Donna J. Guy

The Pan American Child Congresses, 1916 to 1942: Pan Americanism, Child Reform, and the Welfare State in Latin America

The Pan American Child Congresses provided a catalyst for child-focused welfare policies in Latin America. Originally organized by Argentine feminists in 1916, the congresses soon attracted many physicians and legal specialists concerned with topics such as infant mortality, child abandonment, and juvenile delinquency. Although feminists insisted more than their male counterparts that Latin American governments solve all the problems of children, both groups agreed in principle on many issues. Furthermore, womens views became evident when Latin American male physicians met with their U.S. counterparts at a 1927 eugenics conference in Cuba and refused to endorse highly racist and authoritarian measures. Instead, they worked through the child congresses and with women from the U.S. Chil drens Bureau. This led to protective legislation for children as well as a hemi spheric Childrens Code in 1948, indicating a shift in focus from the obligations of the state to the rights of children.

Gay and lesbian themes in Latin American writing

Preface Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. Adolfo Caminhas Bom-Crioulo: A Founding Text of Brazilian Gay Literature 3. Vampire Versions of Homosexuality: Seduction and Ruin 4. The Deconstruction of Personal Identity 5. The Sociopolitical Matrix 6. Optical Constructions 7. Narrations on the Self 8. Utopian Designs 9. Conclusions Notes: Translations of Quotations Bibliography Index

Women Build the Welfare State: Performing Charity and Creating Rights in Argentina, 1880–1955

In this pathbreaking history, Donna J. Guy shows how feminists, social workers, and female philanthropists contributed to the emergence of the Argentine welfare state through their advocacy of child welfare and family-law reform. From the creation of the government-subsidized Society of Beneficence in 1823, women were at the forefront of the child-focused philanthropic and municipal groups that proliferated first to address the impact of urbanization, European immigration, and high infant mortality rates, and later to meet the needs of wayward, abandoned, and delinquent children. Women staffed child-centered organizations that received subsidies from all levels of government. Their interest in children also led them into the battle for female suffrage and the campaign to promote the legal adoption of children. When Juan Peron expanded the welfare system during his presidency (1946–1955), he reorganized private charitable organizations that had, until then, often been led by elite and immigrant women. Drawing on extensive research in Argentine archives, Guy reveals significant continuities in Argentine history, including the rise of a liberal state that subsidized all kinds of women’s and religious groups. State and private welfare efforts became more organized in the 1930s and reached a pinnacle under Juan Peron, when men took over the welfare state and philanthropic and feminist women’s influence on child-welfare activities and policy declined. Comparing the rise of Argentina’s welfare state with the development of others around the world, Guy considers both why women’s child-welfare initiatives have not received more attention in historical accounts and whether the welfare state emerges from the top down or from the bottom up.

Lower-Class Families, Women, and the Law in Nineteenth-Century Argentina

The concept of patria potestad, or the right of male heads of house holds to control family members, including their labor, has undergone a marked transformation in Argentina. In the colonial period patria potestad served to re inforce imperial codes related to inheritance, marriage, and race relations, but after independence and before new codes were passed, the weak Argentine nation rarely interfered in family matters except to conscript vagrant men or force poor women to work for the state. Gradually, economic conditions, along with the location of the work to be performed, replaced race as criteria for state inter ference in family labor. As the Argentine state became more powerful in the twentieth century it finally usurped the right of family heads to select occupations and to keep the incomes of family members.

Secondary Cities of Argentina: The Social History of Corrientes, Salta, and Mendoza, 1850-1910.

This study of three Argentine provincial capitals introduces a new concept in Latin American urban studies: the historical role of secondary cities, settlements large enough to possess all the elements commonly associated with urban areas and yet too small to figure among a countrys major cities. The principal contribution of the book is to explain how and why smaller cities grew. What determined and shaped their growth? How did local inhabitants, and especially the dominant social elites, react to internal and external influences? To what extent were they able to control growth? What relationships developed with the surrounding regions and the outside world? The study shows that secondary cities linked rural economies and inhabitants with the outside world while insulating the traditional rural environment from the changing character of large urban centers. In this intermediate position, economic relationships and social structure changed slowly, and only in response to outside innovations such as railroads. Continuity within the secondary centers thus reinforced conservatism, accentuated the gap between the major cities and the rest of the country, and contributed to the resistance to change that characterizes much of Latin American today. The book is illustrated with photographs and maps.

Dependency, the Credit Market, and Argentine Industrialization, 1860–1940

The factors responsible for Latin American economic “dependency” have long been debated by economic historians. In this article, Professor Guy considers the example of Argentine industrialization between 1870 and 1940. Argentine reliance upon foreign capital, she concludes, was due much more to local Argentine institutions — the commercial law, the stock market, and the government inspection bureau — than to any pressures from abroad. She adds that, though dependency theory has its limits, by focusing attention on local institutions, it remains a valuable tool for understanding Third World development.

