In search of the women of the Pampa: written culture, resistance, and gender in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Abstract

This study addresses women’s writing produced in the southern South American region known as the Pampa, especially within the context of the political movements and armed conflicts that took place between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in southern Brazil and Argentina. Based on the observation that traditional historiography and gauchesque literature privilege a masculine and heroic narrative centered on the figure of the warrior gaucho, the text seeks to identify women in this territory, their writing practices, and the documents through which they may be accessed. Drawing on a qualitative and exploratory approach, the research reveals that, despite their systematic exclusion from official narratives, women from different backgrounds — ranging from foreign travelers and wives of political leaders to Black, Indigenous, and working-class women writers — recorded in literary works, documents, and personal writings the relationships between gender, power, and nature. These records, often preserved in periodical publications or as appendices to male collections, nevertheless reveal strategies of resistance, negotiation, and agency. This demonstrates that such absence stems from a system that permeates not only the canon, but also bodies, histories, and the territory itself. The study concludes that it is urgent to make these archives visible, since they not only broaden the official versions of History and Literature that once rendered them invisible, but also contribute to understanding the persistence of certain gender, race, and class hierarchies in contemporary society.