women build the welfare state * Women Build the Welfare State performing charity and creating rights in argentina, 1880–1955 Donna J. Guy duke university press Durham and London 2009 ∫ 2009 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Cycles by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication data appear on the last printed page of this book. * For my Tucumán Family Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Female Philanthropy and Feminism before the Welfare State 13 Family Law and the Politics of Names 2. Benevolence and Female Volunteerism 36 3. Performing Child Welfare 58 Philanthropy and Feminism from the Damas to Eva Perón 4. Juvenile Delinquency, Patriarchy, and Female Philanthropy 83 5. The Depression and the Rise of the Welfare State 120 6. At the Crossroads of Change 151 Peronism, the Welfare State, and the Decline of Non-Peronist Female Authority Conclusion 186 Notes 195 Bibliography 225 Index 243 Acknowledgments Both good fortune and great help from my Argentine friends and co- workers enabled me to expand this book from a discussion of street chil- dren to one that looks at feminist and female philanthropic child advocacy and the welfare state. My understanding of both themes would have been far di√erent if I had not finally received permission to research heretofore closed archives. After eight years of persistence and, with the help of Dora Barrancos, then head of the Women’s Studies Program at the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires and a former legislator for the Government of Buenos Aires, I obtained permission to consult the archives of the govern- ment agency charged with monitoring state institutions for children and other legal issues associated with minors and the family. Currently known as the Consejo Nacional de Niñez, Adolescencia y la Familia [the National Council for Childhood, Adolescence and the Family, cnnaf], it holds many of the archival papers of child welfare institutions (including the Society of Beneficence) that are missing from the Archivo General de la Nación [Na- tional Archives of Argentina, agn], as well as more than five hundred thou- sand files on children who entered state institutions. Significantly, the por- tion from 1880 to 1955 that I was allowed to consult had approximately fifty thousand files. Since that date the numbers have soared tenfold—a clear indication that the welfare state in Argentina continues to function, albeit in a more limited and poorly financed way. This observation is rea≈rmed by the lines of families that queue outside of state agencies. Assisted by my researchers, Fernanda Gil Lozano, Luis Blacha, Laura Moon, and Analía Coccolio, we read these files for two years until a change of government and administration led to the rejection of our request to expand the time frame of our investigation. Throughout our research, we were not allowed to xerox, scan, or photograph files, but rather only transcribe them with computers. As we sampled the materials, particularly from the 1930s onward, a rich collection of letters emerged concerning the role of philanthropic women and their social workers. In addition, letters from parents to children and from children to parents, social workers’ reports on the housing of parents and foster parents, and correspondence related to the children o√ered a vantage point previously unavailable. In an e√ort to tell the stories of these people, as well as the institutions, I have quoted freely from the archives so that the children, parents, and agency employees of these institutions have the opportunity to represent themselves alongside the institutional evalua- tions of them. Clients’ names have not been revealed in accordance with the wishes of the Consejo. Access to provincial archives also permitted me to expand the story of child welfare beyond the city of Buenos Aires. However, the richness of these archives depended upon the wealth of the province or city as well as specific interests of local politicians. Furthermore, not all provinces and cities maintained careful statistics on child abandonment, juvenile delin- quency, and women’s feminist and philanthropic organizations. For these reasons I have expanded the story to include the provinces of Buenos Aires, Tucumán, and La Pampa, while others have been mentioned according to specific themes. This project took more than ten years to complete and would have been impossible without considerable financial and intellectual support. The University of Arizona’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute o√ered a number of summer travel grants and a Research Pro- fessorship Grant; and the Ohio State University has generously supported this project through my Selective Investment Professor’s research fund. I also received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. I wish to thank all the sta√ members at the following institutions: at the Archivo General de La Nación in Argentina, especially Elizabeth Cipoletta and Liliana Crespi; the sta√ at the Biblioteca Nacional; the Consejo Nacional de Niñez, Adolescencia y la Familia; the Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Tucumán; the Archivo Histórico de la Pampa; the iwo [Instituto Científico Judío], especially, but not exclusively, Abraham Lichtenbaum; Anita Weinstein of the amia ar- chives [Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina]; the Patronato de la Infan- cia, the Museo del Templo Libertad; and the Patronato Español, especially Sra. Elsa Insogna. Paul Armony of the Jewish Geneological Association [Asociación de Geneología Judía] helped me obtain information about the Jewish boys’ orphanage. My research has been aided over the years by x Acknowledgments Kent Darcy, Osvaldo Barreneche, Enrique Sánchez Miñano, Tracy Alexan- der, Douglas Stuart, and Shijin Wu. Dora Barrancos, Marta Goldberg, Ana María Presta, and my Argentine mother, Sra. Olga Aráoz de Ramos, o√ered me their knowledge and their hospitality during these many years and helped keep me sane. I am also indebted to Asunción Lavrin, Peter Ross, Sandra Deutsch, Daniel Campi, José Luis Moreno, Lila Caimari, Noemí Girbal de Blacha, Adriana Brodsky, and Ann Blum. Rob Bu≈ngton, Ken Andrien, Stephanie Smith, Herbert Kaplan, Susan Deeds, and Stephanie Gilmore read earlier versions of the manuscript and encouraged me to sharpen the focus and rewrite. I, of course, take full responsibility for the work. My wonderful husband, Gary Hearn, deserves special mention, for he has put up with a lot, read most of my drafts, and given me incredible support during the creation of this book. Acknowledgments xi Introduction This book examines the complex interrelationships between female philan- thropic groups and feminists in their advocacy of child welfare programs and family reforms in Argentina in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Members of female philanthropic groups, who gener- ally were representatives of the middle and upper classes, organized and provided help, often voluntarily, for people poorer than themselves. In contrast, feminists came from all walks of life and organized to promote equal legal, social, and political rights for women. I argue that the activities and conflicts between these two groups provide an excellent historical van- tage point for examining the origins and rise of the Argentine welfare state between 1880 and the fall of the Juan Perón government in 1955. This project began as an e√ort to understand why Argentine and other Latin American feminists lobbied explicitly to gain greater legal authority over their biological children than did their counterparts in the United States. In my research I discovered that Argentine feminists only rarely addressed the plight and rights of non-biological children and orphans. Instead, they combined the goals of protecting mothers and their biological children at the same time that they supported campaigns for equal political, social, and economic rights. In contrast, elite philanthropic women, who were usually identified as members of the Sociedad de Beneficencia (but by my findings also included middle-class and immigrant women), organized to help poor children who had been orphaned and abandoned. In the politi- cal sphere, some of these nonfeminist women supported adoption laws so that married and unmarried women could legally adopt a child, a theme that remained outside most feminist discourse. Why did such di√erences in attitudes toward child welfare divide Argentine female philanthropists and feminists? I have taken much inspiration from the recent literature on women and the welfare state in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.∞ These studies have forged a new understanding of how women fought for both protection and rights within nascent welfare states, ones that often dis- criminated on the basis of class and race and, in the case of the Middle Eastern countries and many European ones, arose out of both religious and feminist movements in response to similar concerns. However, the pub- lications that have examined both progressive and conservative women’s movements rarely touch on the issue of orphanages. As Sonya Michel, an exception to this generalization, noted in her work published in 1999 on U.S. child-care policies, ‘‘Parents’ use of orphanages for child-caring pur- poses became so widespread that by the second half of the 19th century, ‘half-orphans’ (children with one living parent)