The 1820s marked the second decade of revolutionary change in Buenos Aires. With modified and disputed expectations and demands for men and women, the decade was characterised by the rapid transformation of society and culture. The texts which are the subject of this study exemplify these cultural processes in that they engage with the issues of political and social reform, foreign influences (in particular British influences), and, most importantly, the relationship between the personal conduct of women, both in public and in private, and emerging national culture. This chapter will explore how the revolutionary project fostered modernity in several areas as part of a conscious rejection of Spanish colonial systems and associated underdevelopment, an objective that necessitated the exchange of views on the social positioning of women.

The emergence of the Argentine nation was preceded by dramatic power struggles, and state formation was a lengthy and complex process. Independence did not automatically produce a nation-state, and republicanism did not prove easily implemented. This was the case throughout Spanish America yet ‘[f]or the new Argentine State, which was for half a century to remain an inchoate confederation, the substitution [of colonial rule] proved to be desperately difficult’. As Nicolas Shumway describes, ‘expelling the Spanish proved simple compared to the task of building a new nation consisting of all the remaining provinces under institutional government’.

Indeed, the term ‘Argentina’, although in use, did not become the official name of the nation until 1826, and a lasting national constitution would not be agreed and introduced until 1860. This fifty-year delay in political consolidation is linked to the fact that patriotism meant different things to different people in what was a vast and still partly unexplored region. Revolutionary allegiance allowed for variations in focus and scale among military and political leaders. As Ricardo Rojas observed in his 1916 essay on argentinidad:

Todos los hombres de nuestra emancipación hablan de ‘patria’, pero no se refieren concretamente a nuestra patria actual: es para Funes, la ciudad nativa; para Moreno, el virreinato; para Gorriti, las provincias unidas; para Monteagudo, toda la América.

The roots of the national question, and indeed the regionalism which blocked national consolidation, are pertinent to this study because independence in Buenos Aires gave rise to new political sensibilities and the need to appear politically sophisticated to the international community.