The Moral Electricity of Print

In the mid-1870s, Argentine writer Juana Manuela Gorriti organized a series of literary soirees in Lima. Participants included both women and men who delivered talks, recited poetry, and performed songs. Scholars consider these soirees exceptional because they gave Peruvian women writers such as Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and Teresa González de Fanning, among others, the chance to position themselves as valid interlocutors to their male peers. The participants also advocated for women's access to higher education and professional occupations. In his book, Ronald Briggs argues that the Lima women's circuit tied gender emancipation to reading, writing, and publishing within political and intellectual contexts dominated by men. Aware of the ideas circulated by equivalent networks in the rest of the Americas and Europe, these South American authors embraced the premise that the printed word was a means to educate and reform society, especially in moral terms. To achieve this goal, the Lima group relied on novels, journals, biographical compilations, and school textbooks. Briggs effectively demonstrates that nineteenth-century Latin American writers imagined literature as an educational instrument. His work also provides some insights into the history of pedagogy and educators in the region.One of the strengths of Briggs's book is placing the work of Lima women writers within transatlantic and hemispheric intellectual contexts. In contrast to older scholarship that claimed that Latin American intellectuals simply copied foreign ideas, Briggs's work demonstrates the critical engagement of these authors with outside concepts. The concept of moral electricity, first advanced during the French Revolution, referred to an invisible, progressive force that accelerated social change. In the nineteenth century, US and Latin American writers held that the printed word could serve as a conduit for such force. French writer Madame de Staël (1766–1817)—frequently cited in Spanish-language books and periodicals—maintained that literature provided women with the opportunity to have a greater influence over society and politics. This idea resonated with the Lima group, who considered that literature could change customs and, consequently, the law. An example of this, for the Lima women's circle, was Harriet Beecher Stowe's perceived contribution to the abolition of slavery in the United States, through her abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).Briggs's examination of the issue of education—broadly conceived—is valuable, and his observations on the history of pedagogy and educators in the region are welcome. In contrast to enlightened thinkers, who argued that education had to bring students in contact with the world through the senses and ideas, the Lima group claimed that it was also possible to teach through the feelings and emotions represented in their novels. Following a Latin American tradition that included Venezuelan Andrés Bello and Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the Lima writers granted great pedagogical value to biographies and journals that divulged literary and scientific information. Of particular importance is how women writers published collective biographies of women peers, creating a “textual community of heroic figures” that legitimized all intellectuals (p. 16). Briggs highlights that Gorriti held the soirees in the same building where she ran a school, and other affiliates of the Lima group such as González de Fanning worked as teachers. Adding information on local or regional schooling, literacy, and readership would have completed the picture of the intellectual and cultural contexts within which the Lima women's circle was active. More research and data on these social aspects would also make more precise the racial, ethnic, and class limitations of the women writers' project. Overall, Briggs's book shows that these writers not only appropriated but also re-created European and US ideas, in response to opportunities and challenges that they perceived in their own societies

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