Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  Without moving away from home, thousands of girls in the 1950s and 1960s also began to “leave home” on a daily basis to attend secondary schools. The increase in school enrollment at the secondary level was largely due to matriculation by young women: whereas in 1950 they accounted for 50 percent of the student body, in 1960 they already outnumbered boys and were 54 percent of the student body in 1970. Although most educators and surely many parents viewed the girls’ arrival in the secondary schools as a sign of (and a path to) the country’s cultural modernization, it nevertheless constituted rocky terrain for some families.10 That was the case with Alicia and Mabel, two sisters from a working-class family in the Greater Buenos Aires area. Alicia graduated from primary school in 1956 and expected to go on at the secondary level, but her parents did not grant her permission. Even though Alicia would not have to commute because her neighborhood, unlike others, had both public and private secondary schools available, her parents probably feared her daily interactions with boys and preferred her to stay at home and carry out domestic chores, gaining training in a “female” trade later.11 Mabel, for her part, graduated in 1964, and she recalls that she worked “on a strategy” to convince her parents to grant her permission. “The key,” she says, “was my insistence on that I never liked doing stuff in the home.” In addition, when Mabel’s time to enroll arrived, she indirectly benefited from the fact that many of her female neighbors had begun to attend secondary schools as well. “Times were changing,” Mabel notes.12 Indeed they were. While taken for granted by middle-class girls, matriculation at secondary school was still a sticking point for some working-class families.

  Likewise, choosing a school orientation was another arena of confrontation where many parents tried to assert their authority against the will of their daughters. This was exemplified by the changing popularity of the teacher training schools. As had happened throughout the century, in the 1950s girls enrolled en masse in the teacher training schools. In the 1960s, partially as a result of the changing preferences of young women, enrollment in these schools stagnated and then declined, while attendance in the commercial branch, which was aimed at training students to find office jobs, grew at an average of 11 percent annually.13 The changing percentages mask embattled situations. Psychologists persistently advised parents not to overlook their children’s desires, and noted that vocational decisions created frequent clashes since oftentimes “impositions prevailed over negotiations.”14 Many girls started to perceive teacher training as an imposition. Teaching had for decades been accepted as the most respectable career for women, who represented 90 percent of all teachers in 1962.15 At that time, however, many girls expressed their discontent. Interviewed about their experience at a teacher training school, girls agreed that their parents forced them to choose it, and letters written to women’s magazines reiterated that sentiment.16 Moreover, the supply of teachers began to outpace its demand. Illustrating that imbalance, two-dozen young women from Entre Rios, Buenos Aires, and Santa Fe wrote to Elenita Frondizi asking for her help to find a teaching position. Two letter writers from Córdoba appropriated the common lexicon used to speak about teachers and wrote that without teaching, their “sense of mission vanished” and consequently they would “fail the fatherland” and their families alike.17 The widespread difficulty to secure a position upon graduation added one more layer to the declining prestige of the teacher training school and augmented the interest in other possible jobs.

  Throughout the 1960s, young women helped expand and diversify the female extradomestic labor force. While in 1947 women comprised 18 percent of the economically active population, in 1970 the figure had jumped to 28 percent. In terms of age, the fact that young women stayed in the educational system longer than before was reflected in the fact that the fourteen-to-nineteen-year-old age group slightly decreased its participation in the labor market, but better-educated young women in the twenty-to-twenty-four age group increased theirs from 39 percent in 1960 to 44 percent in 1970.18 These were, likewise, the first cohorts that did not withdraw massively upon reaching the threshold of twenty-five years old, associated with marriage and motherhood. Equally important, they carried out a diversified variety of jobs, mainly within the service sector of the economy. While most had jobs as employees in retail stores or in household services (likely as domestic workers), a large percentage worked in public administration or held office clerk positions.19 In fact, unlike the declining allure of the schoolteacher, the secretaria ejecutiva (executive secretary) epitomized the modern young woman and surely propelled many girls to pursue their studies in the commercial branch. As a distinct category from the secretaria, the secretaria ejecutiva signaled a new professional and cultural profile. Interviewed in 1966, a secretaria ejecutiva, age twenty-one, who worked for Ford Motor Company, said that she had received training in a private academy. There she had learned “commercial and international law as well as public relations.” She and other interviewees felt confident that they were not “dull dolls” anymore, but active professionals who, after spending eight hours in offices in downtown Buenos Aires, went to watch experimental movies or visited centers of modern art.20 Those who worked for multinational companies, received a decent salary, dressed well, and engaged with the latest avant-garde developments were numerically a minority among the large contingent of working young women, but they embodied some of the collective meaning of and aspiration to modernity and independence.

