How to Live in a World on Fire: The Impact of the War of Independence on Women’s Everyday Lives

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on recovering components of the impact that the actions unleashed by the war on the northern front had on women, more specifically in what is now the province of Jujuy, during a period that can be placed between 1810 and 1825.

The choice to focus on women is grounded in several and varied reasons. Beyond our own inscription in the female gender, the delay in Jujuy both in making visible and in recognizing women’s participation in the war means that any effort at documentary recovery in this regard constitutes a milestone that helps to outline a submerged history.

However, this is not a matter of inserting the subalternized “half of the sky” into an established ontology, but rather of breaking with that unified and unifying memory and making room for readings from other perspectives.

Through two scenes, the paper shows how war, as a state of exception in relation to everyday life, is a context that allows women, on the one hand, to open practice toward paths previously and tacitly forbidden, while, on the other hand, it generates situations of extreme suffering.

A case recovered from the documentary archives of the Jujuy courts is described as a model for presenting the scenario of opportunity, while literary narratives and oral accounts are used as images of the second situation.