ABSTRACT
The genealogy of Latina feminist traditions has typically focused on Mexican women, beginning with the seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and then fast-forwarding to Chicana feminists of the 1960s and 1970s. Blanca Rosa Rodriguez Lopez, by contrast, advocated a more conventional path to women’s emancipation. Like other middle-class and elite Latin American feminists, she anchored her hopes on education as the key to securing equal rights for women. Conjugating one’s identity entails a self-reflexive and purposeful invention or inflection of one’s sense of self, taking into account such constructions as race, class, culture, language, and gender. Demonstrating a level of pragmatism, Luisa Capetillo endorsed reforms familiar to feminists across the hemisphere, including women’s suffrage, protective legislation, and temperance. As a grassroots activist, she encouraged working-class men to accept women into their ranks as full partners in the struggle against exploitation.