  The secretaria ejecutiva was not the only image of the modern young woman: the college student occupied an analogous position. The college student body gradually became proportionally more female like high schools already had. For instance, while in 1958 young women accounted for 25 percent of college students, by 1972 they represented 38 percent.21 In terms of careers, young college women in the 1960s also made new choices. As we have seen, they comprised the majority of students in the humanities and social sciences departments, but they also increased their numbers in the economics and law schools. Unlike with the secondary schools, though, young women coming from working-class families had limited access to college education. This began to change somewhat toward the early 1970s. In the 1960s, mostly middle-class young women had the opportunity to attend college. For example, in 1968, at the largest university in the country, 86 percent were “first generation,” showing how expectations and experiences differed from those had by previous generations of women.22 Projecting an image of autonomy and carving out their own futures, college women nevertheless encountered barriers in a male-dominated environment. In 1972 men constituted 87 percent of faculty, an index that demonstrates how limited the possibilities were for female graduates seeking academic appointments.23 Moreover, although young women were actively involved in the student movement, only a handful achieved leadership positions (for the most part, as student representatives to the school, rather than university-level governing councils), and this was also true for the schools where women made up a majority of the student body. Yet at the same time that they reproduced structural, long-standing gender inequalities, colleges became sites for mixed sociability in unprecedented ways.

  Albeit with different intensities and modalities, college and secondary school students, working and unemployed girls and young women, all strove to participate in a new sociability that was youth-based rather than intergenerational. That sociability took place in schools and at jobs and fundamentally in the realm of leisure, where young women and men began to interact without adult supervision. Among middle-class adolescents, the barritas—mixed groups—were formed as a socializing institution and proved an alluring novelty, chiefly when it came to the organization of parties at homes on the weekend. Advisers recommended that parents encourage these parties: they saw them as the best way to meet their daughters’ friends and to monitor their social lives.24 Yet for many lower-middle- or working-class families, this was not a viable option: as one letter writer noted, her house was too small to host people.25 These young women did nonethe
less participate in new forms of youth sociability. The spread of rock music and dance in the late 1950s was crucial for resignifying leisure spaces, such as neighborhood-based social clubs, which had long served as places for young people and adults to dance to popular rhythms.26 By becoming “rock clubs,” those spaces turned into youth-only territories; at the same time they preserved—as the home parties did for middle-class adolescents—a certain halo of security provided by being located in their neighborhoods.

  Young women’s extended leisure activities at any venue, however, incited frequent clashes in the family milieu. Progressive family advisers told parents to be tolerant of their daughters’ choices to go out at night, dance, and flirt. These activities, a psychologist reminded her readers, were “signs of a secular process of women’s emancipation, and can not be stopped.”27 While the experts suggested parents reevaluate their attitudes, young women complained insistently of their parents’ refusal to grant them permission to go out at night and of their strict curfews. A young woman age twenty, for example, wrote that she worked as a teacher and earned her own money, yet her parents would not let her go out at night, “even with female friends.” Another girl, age seventeen, commented on her strategies to contest her parents’ “obsessions” with her “morals.” She complained that she was “getting tired of lying” to her parents: since they did not want her to go anywhere, she just made up excuses.28 In fact, many parents feared that allowing their daughters to go out at night, alone or with their mixed barritas, posed potential dangers to their sexuality and risked “promiscuity,” as some termed flirting and dating.29

  On the eve of the 1960, courtship conventions began to slowly change, and this constituted one of the most contested arenas at the family level. The interaction of young women and men in new leisure activities and sites for sociability—including college—was crucial to forging fluid and relaxed relationships, where flirting, for example, became normalized. Likewise, throughout the 1960s an array of practices between the poles of flirting and formal “premarital” dating emerged. All in all, courtship became connected with experimentation and choice for boys and girls.30 However, when these practices began to emerge, they inspired growing parental anxiety. Letter writers regularly addressed difficulties in coping with their parents when flirting or dating. While grateful that her mother let her go out with her boyfriend, for example, a young woman age nineteen complained that she was “obsessed with the kissing issue!” Another girl, age seventeen, wrote to convey her “desperation.” When her parents realized that she was dating a young man, age nineteen, they threatened to send her “to a reformatory.”31 Albeit with varying degrees of drama, these dilemmas cut across cultural and class lines. María Rosa, daughter of an upper-middle-class Jewish family, recalls that while she was an anthropology student, she began to date a young man her age. Her parents approved of him, but “were so reluctant” to grant her consent to go out that the couple decided to marry very young. “We wanted to be together and I wanted to leave my home,” she concludes.32

  While some youths like María Rosa could make the decision to leave behind wearisome parental oversight to start a “home” of their own, many young couples could not afford marriage. Housing, in particular, constituted a widespread problem, a phenomenon that sharply contrasted with the recent Peronist past. Under Peronism, the state had programs that subsidized the purchase or building of family homes.33 Housing was one key issue for Los de la mesa diez (The Ones of Table Number 10), Osvaldo Dragún’s play first staged in 1958 and then adapted as a movie, directed by Simón Feldman and released in 1960. The play and movie tell the story of Maria and José, the rich girl and the poor boy, which begins and ends at “table 10” of a café in Buenos Aires (the metaphor for the impossibility of their starting a “home”). After the movie’s premiere, its actors, director, playwright, and producers engaged in a debate with an audience composed of young people. The audience reaffirmed that the problems that the movie depicted were “not fiction[al].”34 Marriage was financially challenging. Some reports stipulated that getting married and starting a new “home” in 1965 was six times more expensive than it was in 1930: a couple of office clerks had to save for more than forty-eight months in 1965, in comparison with eight months in 1930, for the down payment and the purchasing of the basic furniture for a two-bedroom apartment.35 This riddle partially explains the increase in median age for marriage, which went from twenty-two for women in 1930 to twenty-six in 1965.36

