Texts of Gender Visibility by Chilean Women Authors of the First Half of the 20th Century: Luisa Zanelli, Marta Elba Miranda and María Carolina Geel

Abstract

This article analyzes three texts by Chilean women writers from the first half of the 20th century: Luisa Zanelli’s Mujeres chilenas de letras (1917), Marta Elba Miranda’s Mujeres chilenas (1940), and María Carolina Geel’s Siete escritoras chilenas (1949). It focuses particularly on the different forms of exhibition and evaluation these authors used to value and disseminate women’s contributions to their societies, according to their respective cultural fields. These texts are part of a broad and diverse corpus of writings produced by Latin American women writers since the mid-19th century, whose aim was to highlight the social and cultural contributions of women, both past and present. These types of writings, which I call gender-visible texts, constituted novel discursive forms that attempted to break the silence to which women’s work had been condemned in patriarchal societies throughout history.