Rompiendo Mitos y forjando Historia: Mujeres Urbanas y Relaciones de Genero en Costa Rica a Inicios del Siglo XX (review)
At the turn of the nineteenth century, many Latin American countries experienced profound socioeconomic changes, which had diverse impacts on the lives of women. In Costa Rica this changing reality was especially apparent in the decade of the 1920s, when the country experienced a process of economic and social modernization. Women emerged in several different spaces of the public sphere that had been exclusively or mostly reserved to men—in education, politics, social clubs, and sports. Mora Carvajal's book insightfully examines the insertion of urban women into public life in the Costa Rica of the 1920s in the light of two intertwining principles that marked women's activity outside the home: tradition and innovation. Tradition, or the maintenance of differentiated gender roles and identities, governed women's experience in this era of progress. Innovation was expressed in challenges to the cultural assumption that women were naturally fit only for the private sphere.