Gendering the Obstacles to Progress in Positivist Argentina, 1880–1920
N K r E V E R believe in the tears of a woman." On the verge of becoming one of Latin America's leading intellectuals, Jose Ingenieros extracted this traditional wisdom from the tale of legendary gaucho Martin Fierro and incorporated it into his medical thesis.' While Ingenieros did not usually quote from "the most expressive of the gauchesco poems," he frequently interpreted other historical narratives to find a pattern for current events. In this case, Ingenieros was explaining that women had always lacked the physical strength with which to compete in the struggle for life, and therefore their evolutionary survival had depended on the refinement of fraudulent means to defend against the brute force of men. Of course, as social boundaries shifted amid the growth and mobility of turn-of-the-century Argentina, women were not the only group whose appearances might belie their true intentions. But as the warning suggests, they were a particularly troublesome group to positivist thinkers. The positivist response to women has considerable interest because these writers were central to the project of modernizing a national ideology in the years after 1880.2 Often considered "the protagonists of a national