SOURCE: “Rosario Castellanos: Demythification through Laughter,” in Humor, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1989, pp. 19-29.

In the following essay, Scott argues that Castellanos uses humor to break down cultural myths about women.

Do feminists have a sense of humor? Perhaps one of the most appropriate people to ask would have been the late Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974), noted for both her wit and her outspoken feminism. In her creative writing as well as her journalism, she unleashed the formidable arsenal of her humor to attack the kinds of mind-sets and myths that were keeping Mexican women relegated to traditional roles of selfless wife and mother. For Castellanos the problem began with Genesis. A woman, she reports, is to be satisfied with her place in the world because once upon a time a man gave up one of his ribs to create her. “In the first place,” she writes, “no one was asking...