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Castellanos Ossuary She is one of our greatest writers and thinkers. She is also a pioneer of Mexican feminism. In many of her texts, she described the condition of marginalization and subordination in which Mexican women, particularly indigenous women, lived, and criticized the values, stereotypes, prejudices and attitudes that patriarchal society imposed on them.
José Emilio Pacheco recognized its importance and lamented: No one in this country had, at the time, such a clear awareness of what the double condition of woman and Mexican means, nor did she make this awareness the raw material of her work, the central line of her work. Naturally, we were unable to read her
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His master’s thesis, On female culture (1950), is one of the central works of Mexican feminism. It asks if there is a specifically feminine way of thinking; intuition, it grants as an answer. From that perspective, the transcendence that has been assigned to women is motherhood; to men, cultural production. This is not something natural. It is a sociocultural conditioning. Despite this, exemplary women have transcended this limitation and it asks, how did exceptional women like Sappho, Saint Teresa, Virginia Woolf and Gabriela Mistral overcome these obstacles? Men produce culture to transcend; women transcend through motherhood, through their children. The woman, instead of writing books, researching truths, creating status, has children.
Rosario fought against this prejudice of the intellectual inferiority of women, openly expressed by thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Weininger, Nietzsche and Moebius. She would surpass some of the conclusions of her master’s thesis years later, when she became aware of what it meant to be a woman and to be liberated. She adopted Simone de Beauvoir’s thesis as her own: One is not born a woman, one becomes one
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In Woman who knows Latin , the book where she best expresses her feminist ideas, with fine prose and sharp irony, mocking the stereotypes that patriarchal society imposes on the female figure. Among many important passages, there is this one: The beautiful woman stretches out on a sofa, displaying one of the attributes of her beauty, her small feet, to male admiration, exposing them to his desire. They are shod in a shoe that some fulminating dictator of fashion has decreed as an expression of elegance and that has all the characteristics that define an instrument of torture. At its widest part it squeezes to the point of strangulation; at its front end it ends in an improbable point to which the toes have to submit; the heel is extended by a sharp stiletto that does not provide sufficient support for the body, making balance precarious, falling easy, walking impossible. But who, if not the suffragettes, dares to wear comfortable shoes that respect the laws of anatomy? That is why the suffragettes, in just punishment, are unanimously ridiculed.
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Rosario ironically dismantles the stereotypes of behaviors that are assigned to the young, the virgin, the married, the mother, the white-headed. In contrast, she affirms the will of women to break this social conditioning: “With a strength that no coercion can bend; with a stubbornness that no argument can convince; with a persistence that does not diminish in the face of any failure, women break the models that society proposes and imposes on them to achieve their authentic image and to consummate themselves –and consume themselves– in it…”
She criticizes the feminine ideal of Western culture, outlined in the Bible: a pure woman, faithful to her husband, devoted to her children, hard-working at home, prudent in managing the family patrimony, loyal, patient, chaste, submissive, humble, modest, self-sacrificing. The sphere in which female existence takes place is that of morality. But in addition to the soul that was recognized in them, women have a body. And regarding the female body, denied, misunderstood, stigmatized, used by men, Rosario harshly described this inability of men to understand it, with a description that remains, unfortunately, as relevant:
“A sick animal, St. Paul diagnoses. A mutilated man, St. Thomas decrees. Woman is conceived as a receptacle of humors that make her impure during certain dates of the month, dates on which it is forbidden to have access to her because she spreads her impurity to whatever she touches, food, clothing, people. A scenario in which a fascinating and disgusting process will take place: that of pregnancy. During this long period, woman is as if possessed by malignant spirits that rust metals, spoil crops, cast the evil eye on beasts of burden, rot preserves, stain whatever they look at…”
But Rosario, like many of the women who have identified with her and rebelled to change patriarchal society, to break that social conditioning, says:
“With a strength that no coercion can bend; with a stubbornness that no argument can convince; with a persistence that does not diminish in the face of any failure, women break the models that society proposes and imposes on them in order to achieve their authentic image and to consummate themselves – and consume themselves – in it…”
Concludes: Men are not our natural enemies, our fathers are not our born jailers. If they are open to dialogue, we have an abundance and variety of reasoning. They must understand, because they will have experienced it firsthand, that nothing enslaves as much as enslaving, that nothing produces a greater degradation in oneself than the degradation that one tries to inflict on another. And that if a woman is given the status of person that until now has been denied or withheld from her, the personality of the donor is enriched and made more solid.
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