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Historical Context

It was the decade of 1890 in Argentina. At that time, travelling wasn’t as easy and comfortable as today. You could travel afoot, by horse or mule, in a carriage or stagecoach, over dirt roads. The railroad was starting to stretch out from Buenos Aires to other important cities. Bicycles were a luxury and cars were scarce. The sky was bluer and distances longer, towns were small and inhabitants few.

Women went through more difficult times than today’s. To understand it, we must briefly summarize their civil situation, particularly in Argentina, during the period of time considered.

In the civil and political spheres, women were relegated, treated as inferior to men and, with their children, considered property. That decade is part of a century that marked a regression in the rights of women because of the blockage of the civil rights that existed earlier in this country inspired in Napoleon’s well known code (1804). The new laws constituted an inferiorization of the female status, that was a contrast to previous times. Probably this was a result of contradictory ideologies, that worked together strengthening the patriarchal perspective. Those ideologies led to the fixing of assumptions that a woman is unpredictable and ungovernable and to have the apparently scientific certainty of that time about their biological inferiority. This convinced the men of that time about the need to prevent women from being equalled before the law, because this could lead to a natural disaster. “Science” tried to make evident the differences between sexes. The most productive theory was Evolution, that pretended, under the disguise of science, to impose reason and thus explain the distributive imperfection between the sexes. That was how laws were enforced that resolutely increased the capacities of males and decreased those of women.8

Since the late 19th century, isolated voices presented their questioning about women’s legal inferiority. These voices were of women and also of not a few men of law, who explained the outrageous asymmetry between sexes in legal matters. In 1898, Doctor José Olegario Machado wrote: “It is time that our legislation, realizing the intellectual advancement of women, free her from the perpetual guardianship that has held her, and reduce the marital power to whatever is of absolute necessity for the management of the business of the community”.9

Machado stated:

Women’s civil incapacity answers to the need of a single management of the family, one head leader and one chief that rules; for the moment we do not see her as a partner with equal action in family issues, nor in those of civilian life, but the instruction and education she receives, her judgement and thoughts will mature with the passing of time […] and the day is not far away when she will be an associate to man with equal rights.10

Juan Agustín García, one of the most lucid jurists, from his chair and the press wrote in La Nación [The Nation] in 1902, at a time when the emancipatory project of Luis María Drago was not successful in Congress and the end of the feminine subjection was promoted, that to him was the cause of

Unspeakable suffering, real dramas full of pain, that only we, who by our profession intervene daily in these things, know. […] Women’s economic emancipation is imposed in all legislations based on the Christian marriage; implicit in its logical and historical development, in its fatal and irresistible tendency; in the working classes, because the wages belong to the one who wins it, because the general thesis is, that the mother is more thrifty and farsighted than the father; in the wealthy classes, to avoid wicked exploitations.11

Although the great battle for the female emancipation happened between de decades of 1910 and 1920, the Argentine woman remained legally discriminated until 1985 when the law of shared parental authority was enforced, during the rule of president Alfonsín.12

When taking into account the circumstances described and going back to the decade of 1890, when the SDA church started to spread the message in the South American continent, we are compelled to highlight the Christian and biblical concepts that the Adventist pioneers from other continents subscribed to in relation to the equality of men and women in the mission of the Church. The adventist message of 1890 included an anthropology, based in the Word of God, which promoted equality in the way men and women were treated as part of the plan of salvation by grace proclaimed by Jesus Christ. However, the influence of the pioneers was not enough for this equality to be clearly reflected in reality, as the denomination’s historical records show. There were still external influences that hindered the full understanding of the biblical concepts and their practice.

At the time of 1890, it was only two decades since the Adventist Church had started its expansion outside the United States. It had a world membership of 29.700 believers. The missionaries were scarce, although hearts were willing to love and serve God. That is why only a handful of believers could come to the South American continent. But they had great dreams and by the beginning of the new century they had already organized several churches, congregations and institutions of education, health and publications. This was because both men and women collaborated intensively in the mission. The women, single or married, who came as missionaries fostered such a vision of commitment, effort and dedication by developing their skills and gifts that they inspired the new generations of converts.

Let us begin to know some of those stories…

8 Dora Barrancos, “Inferioridad jurídica y encierro doméstico [Legal Inferiority and Domestic Confinement]”, in Historia de las Mujeres en la Argentina [History of Women in Argentina], ed. by Fernanda Gil Lozano, María Gabriela Ini and Valeria Silvina Pita, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires, AR: Taurus, 2000); Dora Barrancos, Mujeres en la Sociedad Argentina: Una historia de cinco siglos [Women in the Argentine Society: a History of Five Centuries] (Buenos Aires, AR: Sudamericana, 2007); María V. López Cordón and Valentina Fernández Vargas, “Mujeres y régimen jurídico en el Antiguo régimen: una realidad disociada [Women and Legal Regime in the Old Regime: a Dissociated Reality]”, in Ordenamiento jurídico y realidad social de las mujeres: Siglos xvi-xx [Legal Order and Social Reality of Women: xvi-xx Centuries] (Madrid, ES: UAM, 1986); Viviana Kugler, “Los alimentos entre cónyuges: Un estudio sobre los pleitos en la época de la Segunda Audiencia de Buenos Aires (1785-1812) [Food Between Spouses: A Study on Lawsuits at the Time of the Second Court of Buenos Aires (1785-1812)]”, Revista de Historia del Derecho 18 (1880): 183-213; Dora Barrancos, Inclusión/Exclusión: Historia con mujeres [Inclusion/Exclusion: History with Women] (Buenos Aires, AR: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002).

9 “El más ilustrado de los comentadores del código civil [The Most Enlightened of the Commentators of the Civil Code]”, quoted by Enrique del Valle Iberlucea, El divorcio y la emancipación civil de la mujer [Divorce and Civil Emancipation of Women] (Buenos Aires, AR: Cultura y Civismo, 1919), 6.

10 José O. Machado, Exposición y comentario al código civil argentino [Exhibition and Comment to the Argentine Civil Code], vol. 1, 360, quoted in Del Valle Iberlucea, El divorcio y la emancipación civil de la mujer, 32.

11 Drago’s own doctoral thesis is entitled El poder marital [Marital Power] (Buenos Aires, AR: Imprenta El Diario, 1882). There were several thesis in that regard, but one of the first and most important is J. J. Urdinarrain’s, El Matrimonio [Marriage] (Buenos Aires, AR: Imprenta Especial para Obras de Pablo E. Coni, 1975). These documents are quoted in Barranco, “Inferioridad jurídica y encierro doméstico”.

12 It was only in 1949 when political equality of men and women was complemented with legal equality of the husband and wife and the shared parental authority guaranteed by the Article 37 (II.1) of the 1949 Constitution. The text was written by Eva Perón. The military coup of 1955 revoked the Constitution, and with it the guarantee of legal equality between man and women in marriage and in the face of parental authority, reappearing the priority of man over women. The constitutional amendment of 1957 did not incorporate this constitutional guarantee. See “Eva Perón”, in Wikipedia (internet; accessed September 20, 2010), available in http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Per%C3%B3n.