“The country of women”: genesis of a Paraguayan national stereotype by travel accounts of foreigners
Keywords:
Paraguay, Women, Gender Relations, Travel Accounts, ForeignersCopyright (c) 2024 Barbara Potthast
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Abstract
After the devastating war against the Triple Alliance, which annihilated a large part of the male population in Paraguay, the shattered society and economy were left in the hands of women. Although Paraguayan women had been active in public even before the war, such as in the market, the omnipresence of women attracted the attention of contemporaries. The panorama fascinated European and North American travelers, who spread their impressions in magazines such as "Le Tour du Monde" or in numerous travel books, very popular at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Due to the demographic situation, Paraguay was characterized in more than one report as a "country of women", and the women were described as beautiful, clean, hard-working, and free in their sexual habits. This discourse could draw on pre-war ideas about Paraguayan women being relaxed about sexual matters, which were reinforced by the post-war situation. The article analyses the origin and spread of this exotising and sexualising discourse on Paraguayan women, based on quotations from travel accounts and the pictorial images that accompanied them.
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