Catholicism and the Female Condition: Gender Representations of Motherhood and Domesticity in the Southwest Argentinean Buenos Aires Press in the Early 20th Century

Abstract

This paper identifies and describes the meanings ascribed to motherhood and domesticityby analyzing gender representations in the discourse of the confessional press that appears inBahia Blanca and travels through its zone ofinfluence during the first three decades of the20th century. It is argued that Catholic menand women who write in the press share theconcept of dominant sexual difference andaddress the problem of the female condition byfocusing on the notions of domesticity andmotherhood, which refer to the role of the biological and material reproduction of society inthe context of the sexual division of labor.However, some of them reformulate them inresponse to the epochal changes that haveimpacted the family, as a result of which theyexpress ideas which, while not in themselvesintended to subvert gender relations, endorsecertain modern mutations.