A Laboratory for Democracy: Feminist Teachers and School Reforms at the Beginning of the 20th Century in Argentina

In the opening speech at the First Female International Congress in Buenos Aires, feminist teacher Ernestina López claimed: “It has been said that each age has its men and why should we not also say that it has its women?” During the centennial of the 1810 revolution, Argentine women organized to demand an equal place for them in politics, law, arts, science, and education. Teachers were at the forefront of this feminist movement. Within a critical political debate that resulted in the promulgation of “universal” (male) suffrage in 1912, teachers debated what a democracy would look like and what type of education children should receive. This paper traces the links between feminist praxis in the Global South with the transformations put into practice in the classroom. It focuses on feminist teachers Ernestina López and Raquel Camaña, organizers of the First Female International Congress in Buenos Aires (1910) and the First Congress of the Child (1913) respectively, and advocates for structural changes in the school system. I suggest that drawing on a transnational debate about pedagogy and childhood promoted by women throughout the Americas, teachers in Argentina saw in the classroom a laboratory for democracy where children exercised their rights and where the teacher challenged their own authoritarian and despotic roles, replacing them with a loving and caring maternal educator. Many of the transformations that feminists envisioned for the classroom and the society at large did not come to fruition and women had to wait until 1947 to exercise their right to vote, but even on a smaller scale, feminist teachers at the beginning of the 20th century transformed the classroom into a counterspace for girls to exercise freedom of movement and expression, and to exist without the authoritarian surveillance of the teacher.