina Palacio’s role in this story? She was caught up in the military coup
as the innocent wife of a man involved in a risky political manoeuvre. Despite her fears,
after she learned of her husband’s imprisonment, she insisted on accompanying him for
the duration of his ordeal, leaving her young daughters behind. His physical resistance
failed and he contracted a mysterious disease that drove him insane and made him
unable to recognize his own wife. She kept him company until the end. He died in
February 1841 and after his death she managed to return to Santiago del Estero to her
parents’ home and her children. After she recovered from her own ordeal following the
troops and taking care of her husband, she dictated her memoirs to traveller Benjamin
Poucel (1807–1872).
80 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL, 7.1, MARCH 2006
Palacio was sixteen and barely out of childhood when she married. When these events
took place, she was eighteen and already had two daughters, one of them recently born
and nursing. The narrative, like that of María Martínez, begins abruptly as the revolt
takes place. There is the briefest attempt to frame it within the political situation of
the province. Palacio, much younger than Martínez at the time of her experience, could
not have had more than an elementary education and was certainly not as well read as
Martínez. She dictated her story to Poucel, who must have carried out the task of polish-
ing it and converting it into a publishable narrative. There is no comparison between the
two women in terms of their abilities to write, but the interest of this analysis resides in
their behaviour once they were confronted with their husbands’ incarceration. Initially,
Palacio was terrified by the entrance of the troops into town. When she first hid in her
own house, she left her infant daughters alone. Then she escaped her home to hide in
a church, and although taking her nursing daughter with her, she left her there under
the protection of several people when she learned of her husband’s imprisonment. This
was a sobering moment. From then on, her determination was fixed on one objective, to
protect and console her husband, even at the cost of abandoning her children. Martínez
had similar thoughts of leaving her home to accompany her husband, but instead she
took up arms against the rebels.
Palacio’s decision to follow her husband was not lightly taken. She begged Ibarra
for his freedom, or at least for his better treatment, and was summarily dismissed. Her
family opposed her idea of joining him. Driven by the thought that ‘life apart from him
would be unbearable’ (Berg 2004: 187) she begged the commander in charge of the town.
He also dismissed her summarily. Using messengers, her husband advised her against
trying to join him and reminded her of her two daughters. Eventually Ibarra granted her
permission to visit her husband, but after a short stay, the fear of Indian attacks drove
her back to Santiago del Estero. Despairing of his fate, José María changed his mind
and asked her to return in the hope that the two of them could escape, only to change
his mind again. Determined to go, Agustina sought all the required permits and left in
search of her husband. Ibarra jested about the ‘mad woman’ wanting to make a spectacle
of herself. She found José María already sick and unable to recognize her. Throughout
the ensuing months, she lived with him, moving from place to place and further into
the hostile northern province. Her deranged husband’s health degenerated, requiring
constant care and protection. Insane, he abused her in word and deed, but she persisted
in her determination. They escaped the attacks of Indians, who were still roaming the
area. They experienced hunger, thirst, cold, rain, and physical abuse from the soldiers. At
one point she hired herself as a wet-nurse to an Indian child, and sewed clothes for the
Indians to earn food in exchange for her services. The incredible tests of survival she
endured make poignant reading. Once in a while she received some help from her family
through messengers, but even that aid was cut by the soldiers. About José María, she
said: ‘Su locura era horrible; en todo el año no pronunció mi nombre ni siquiera una vez.
Apenas salía de su boca una palabra ininteligible y cuando yo no respondía se arrojaba
a mí! ... me parece imposible no haber muerto a sus manos’ (Berg 2004: 193).
At a very early age Palacio was already ‘una mujer sufrida’ obsessed with taking care
of a husband who was no longer responsive. At all times her indomitable perseverance
belied her youth. Her physical strength sustained her despite being a typical urban
woman of means. Towards the end of her saga, she thought of asking her family to come
and save her but accused herself of cowardice and begged God to forgive her and to
LAVRIN: SPANISH AMERICAN WOMEN 81
allow her to continue nursing her husband. Like Martínez, Palacio showed a strong reli-
gious faith sustaining her in such testing times. All those who learned about the story
after her return referred to her as an ‘angelic woman’ endowed with sublime virtue, an
emblem of the purity of the sacrifice endured by all provincial women as a result of the
disorder and calamity that Buenos Aires had inflicted on the rest of the provinces. Mary
Berg concludes that Palacio’s story became the symbol of ‘the nation’s triumph’ and her
body became ‘the site of the nation’s conflict’ (Berg 2004: 134), a conclusion that parallels
my own in the case of Martínez.
These two women were catapulted into action by political events in which they were
not expected to participate, and the memory of their actions became a symbolic represen-
tation of what men most wished to underscore in women’s character at the time: their
strength within their fragility; their devotion to their husbands and to the principles
men personified. Ironically, the husbands who provoked their extraordinary conduct
were weakened symbols of manhood, beaten by circumstances and unable to fulfil their
expected protective roles. They were prisoners at the mercy of other men and under their
wives’ care. While recipients of love and devotion, they were devoid of any heroic
aura themselves. Pedro Nisser is presented as a patriot by his wife, but she soon becomes
the true hero of her own narrative. Palacio’s husband had one moment of strength in
signing a letter of political rebellion, but he soon becomes a broken man and a source of
much suffering for his wife. He was regarded as a petimetre by the vengeful Ibarra, who
held the dubious distinction of being the powerful villain in this narrative. Indeed, it is
against Ibarra’s emblematic cruelty and barbarism that Palacio embodies the purity
and firmness of emblematic womanhood. Unlike Martínez, Palacio is almost a child, but
her motherhood gave her status and maturity among her contemporaries. The two
husbands become anti-heroes once they are captured. Their imprisonment inspires their
wives to become heroes themselves. When women become heroes they develop the abil-
ity to go beyond the expected boundaries of their sex and behave with the strength and
determination that the presence of their husbands would have inhibited. María Martínez
still hears the military echoes of Colombia’s independence and lives in a country plagued
by a provincial rebellion that challenged the principles laid down by the liberators. She
believes in principles and in social order and is willing to fight for them, like a man.
