Breaking the Mold

Each generation bequeaths its descendants values and habits to accept or reject. The women who fought in the Cuban Wars of Independence presented their daughters with examples of heroism, durability, integrity, ingenuity, self-sacrifice, and combativeness during the campaigns against Spanish rule. The mambisas forged a new model for middle- and upper-class women of the twentieth century by breaking the mold of prescribed behavior for proper Cuban ladies who before 1868 were uneducated and dependent upon men. Mambisas, while remaining wives and mothers, left the protection of their homes, went into the manigua, and took up arms in support of national sovereignty. The protracted guerrilla wars increased the difficulties of daily existence that women could not escape. Engulfed in the struggle to survive, women of all classes expanded their capabilities to include nursing, gunrunning, supplying provisions, fund raising, publishing, and fighting. Their war efforts proved to men and, more importantly, to the women themselves, their worthiness as full citizens in independent Cuba.

The actions of the mambisas contrasted sharply with the activities of proper Cuban ladies who lived only two decades before. Social prescription for the highly bred in 1848 held that women were most desirable when weak, beautiful, and submissive. Men were their tutors in every matter save domestic work. If women received any education at all, it was in Church catechism to enhance their virtues as mothers. Men feared that women uninstructed in religious fundamentals risked becoming perverted, frivolous, and gossips. They might even fall into the disagreeable habit of reading "adventurous love stories" that would give them the illusion that love could possibly offer pleasure or enchantment. Such an illusion might lead them away from the brutal reality that marriage "was the painful job of having children." Women's education was based upon the principles that they should not use their intellects and that their place was having children and doing domestic work in the home.

Escaping the confinement of marriage was impossible for women and men. The family was the social base that united a people and preserved class and familial authority. It bound men to men through extended family ties. Society functioned according to power linkages between family groups, and each group succeeded or failed according to its ability to control wealth and to protect family and friends under the direction of the patriarch. Conversely, the family-based society was closed to interlopers or newcomers seeking power and wealth.

Marriage, ideally, was a panacea for all that was bad in society. It was a paradise for parents and children. It liberated women from working for a living as domestic servants, street vendors, or prostitutes. Parenthood increased social sympathy. Every member of society worked to enhance the well-being of the family. The husband and head of household, under the patria potestad, was the sole administrator of wealth and family relations. The husband and wife helped one another in time of need. Children were guaranteed protection, shelter, food, and sustenance. They also inherited what estate there might be. As adults, the children insured their aging parents against want, hunger, and loneliness. Theoretically, then, society progressed according to family economies and within family units and not according to a government's economic strategies.

Within marriage and parenthood, women were inferior to men. Women were mothers and expected to be generous, tender, merciful, soft, timid, and compassionate. Their only acceptable public function was to help children and disadvantaged women through Catholic charity organizations where the Church could oversee their work.

Many privileged women strove to be exemplary wives and mothers, though not always of their own volition. Their behavior was prescribed by Church teaching, social custom, and man-made laws. Religion and education reinforced their family orientation, while the penal code allowed husbands to kill unfaithful wives with impunity. Just as Cuban society under Spanish domination was subject to violent suppression for social and political restlessness, women were subject to violent repression for challenging their subordination to men.

Women outside the privileged classes suffered under the same principles of subordination but lacked the protection that money and power provided. For many women, poverty meant arduous work and living on the verge of starvation. The sanctity of marriage and men's protection eluded many because poor men could not maintain their families. Racial and class distinctions placed an inferior value on black, mulatto, and poor women's lives. While the Catholic Church attempted to impose moral behavior on all women regardless of race and class, social custom—namely, concubinage and unsanctioned unions—determined that many poor women of any race would be unwed mothers and workers outside the home. For these women, marriage, religion, notions of the "bello sexo," the arts, charity, tenderness, and deference to men had no place.

Some privileged women ignored prescribed behavior and became recognized intellectuals before the end of the century. The better authors, however, spent much of their lives in Europe. One of Cuba's protofeminists, Mercedes Santa Cruz de Montalvo (La Condesa de Merlin), resided in France through the greater part of her life, having left Cuba at the age of twelve. Her writing reflects her womanly sentiments and Cuban roots. Perhaps in response to Descartes' enlightened phrase "I think, therefore I am," she said, "I think because I feel, and I write because I think. Herein lies my art." The Condesa's greatest contribution was her unbridled sentiment and her unapologetic respect for a feminine perspective.

The Condesa wrote prose about Cuba and her life. In 1833 she published in Paris Mis doce primeros años, which was about her early childhood in Cuba. Later she wrote Sor Inés 0 Santa Rosa, which was published along with Mis doce primeros años as Memorias de una criolla. In 1833 she published in two volumes Ocios de una mujer de gran mundo o Lola y María, Marquis de Foudras, a book that she claimed was essential reading for any woman who aspired to excellence in any given field. Her greatest work, La esclavitud en Cuba, was written in 1849. After her return to Cuba in 1851, the Condesa published in Paris three volumes about Cuba entitled Viaje a la Habana.

Gertrudis...