13 - Women in twentieth-century Latin America

Summary

There is no scarcity of documentary sources on women in twentieth-century Latin America, and there are several recent important bibliographical sources in English. An indispensable introduction is K. Lynn Stoner (ed.), Latinas of the Americas: A Source Book (New York, 1989), which includes Georgette Dorn, ‘Bibliographies: Bibliography’. Meri Knaster (ed.), Women in Spanish America: An Annotated Bibliography (Boston, 1977) remains an useful source for works published before 1975; it was the first serious effort to collect an interdisciplinary and chronologically comprehensive bibliography on subjects related to women. Stoner’s bibliography covers publications between 1975 and 1987 and contains important bibliographical essays by well-known scholars, assessing the state of the art in several fields.

Shorter historiographical essays published after Knaster’s work provide useful surveys of the state of research. See Asunción Lavrin, ‘Some final considerations on trends and issues in Latin American women’s history’, in Asunción Lavrin (ed.), Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives (Westport, Conn., 1978), 302–32; Marysa Navarro, ‘Research on Latin American Women, ’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1/5 (1979), 111–20; June Hahner, ‘Recent research on women in Brazil, ’ LARR, 20/3 (1985), 163–79; K. Lynn Stoner, ‘Directions in Latin American women’s history, 1977–1985’, LARR, 22/2 (1987), 101–34; and Asunción Lavrin, ‘Women, the family and social change, ’ World Affairs, 150/2 (1987), 109–28, ‘La mujer en México: Veinte anos de estudio, 1968–1988: Ensayo historiografico’, in Simposio de Historiografía Americanista (Mexico, D.F., 1990), 545–93, and ‘Women’s studies’, in Paula H. Covington (ed.), Latin America and the Caribbean: A Critical Guide to Research Sources (New York, 1992), 743–54 (complemented by a bibliography compiled by Aimee Algier-Baxter, 755–88).