  While certainly disturbing for middle- and working-class couples, the hardships of finding the means to secure a new “home” do not fully capture the intricacies of the sociocultural dimensions of “leaving home.” Financial problems overlapped with the gendered dimensions of socio-cultural modernization: young women delayed starting their own “homes” at the same time that many of them began to “leave” their family homes. By staying longer in the educational system, participating in the labor market, experimenting with new leisure activities, and shaping new courtship practices, young women questioned the ideals of domesticity and equating womanhood with motherhood and wifehood. Amid these practical contestations and the expanding horizons that young women pursued, parents tried to reassert their authority. The maladjustments between young women’s experiences and expectations and patriarchal authority created daily dilemmas. In some cases young women could solve the quandary by marrying early to start a new “home.” And in other cases young women set in motion a desire to literally “leave home.”

  The Making of a Moral Panic

  An often-invoked desire expressed by young women, “leaving home,” or rather, “running away from home,” also represented a concern for educators, the media, and psychological advisers. In fact, a tiny but increasingly visible minority of young women set in motion the desire to leave their homes, and their fate came under the spotlight in the early 1960s. Many moral watchdogs and segments of the media believed that young women left home to pursue a hedonistic and sexualized lifestyle, known as the “Dolce Vita.” This was the general framework to encode the moral panic around the Penjerek case, a panic in which the Catholic conservative groups were at the vanguard of a broad spectrum of voices that included state officers, politicians, and unaffiliated parents. An informal yet vast alliance supported practices aimed at restricting young men’s and, chiefly, young women’s increasing autonomy, which they saw as a means of reconstructing patriarchal authority and of reinforcing domestic ideals that many thought were vanishing. An analysis of the making of that panic shows that well into the 1960s cultural conservatism permeated Argentina’s culture. It also offers a window to observe how discussions of politics, sexuality, and youth intersected.

  The practice of running away has always been a way to melodramatically represent a response to family conflict. It reappeared forcefully by the late 1950s, both in film and in the lives of some young women. Two popular melodramas released in 1958, Demasiado jóvenes (Too Young, dir. Leopoldo Torres Ríos) and Una cita con la vida (A Date with Life, dir. Hugo del Carril), for example, focused, respectively, on the story of a working-class girl and a middle-class girl who begin dating boys their age against the wishes of their cold and unaffectionate parents. In the midst of tense intrafamilial relations, the young heroines run away from their homes. Both episodes are short-lived and serve as shocking events, attempts to recraft the young women’s relations with their parents, who turn into models of affection and tolerance. The movies echoed the concerns of Edward Cahn’s Runaway Daughters (1956), released in Argentina—to box office success—in 1957 as Adolescencia. In contrast to the American movie, though, the Argentines focused on lone girls rather than on a “teenager group,” and represented running away as a desperate attempt to repair familial lives depicted as wearisome. However, when actual young women voiced their desire to run away they focused less on the possible results of their actions than on the causes. For example, in letters written to a teacher, one secondary school girl emphasized her feelings: “
I just want to leave: they [her parents] give me no peace.” A second girl further dramatized: “My parents are my jailers: I want to leave this prison.” By drawing on the same metaphor, a third girl confessed: “I have the growing desire to run away, to leave the prison behind.”37 Letter writers to women’s magazines repeated that desire, which they connected with parental rejection of their boyfriends and “over-control over everything I do,” as one girl put it.38 “Leaving home” represented, to these girls, a means to circumvent what they depicted as suffocating parental authoritarianism.

  Psychologists and psychoanalysts, like the movies and educators, also helped publicize the issue of runaway girls and their troublesome familial relations. Consulted by the media, some psychologists argued that young women ran away—or threatened to—so as to blackmail their parents who, “afraid of losing them, conceded everything.” They suggested parents not “fall into this trap,” yet also reminded them that “presumed or real runaway girls” were a symptom of “things that had gone awry,” and that they needed psychological help.39 For their part, the heads of one of the first adolescent psychology programs at a public hospital reported that, in 1961, 38 out of 120 patients had begun treatment because of permanent clashes at homes. While the doctors believed that these adolescents’ behaviors were healthy and helped them “affirm their identity,” they were alarmed at the “high rate of runaway girls” they had seen.40 Another psychoanalyst reported on the clinical case of a girl who went into analysis right after running away. Because her parents became exceedingly strict after discovering that she was flirting with an older boy, the girl pretended to be sick and asked to be hospitalized. She took to the streets after being momentarily overlooked by the nurses. When the psychoanalyst asked her the reason, she answered, “to get away from my parents.”41