SOURCE: “Feminine Voices in Exile” in Engendering the Word: Feminist Essays in Psychosexual Poetics, Temma F. Berg, editor, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989, pp. 160–66.

In the following excerpt, Olivera-Williams discusses two of Storni's poems as feminist statements.

By the time that Argentine Alfonsina Storni published her first book of poetry in 1916, two years after Agustini's death, other Spanish American women had followed Agustini's path and were being recognized in literary circles. Among them were the Uruguayan Juana de Ibarbourou, the Chilean Gabriela Mistral, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945, and the Cuban, Dulce María Loynaz. But these women were considered “islands,” “exceptions” in the predominantly male world of Latin American literature. Storni's voice was the only feminist voice insisting upon an end to the sexual bias of her time. Like Delmira Agustini, Storni not only shocked her society with her profession—poetry—but also with...