Students, Artists, and Feminists: Reappropriating Modern Womanhood in the Journal Artes y Letras of New York

Abstract

Among the numerous newspapers and magazines written in Spanish and published in New York during the early decades of the twentieth century, the cultural journal Artes y Letras was of particular relevance.Artes y Letras was a project that integrated feminism, Hispanismand citizenship with the aim of representing Hispanic culture, defending equal rights for women, and providing a positive and strategic representation of the identity and emancipation of modern women. This article offers an analysis of some of the biographical essays about Hispanic women published in the journal and focuses in particular on the photographs attached to them, insofar as they problematize the criteria under which an individual is considered exemplary and the notions of progress and modernity involved when considering racialized women. From their position as students, artists and professionals, these women not only strike poses that reveal an intertextuality with the imaginary associated to the glamour and comfort of modern American life but they also embody the influence of the new conditions of visibility in the process of self-representation of femininity.