Feminist Rehearsals: Gender at the Theatre in Early Twentieth-Century Argentina and Mexico offers a nuanced, complex, and well-documented education in the evolution of women's rights from the nineteenth century through suffrage in Argentina and Mexico. May Summer Farnsworth delivers a tour de force with this history of women's activism and the many linkages between theatre and legislative debates in furthering social change. Farnsworth employs the term feminist rehearsals to “identify recurrent performative tactics used by authors, practitioners, and spectators to transmit feminist ideology, produce feminist knowledge, and create feminist publics” (1–2). These rehearsals manifest beyond what is traditionally considered theatre by broadening the definition of the stage to include public meetings and political events.
Comprising an introduction and seven chapters, Feminist Rehearsals applies frameworks posited by Jill Dolan and Judith Butler when considering “group identities born of labor struggles, suffrage protests, and feminist drama in Latin America” (3). Namely, the study interrogates the powerful effect that woman-centered performances have on feminist spectators. This monograph traces pivotal moments, dramatic works, and individuals who were vital to garnering support and advocacy for women's rights. The first chapter is a carefully elucidated historiography of women's growing social action repertoire via print culture and performance in both Argentina and Mexico. Farnsworth underscores the trailblazing work of Juana Manso de Noronha (1819–75) as playwright and advocate who forged a path for women in Argentinian elementary education. This chapter uncovers the work of feminist freethinker Julieta Lanteri and socialist Alicia Moreau, who shed light on suffrage inequality at a time when suffragists were mocked in popular plays staged in Argentina. Public displays of solidarity and advocacy for women's voting rights and social reform influenced the shift in themes and aesthetics represented in the theatre industry, and depictions of women onstage began expanding and improving. Developments for women's rights—promotion of civil code reform, women's suffrage, and the legalization of divorce—both onstage and off were achieved through the persistence of women activists like Virginia Bolten, Hermila Galindo, Lanteri, and Moreau.
The chapters that follow offer a genealogy of women's theatre integral to chipping away at conservative representations of women in Latin America. Farnsworth's careful and critical analysis of thesis dramas by Teresa Farías de Isassi (Sombra y luz) and Salvadora Medina Onrubia (Almafuerte) lends credence to how their work “dramatized the psychological effects of sexual repression and criticized patriarchal discourses working within the rhetoric of revolution in Mexico and labor activism in Argentina” (51). The attention paid in Chapter 3 to Camila Quiroga's influential performances in plays by Emilio Berisso and José González Castillo underscores how women were key players in supporting social change and endorsing feminism through their role as dramatic artists at a time when they were less likely to author plays themselves. Chapter 4 uncovers the irony that, while widely recognized today, Alfonsina Storni was the least celebrated woman playwright of her day. Storni's influence on feminist melodrama replaced “the old tropes of shame, pardon, and error with rebellion, independence, and feminist awakenings” (93). Chapter 5 centers the role of motherhood in both the Mexican political and performance spheres, with close readings of works by María Luisa Ocampo, Luis Castillo Ledón, Catalina D'Erzell (pen name of Catalina Dulché Escalante), and Magdalena Mondragón Aguirre, as ideological “battlegrounds” paving the way for women's suffrage in Mexico and suggesting that recognizing full citizenship “means valuing women's diverse experiences while also insisting on their imagined connections” (110). Chapter 6 addresses the impact of dictatorship on women's lives in Argentina during the 1930s and 1940s. Repression thwarts the feminist movement while fueling comic feminist rehearsals that strategically avoid censorship. Farnsworth uncovers the emergence of a “feminist laugh” (118) in her analysis of plays by Camilo Darthés and Carlos Damel, exposing their critique of prescribed gender roles. The chapter also places Malena Sándor among her male contemporaries for her use of comedy while theatricalizing the social issues of divorce and female emancipation. Finally, Chapter 7 offers a study in transformative mythmaking employed by underground avant-garde dramatists during the early twentieth century, challenging spectators to reevaluate women's present situations while examining the sexism of the past.
The concluding chapter of Feminist Rehearsals credits playwright Alfonsina Storni with having provided a “blueprint for future feminist dramatists seeking to adapt canonical works into modern feminist spectacles” (144). Farnsworth's skillful reading of feminist reworkings of ancient legends by playwrights Sándor, Mandragón, and Josefina Marpóns establishes their importance as precursors to the enduring and celebrated feminist play El eterno femenino by Rosario Castellanos. Feminist Rehearsals is rich in fact-finding and storytelling, uncovering a trove of dramatic literature and performance in the struggle for women's rights. And as if this were not enough, to the reader's delight, Farnsworth includes appendixes with excerpts of select plays expertly translated into English by the author herself.