The Shifting Meanings of Childhood and “N.N.”

The history of the Dirty War in Argentina relates as much to intolerance of adolescents and young people as to ideological conflict. The fact that the disappeared in Argentina were disproportionately young and buried in plots that identified them as nameless (“ningún nombre,” or “N.N.”) links this war to the long history of state efforts to control the actions of parents and delinquent children. Argentine society, of which the military formed a part, had long refused to accept the idea of adolescence and rejected all inappropriate behavior of young people from 1919 on. The combination of extralegal efforts of families to rid themselves of unwanted children and the states desire to control families eventually became part of a military policy of getting rid of perceived unacceptable youths by having them disappeared and buried in anonymous graves.

Future directions in Latin American gender history.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Eric Van Young for inviting me to give this speech today. It is a great honor and a pleasure to have the opportunity to share with you some of my thoughts concerning the development of gender studies in Latin American history as well as the issues that need to be addressed in future years. When I first became interested in gender history in the 1970s, it seemed unlikely that journals such as Luso-Brazilian Studies would ever dedicate an entire issue to womens studies. Yet this year there is such an issue. It helps us appreciate how accepted gender studies have become for Latin American historians.

Carlos Pellegrini and the Politics of Early Argentine Industrialization, 1873–1906

Until the I870s, Argentina was principally a pastoral nation totally dependent upon trade with more advanced nations to provide basic necessities. Yet, within a brief span of about thirty years, it became a major producer of livestock products, cereals and flour for export, and of a wide variety of foodstuffs and other consumer goods for internal consumption. Most of this had been achieved by the application of protective tariffs to nascent industrial activities, and by the importation and use of new machinery and technology to process available raw materials. Thus, unlike other Latin American nations which had not yet begun the arduous process of modernization, Argentina had already embarked on a program of import substitution and State-encouraged industrialization in the late nineteenth century. Argentinas early experiments with industrialization took place in an ,environment of hostility and scepticism. A longstanding commitment to free trade and laissez-faire economic policies formed a difficult obstacle to ,overcome. The political strength of oligarchs associated with the livestock and export-import sector, principal beneficiaries of free trade, also could not be ignored. Nevertheless, a combination of local and international circum:stances in the I87os enabled a small group of protectionists led by Carlos Pellegrini, Vicente Fidel Lopez and Dardo Rocha to propose new tariffs that would promote agriculture and industry as well as generate income. Their successful manoeuvers thus initiated the first attempt to industrialize Argentina, and soon high tariffs became synonymous with protectionism. To the dismay of national industrialists and their supporters, a political and economic crisis in I890 renewed the campaign to dismantle the protectionist tariff system. The need for additional government revenues as well as hostility towards groups that had prospered under the old order enhanced the arguments of freetraders. To protect budding industries from their critics, newly-installed President Pellegrini in I890 devised a plan to increase industrial tariffs while taxing prosperous industries in other ways,

The Morality of Economic History and the Immorality of Imperialism

EVER SINCE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, economists, historians, sociologists, and political scientists have pondered why some countries have benefited so much from the rise of capitalism, modern agriculture, and industrialization, while others have languished. Neat and messy theories of comparative advantage, industrialization cycles, cultural, religious, geographic explanations, Marxism, dependency, and world-systems theories have all been offered. Driven by ideologies, belief in the veracity of particular types of data, and usually preaching to the converted, these theories have been both praised and scorned, particularly by historians who have a great penthant for finding the exceptions to all models, and who tend to tolerate their own evidence better than documentation offered by others. If historians cannot accept the theories of others, then supposedly they should create their own. This is a difficult task because it implies knowledge of more than one country or region and reliance on the conclusions of other specialists, a hazardous proposition. It can also lead to historians searching for evidence to support a vision of one society that is then superimposed on others. David S. Landes confronts the thorny and contentious fields of national histories and macroeconomic theory in an extraordinarily ambitious study of nations across time and region to find out why some are more successful than others in the struggle for economic survival, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998). His theory of moral and cultural capitalism is based on the empirical evidence found in the many monographs and articles listed in his bibliography. While this method has its own hazards, it is far more satisfying to the empirical demands of historical documentation, and it is easier to present the premises and the evidence than it is in ideological or model-based studies. Indeed, the bibliography, though not complete, is excellent. The question remains how the author utilized the information. Since the basic premises as well as the conclusions are designed to promote specific and rigid Eurocentric prejudices that serve more to create controversy than to persuade the reader, it is evident that Landes searched the bibliography for information to confirm, rather than challenge, his moral and cultural perspective.