She was not simply driven by her duty to her husband. Her sentiments are those of an
independent woman. In the Argentina of the 1840s there was no notion of nation. The
principles of law were further diluted in the provinces, being silently upheld by those
who suffered local tyrants or otherwise cherished by those who had escaped into exile.
Palacio did not dress as a man to fight tyranny. She could only express hatred of those
who caused her husband’s suffering and inflicted pain on her; she could only play an
extraordinary role by breaking the social limitations imposed on women and suffering
in her own body what her husband was suffering in his. If Martínez becomes an emblem
of civic conduct after her return, Palacio becomes the image of a victim whose swollen
and blood-stained body is the silent witness of the irrationality of the local caudillo, the
merciless environment, and the fear of the untamed Indian.
I would not like to present these two stories merely as tales of heroic women. There
are too many nuances and I have explored only a few. Expressing their sense of duty,
both women relied on religious principles. They invoked God for sustenance, revealing
a piety acquired in an early education that possibly inculcated in them a sense of duty
to their husbands. This could explain the unfaltering loyalty of Agustina Palacio to a
deranged man, and María Martínez’s conviction that by taking her political beliefs to the
82 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL, 7.1, MARCH 2006
battleground she was serving her spouse’s cause. Palacio’s motherhood is contradictory;
she was torn between her duty as a mother and as a wife. The latter prevailed, and she
left her daughters in the care of others. Yet, on her return she claimed them as soon as
she entered her home and nobody thought less of her as a mother because she put her
husband first. If duty to husbands or nation were the ultimate driving forces in these
women’s lives, if they served as role models to ratify women’s role as paradigms of
service to traditional values, to what extent can we speak of a change of gender roles
before 1850?
In these stories we envision an agency that is still geared to fulfil expectations that
resonate with a mixture of late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas, conservative
attachment to family values, and an incipient romantic drive for stories in which
passions, rational or irrational, prevail. The Enlightenment opened the possibility for
women to become sufficiently educated to engage in public and civic activities, although
still holding them down to their roles of mothers and wives. Their activities are tradi-
tional because their goal is still to serve the bonds of traditional marriage. However,
there is a touch of nineteenth-century romanticism in the creation of a national story
adequate to serve the objectives of the incipient nation-states. Could the abstract love
of motherland and justice in Martínez’s case be regarded as a point of departure from
tradition? In many ways it was. When we review the activities of all women involved in
the political plots of the early republican period, we can see how they were an outlet
for their pent-up civic desire to be more than token nationals of countries that did not
consider them citizens. The excessive sacrifice of a dutiful young wife, apparently so
alien to the activity of politically involved women, was in itself a political statement
under a different guise. Both are examples of the multiple avenues of behaviour open to
women in these years. Both contain a ‘will for action’ that presages a change within
women themselves, already becoming evident under the benevolent acquiescence of
public opinion.
Do these stories mean today what they meant for women in the nineteenth century? To
what extent is the process of remembering for these two women different from our way
of remembering them? In writing about their experiences Martínez and Palacio sought
to redress their own personal tribulations and express their own deeply felt political
allegiances. Writing in both cases was the result of an inner compulsion. Women could
express emotions, but they would have to wait decades to engage in a dialogue on
citizenship. And yet, despite male inhibitions about their presence in the political arena,
they were asked to remember. The request had an implicit purpose in both cases: to
enhance the image of women as capable of heroic actions in cases of supreme need.
Women’s testimony had a value in the task of building a communal memory even if that
memory corroborated accepted social representations: sacrifice for the honour of the
motherland or sacrifice for the love of husband. Both women accepted the task of writing
to promote honourable choices for their sex.
Today, we look into these memoirs to see beyond what they consciously or uncon-
sciously expressed, to make sense of what these women did and to make sense of
our own past. We must also continue to look beyond the women who wrote dairies or
published newspapers, fascinating as they are, to find those countless others who spoke
only through records of marital dissent, suits against violent husbands or masters, or
claims against lost honour. Private life, which has remained silent in most of the histories
written about the independence era, is there waiting to be discovered. As Christine
Hunefeldt wrote: ‘silence is a matter of interpretation and depends on our willingness to
listen with care’ (Hunefeldt 2000: 315). There is no longer silence, and we are listening.
LAVRIN: SPANISH AMERICAN WOMEN 83
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Este artículo repasa la historiografía reciente sobre la mujer hispanoamericana en el período 1790
a 1850. Luego se procede a examinar dos obras escritas por mujeres que representan la auto-
percepción y las aspiraciones sociales de las mujeres de esa década. Son los diarios escritos por
María Martínez de Nisser, de lo que hoy día se llama Colombia, y Agustina Palacio de Libarona,
de Argentina. Estos textos nos dan una idea de los pensamientos y motivaciones de los hombres y
mujeres que participaban en los conflictos políticos de la primera mitad del siglo diecinueve.