Peruvian Female Thinkers of the 19th Century

Beginning in the 1870s, literature written by women in Peru gave rise to the realist novel. Unlike the romantic movement, which portrayed an apolitical and a non-critical femininity, the realist novel is characterized by social critique and employs the principles of positivism to understand human nature.

Between 1887 and 1888, during the reconstruction after the War of the Pacific, Clorinda Matto de Turner (Cusco 1854 - Buenos Aires 1909) resumed organizing literary soirees at her home. In 1889 she published Aves sin Nido (Birds Without a Nest), her first novel. There she denounces social injustice, oppression, and the church’s abuses against the indigenous population of the Andes. Aves sin Nido is considered the first indigenist novel. The National Library of Peru preserves one original copy dedicated to Ricardo Palma.

Between 1889 and 1891 Clorinda Matto directed the weekly El Perú Ilustrado. She founded the newspaper El Recreo and her own printing press, La Equitativa, in which she published a newspaper, Los Andes, which favored the Caceres movement. In 1895, during the government of Nicolás de Piérola, her home was raided and her press destroyed. In consequence, she went into exile in Buenos Aires, where she published El Búcaro Americano (1896 - 1901). The National Library of Peru preserves her correspondence with Ricardo Palma and El Recreo Newspaper.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, newspapers were essential mediums of creation, reflection, and debate for women writers. For women, access to the literate world was no longer only thorough domestic topics. Mercedes Cabello Carbonera (Moquegua, 1845- Lima, 1909) was one of the writers who in many articles advocated for equal education for men and women as well as women's access to paid work.

The Modern Novel. Philosophical Study (1891) is a book of essays for which Mercedes Cabello received the La Rosa de Oro award at the Hispanic-American Competition of the Literary Academy of Buenos Aires. In this volume, the author reflects on romanticism and naturalism as aesthetic currents that contribute to the construction of the novel. She argues that the novel is a quest for truth and understanding of the condition of being human.

In 1892, she published the novel El conspirador. Autobiografía de un hombre público. (The Conspirator. An autobiography of a public man). In it, through fiction, she explores the fabric of the post-war political world and criticizes its corruption and caudillismo. Clorinda Matto de Turner's Aves sin Nido and El conspirador are considered the most important novels of the nineteenth century, according to Antonio Cornejo Polar.

Mercedes Cabello's work had great recognition and was published in Argentina and Spain. In her works she defends secular education for women and recognizes their intellectual and political capacities. This position caused rejection and she was forced to withdraw from public life. Eventually she fell ill and was placed in a mental institution where she died in 1909.

As a result, girls' education was directed at making them good wives.

The anticlerical character of enlightenment thought led to the debate about the best place and best way to educate girls. Teaching in convents was criticized and home schooling was accepted, conditional on preserving moral principles. The writer Teresa González de Fanning (1836-1918) questioned the ways in which female education was focused on married life and motherhood.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Miguelina Acosta (1877 - 1933) became the first trial attorney. She wrote her undergraduate and doctoral thesis about topics related to the legal situation of women.