From this platform, the feminists positioned themselves as matriarchs of a more socially progressive Cuba (p. 70).
Editorials in Avance occasionally addressed the women's movement, arguing that women offered the vanguard advantages in their struggle for sociopolitical change. In fall 1927, contributor Enrique José Varona (1849–1933) heralded feminism, associating it with the broader social revolution for which he and the journal's intellectuals fought. His praise brought the weight of a veteran of the Independence Wars, a former vice president (1913–1917) known for criticizing political corruption, a positivist philosopher and professor at the University of Havana who mentored contemporary students in the opposition. In a 1929 editorial on the women's movement's effort to win the right to vote for women, the editors argued that women were key to the democratization of Cuba as a means of escaping Cuba's history of political corruption, expressing that the “feminization” of Cuban politics could make the process more human (Directrices: Feminismo y democratización 1929a); another article from the same year praised the Lyceum, noting that “one must have deep faith in the public action of women” (Almanque 1929). Stoner argues that such positive assessments of women's abilities to aid the nation were pervasive throughout the twenties and thirties and resulted in the inclusion of many feminist reforms in the Constitution of 1940. The articles suggest that women were considered to exist outside the realm of historic corruption plaguing national politics and that their participation offered advantages in the opposition's quest for reform.
In 1936, a woman was appointed director of Cuba's Culture Ministry, a move the press celebrated in ways that reveal the national authenticity attributed to women's cultural work. Vanguard notions of nationalism and creativity, new social roles for women, and recent changes in Cuban government (Pérez 1995, pp. 276–277) were all associated with the appointment of Dra. Esperanza de Quesada y Villalón. Her appointment put a woman in charge of the preservation of Cuban culture, following the Lyceum's example. In the months leading up to Quesada's appointment, many articles had recapped the Lyceum's unique role in protecting the vanguard and preserving national culture during the difficult years of the Machado dictatorship. Echoing analogies made about the Lyceum, Grafos writer Conchita Gallardo (1936) compared a woman's role as mother educating her children – the citizens of tomorrow – to the national educational mandate of the Culture Ministry. For this reason, Gallardo argued that it was particularly appropriate to name a woman as chief. Furthermore, Gallardo lauded Quesada for her feminine nature and upstanding character: “She has the highest personality and idealism and the most effective action; she is a woman of today, possessing the gentle feminine spirit, [and] the energies of character, bravery, determination, and conscientiousness” (n.p.). Democratic character traits and female stewardship of national culture came together once again, as they had many times before in the commentary on the Lyceum found in the pages of Revista de Avance.
A key aspect of the potential for women's unique contribution to the nation seems to have been their perceived distance from the corruption that the vanguard sought to address in national politics. Critic Manuel Bisbé remarked that the Lyceum was a “refuge” from contentious national politics, a neutral place where diverse viewpoints could be expressed in a tolerant atmosphere (Caballero de Ichaso and Bisbé 1939). He said that such a refuge was necessary at that time more than ever; Cubans needed a “home to the spirit.” The only condition of debate was that “the passions have to remain outside, [as do] the shameless clothing, dirty from the blood and sludge of the fight” (pp. 29–30). His description gives the sense that uncensored and thus authentic debate was only possible in the safety of the private sphere, in locales like the Lyceum, where the scrutiny and compromised nature of public life could not interfere.
The traditional associations of women's domestic lives with the private sphere may have also affected how critics discussed a woman's place in the vanguard's contemplative pursuit of national art. Contemporary art criticism suggests female figures and domestic spaces were couched in terms of the emotional, inner reality of the artist that vanguard critics urged forth. One of the earliest examples of this is in a 1932 review of an exhibition of the work of Pura Rogríguez Castells, held at the Lyceum. The artist was praised for her “prodigious interior world” and the “emotiveness” present in the faces of the mysterious women she painted, each one a symbol of an emotional or mental state (Ordetx 1932).
Víctor Manuel's art, too, was seen by critics to exemplify the sort of personal expression advocated by the vanguard; his female figures were understood to make manifest his emotional life. In fact, in his review of Víctor Manuel's 1933 Lyceum show, Pérez Castillo drew a parallel between the subjectivity of the artist and the subjectivity of his female figures, and in so doing, effectively placed the vanguard preference for emotional expression onto the female figure, thereby making the female figure an icon of vanguard subjectivity. When Pérez Castillo compares Víctor Manuel's work to the tradition of removing young Cuban girls from society, he invokes the nineteenth‐century custom in which criollo women remain primarily at home for the protection of their moral virtue. Pérez Castillo's comparison of this criollo domesticity to Víctor Manuel's emotionally grounded images suggests that the vanguard's practice of withdrawal into oneself was akin to the traditional withdrawal of criollo women from society.
Responses to a 1934 Rita Longa (1912–2000) sculpture show at the Lyceum also engaged the contemplative nature critics attributed to Víctor Manuel's depictions of women (R.S.S. 1935). Critic Sarah Cabrera (1934) noted the questioning way Longa's female figure in Interrogación (Question, c.1924) looks at herself in a mirror. Cabrera argued that the answer to her question was in the mirror's image, as if the woman were able to look inside herself. In this sculpture, Longa has shaped a lithe female body into a graceful question mark. The simple form leaves no doubt as to the symbol her body is meant to invoke: the arch of her back, extension of her hair, and close proximity of her face to the mirror she holds suggests extreme introversion. The curve of her body forces all of her attention into the mirror; she is unavailable for anyone else. The artist has used both composition and form to create a symbol of inquiry out of the introspective pose of the woman's body. The implication is that women may find in themselves the answers to the artistic and intellectual restlessness embodied by the vanguard.
These reviews reveal a tendency by critics to associate vanguard practices – the interior‐oriented, subjective, and nonrepresentational use of the formal tools of art for emotional expression – with a set of stereotypes about women in general. Critics repeatedly read female figures in Cuban painting as symbolic of the vanguard's sincere, personal, and interior‐derived expression. This interpretation stems from contemporary expectations that women were innately predisposed to interiority and that they were also removed from the larger problems that stimulated the vanguard's approach.
The vanguard was pursuing the basic principles of modern art in Europe, which they recoded via a notion of internal personal expression to be both Cuban and specific to Cuban politics. The emphasis on personal orientation precludes the possibility of a group style, hence the vanguard's pride in the diversity of expression among their cohort. The political nature that critics attributed to this, although not visible in any precise iconographic or formal expression, is in the sincerity of self‐exploration and personal expression. How such an apparently apolitical program could have been thought to be political can be understood only in the context of political corruption and repression, where sincerity was largely absent in official public discourse and personal expression could bring arrest, or worse.
Notwithstanding these very real pressures on the vanguardistas' political activism, the possibility exists that this retreat inside, in pursuit of emotional subjectivity, was in itself an escape from the sociopolitical instability that threatened the vanguard's middle‐class comforts. Shut out of traditional politics by the elites and threatened by economic fragility and the recent organization of labor groups with descent into the lower classes, middle‐class intellectuals used culture (Whitney 2001) and virtue to differentiate themselves. Could it be that these motives for their combined cultural and political project also compelled them to seek an escape from these troubling circumstances?
It is possible, too, that
