Isabel puts in letters their claims: Teachers and epistolarios. Rosario, Argentina (1875 – 1879)

Abstract

The present work aims to analyze two topics around three words: school, teacher and letter. The first commitment is compromised to think how the rise of Argentine Educative System operated over the female teachers’ participation in the educational practices. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Argentine Estate considered that the female figure was the most suitable to drive the civilizing act of the normal school. These beliefs were justified by her “natural gifts”: care and predisposition towards others. In a second commitment, we extrapolate this question to reflect how this prescription was reformulated by the own women to escape from the private domestic space in order to establish new relationships and negotiations in spaces which belonged to male (public) and males (institutions and ministry agents). Investigate the ability of these women claim that the teachers have to petition on what they consider fair and thus himself, his ability to challenge the essentialist discourses on "teacher " that circulated at the time. This life experience will be analyzed from letters written by a young foreign teacher: Isabel Coolidge.