White Slavery and Mothers Alive and Dead: The Troubled Meeting of Sex, Gender, Public Health, and Progress in Latin America

This volume brings together a diverse set of essays exploring topics ranging from public health and child welfare to criminality and industrialisation. What the essays have in common is their gendered connection to work, family, and the rise of increasingly interventionist nation-states in Latin America, and particularly in Argentina. Donna J. Guy first looks at Latin American women from a general and international perspective. She explores which paradigms are most useful in studying gender history in Latin America. She also addresses the evolution of the Pan-American Child Congresses as well as the politics of Pan-American co-operation in relation to child welfare issues. Later essays focus on Argentina in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Guy looks at how women were affected by systems of forced labour, and she illuminates changes in the concept of patria potestad, or the right of male heads of households to control family members’ labour. Other essays address such issues as public health, white slavery, and public notions of motherhood in Argentina.