Images of the mujer moderna in the Works of Maruja Mallo and Norah Borges

The emergence of the figure of the new woman marked one of the most significant social changes of the twentieth century. Although expressed in the singular, the term embraces a whole host of subjectivities and is associated with a range of symbols and identities, all of which were negotiated by individuals in their own way. Maruja Mallo and Norah Borges present images of the mujer moderna that show the ways in which that particular identity was negotiated by Spanish and Argentine women in the 1920s and 1930s. Both artists, albeit in very different ways, reject a simplistic depiction of the modern woman and refuse to reduce her to a rebellious figure; instead they show her position in relation to wider society. Their images celebrate the new found freedoms of women and place these within a trajectory of women’s history, whilst simultaneously problematizing the ways in which women in Spain and Argentina were caught between tradition and modernity

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