Victoria Ocampo’s Transnational Networks: A Sociocultural and Data-driven Approach

Abstract

It is a matter of fact that women played a relevant role in the development of modernity. However, their identities, faces, and public significance are very difficult to trace in historical sources (through, for instance, periodicals), partly because their names were erased from the public record over time and partly because they were simply not recorded, as their male counterparts failed to appreciate their contributions. We often learn about them thanks to their writings (autobiographies, diaries, or essays), their correspondences, or their appearance in photographs or portraits. As a result, their names seldom appear in public reports, and are hardly ever associated with a significant contribution or active collaboration in the public domain. This pattern of invisibility increases depending on their social class and geographical origin. In the case of Latin America, women were (and still are) at the periphery of the periphery. They were in the margins because of their condition as women and also because of their geographical origin. This research aims to apply a gender perspective to retrieve and restore the relevance of Latin American women through the networks they succeeded in establishing with other Western female colleagues (European, North American, and Latin American). Using a sociocultural and data feminist approach, this paper proposes some methodological insights to trace women’s historical social networks as a way to make them more visible and as a strategy of recovery. We will focus on the social networks of women belonging to national, regional, or local intellectual elites, as women from low-class backgrounds are much harder to identify. In this respect, we will take as a point of departure Victoria Ocampo’s transnational network. This will allow us to shed light on her ties with other women intellectuals of her time such as Gabriela Mistral from Chile, María de Maeztu and Victoria Kent from Spain, and Virginia Woolf from England. 2 This paper also expands our general understanding of the long nineteenth century by including some women who were born in the nineteenth century but developed their ideas and main activities during the early and mid-twentieth century. Despite the fact that they may have acted as the missing link between both time periods, from a social network perspective, it is very difficult to establish rigid chronological cut-off points, as the relations emerging from the network often encompass a wide range of women, some of them being older and belonging to the previous century. Ocampo’s patrician class origins and the relationships established among Argentinean patrician families also date back to the nineteenth century and are crucial to understanding her social network.