Moving Mountains and Uprooting Weeds: Literary Subjectivity, First Wave Feminism, and Women's Magazines in Latin America and Japan

Abstract:This article argues that first-wave feminism is best understood as a relatively concurrent, multipolar irruption of women's claims to subjectivity wherein suffrage was not the main objective, but rather just one particular historically contingent outcome among many. It seeks to overturn models that understand early feminism as a Euro-American phenomenon to which women in the so-called third world or non-western world were latecomers. In a close reading of the Argentine literary journal Búcaro Americano (1896-1908) headed by established author Clorinda Matto de Turner and Japan's Seitō (1911-1916), a feminist literary journal headed by up-an-coming author and feminist Hiratsuka Raichō, I trace the specific articulations of subjectivity proffered by the journals' writers and editors. Specifically, I find that the specific subjectivity evinced by the women producing these journals was a fundamentally internationalized one owing on the one hand to the economic changes to the global economy wrought by liberalism and on the other to women's exclusion from national discourse by both law and custom. Ultimately, I argue that by understanding these texts as part of larger feminist movement that arose contemporaneously in multiple locations around the world, a more holistic and less imperialist view of first-wave feminism becomes apparent.