What can women’s personal archives teach us about feminist practices? How can we reconstruct a history of feminism in Latin America from the fragments? Using documents preserved at the University of Notre Dame and other archives from Argentina and the United States, this talk reconstructs the transnational networks that connected women educators and early feminist leaders across the Americas at the turn of the 20th century. Drawing on feminist science studies, anthropological critiques of power in the archives, and transnational history, the presentation traces the work and relationships of U.S. educator Jennie Howard and Argentine feminist leaders Dr. Ernestina López and Dr. Elvira Rawson de Dellepiane. Their correspondence, published work, and personal papers—many preserved at Notre Dame—offer a rare glimpse into the everyday relationships that sustained feminist collaboration across borders.

Presenter

Sabrina González, Assistant Professor, Washington State University, is a historian of modern Latin America with a focus on 20th-century Argentina. Her first book manuscript, Schools as Laboratories: Science, Children’s Bodies, and School Reformers in the Making of Modern Argentina (1880-1930), examines the history of nation-making in Argentina from the perspective of women schoolteachers. Schools as Laboratories studies the theory and practice of modern pedagogy at the intersection of transnational scientific theories and local school experiments with immigrant children. González is particularly interested in how women used education as a tool for children's and women’s emancipation that challenged state-sponsored education and built a transnational school reform movement. González’s second book project will explore feminist organizing in South America in the first half of the 20th century.

Beyond historical research, González is passionate about collaborative and interdisciplinary projects that bring together scholars and activists from the United States and Latin America.