SOURCE: Scott, Nina M. “Shoring Up the ‘Weaker Sex’: Avellaneda and Nineteenth-Century Gender Ideology.” In Reinterpreting the Spanish American Essay: Women Writers of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, edited by Doris Meyer, pp. 57-67. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Scott analyzes Avellaneda's feminist essay “La Mujer” in its context within Album Cubano, a journal founded and edited by Avellaneda.

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (Cuba, 1814-1873) is not known as an essayist: she was principally a poet, novelist, and playwright, famous in her lifetime—at times even notorious for her unconventional love life—and best known today for her radical two first novels, Sab (1841) and Dos mujeres (Two Women, 1842), some plays, and her earlier lyric poetry.¹ Avellaneda had traveled to Spain in 1836, and by means of her talent, her striking physical appearance, and her astuteness in marketing herself and her writing, had come to...