Armonía Somers - The Naked Woman

Rama, 97 (translation my own). “Las que llegaron después son las mujeres, quienes alcanzan autonomía civil y humana en esta nueva sociedad de la que se han de expresar con violentas críticas, a veces esquemáticas, a veces cínicas, siempre inconformistas, replanteando con más audacia que los hombres los problemas de la afectividad y en particular los de las relaciones sexuales.”

While these women writers started publishing with a disruptive aesthetic in the early twentieth century, they weren’t recognized until the late sixties, when women’s rights movements around the world inspired a critical perspective on women’s writing. For instance, by the time Somers published her first novel, Simone de Beauvoir had just published Le Deuxième Sexe in 1949. It’s worth noting how writers such as Mexican authors Elena Garro and Rosario Castellanos were writing on the margins in the sixties, too, while Argentinian Silvina Ocampo and her sister Victoria Ocampo published the influential literary magazine Sur in Buenos Aires in the 1930s. Mexico, Argentina, and Uruguay, however, were considered the most advanced Latin American countries in terms of women’s rights, while women writers from other countries in the region were kept in the shadows until the late eighties and nineties. For a detailed genealogy of female authorship in the twentieth century, see Olivera-Williams 1991 and 2012.

Picon Garfield, 38.

Picon Garfield, 48.

According to Ángel Rama (1972), certain upper-class women writers from the Southern Cone, such as Silvina Ocampo from Argentina and Clarice Lispector from Brazil, were often included in “official” literary circuits, and their writings had been canonically considered avant-garde. Somers’s work, however, remained marginalized for a long time.

Risso, 254.

Gandolfo 1986 (translation my own). “Entretanto la púdica Montevideo creció y lo aceptó. Y ahora que La mujer desnuda es ciudadana legal no hay reediciones.”

Gandolfo (translation my own). “Es decir que no miro al sesgo el tema, sino de frente. Lo que procuro es el tratamiento aséptico, no el regodeo.”

Picon Garfield, 42.

Conway 2015, 117.

Cosse 1988.