Thursday, January 3, 2013: 1:20 PM
Beauregard Salon (Hotel Monteleone)
The paper discusses how my 2008 historical biography of Manuela Sáenz (b. 1797, d. 1856), Simon Bolivar’s storied friend, lover and follower, enhances historians’ understanding of Spanish American society and politics in the early national period. It explains how this biography sheds light on important social aspects of the period, including the impact of the independence wars on families and individuals as well as on gender boundaries and relations between the sexes. Sáenz’s life-story offers a vivid example of the way in which the wars not only mobilized women but opened up new social, civic, and political spaces for them and opportunities for self- reinvention. It shows how like men, women assumed new patriot or republican (later, national) identities and formed affiliations based on shared political sympathies and experiences. It also shows the limits of women’s participation in an expanding public sphere, including the growing, largely masculine, realm of competitive politics. At the same time, my study reveals how both class and gender-related norms continued to shape and constrain women’s lives. As I hope to demonstrate, beyond being the first modern, scholarly biography of Sáenz, its relevance for historians lies in illustrating 1) the ambiguous legacy of independence from the standpoint of women and gender relations; and 2) the role of personal alliances and relationships—and, of larger creole social networks—in the political life of the young republics, including rule by caudillos like those that Sáenz befriended. My paper addresses some of the main methodological challenges encountered in the course of my research on Sáenz’s life: sifting through a vast secondary literature which portrays Sáenz in a simplistic, sensationalized or semi-fictional manner; making the most of scarce primary sources; weaving together information gleaned from disparate sources in order to present a plausible portrait of the protagonist and her times.