An American Teacher in Argentina

Mary Gorman’s Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from New Mexico to the Pampas

Julyan G. Peard

An American Teacher in Argentina tells the story of Mary E. Gorman who in 1869 was the first North American woman to accept President Domingo F. Sarmiento’s invitation to set up normal schools in Argentina, where she eventually settled. An ordinary historical actor whose life only sometimes enters the historical record, she moved along the fault lines of some of the greatest historical dramas and changes in nineteenth-century US and Argentine history: she was a pioneering child on the US-Indian frontier; she participated in the push for US women’s education; she was a single woman traveler at a time when few women traveled alone; she was a player in an Argentine attempt to expand common school education; and a beneficiary of the great primary products export boom in the second half of nineteenth-century Argentina, and thus well positioned to enjoy the country’s Belle Époque.

The book is not a straightforward, biographical narrative of a woman’s life. It charts a life, but, more important, it charts the evolving ideas in a life lived mostly among people pushing boundaries in pursuit of what they considered progress. What emerges is a quintessentially transnational life story that engages with themes of gender, education, religion, contact with indigenous peoples in both the US and Argentina, natural history, and economic and political change in Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century. Because the book tells a good story about one woman’s rich and eventful life, it will also appeal to an audience beyond academe.

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 300 • Trim: 6½ x 9¼

978-1-61148-764-0 • Hardback • July 2016 • $88.00 • (£68.00)

978-1-61148-765-7 • eBook • July 2016 • $83.50 • (£64.00)

Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Educators, Education / General, Literary Criticism / Caribbean & Latin American

An American Teacher in Argentina

Mary Gorman’s Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from New Mexico to the Pampas

Hardback

eBook

Summary

An American Teacher in Argentina tells the story of Mary E. Gorman who in 1869 was the first North American woman to accept President Domingo F. Sarmiento’s invitation to set up normal schools in Argentina, where she eventually settled. An ordinary historical actor whose life only sometimes enters the historical record, she moved along the fault lines of some of the greatest historical dramas and changes in nineteenth-century US and Argentine history: she was a pioneering child on the US-Indian frontier; she participated in the push for US women’s education; she was a single woman traveler at a time when few women traveled alone; she was a player in an Argentine attempt to expand common school education; and a beneficiary of the great primary products export boom in the second half of nineteenth-century Argentina, and thus well positioned to enjoy the country’s Belle Époque.

The book is not a straightforward, biographical narrative of a woman’s life. It charts a life, but, more important, it charts the evolving ideas in a life lived mostly among people pushing boundaries in pursuit of what they considered progress. What emerges is a quintessentially transnational life story that engages with themes of gender, education, religion, contact with indigenous peoples in both the US and Argentina, natural history, and economic and political change in Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century. Because the book tells a good story about one woman’s rich and eventful life, it will also appeal to an audience beyond academe.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 300 • Trim: 6½ x 9¼

978-1-61148-764-0 • Hardback • July 2016 • $88.00 • (£68.00)

978-1-61148-765-7 • eBook • July 2016 • $83.50 • (£64.00)

Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Educators, Education / General, Literary Criticism / Caribbean & Latin American

Author

Julyan G. Peard is professor emerita of Latin American History at San Francisco State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
1. Introduction
2. Southwest
3. East
4. Sur
5. Curumalán
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Reviews

Julyan Peard effectively chose to write a biography within the framework of the transnational history of nation making. . . This makes the book not only more intellectually stimulating and informative but also useful and rewarding for scholars, students, and a general audience beyond academe. . . . The scope of Peard's research is wide and diverse. . . . Beyond the book's important transnational approach, this is a story about a woman's personal choices in places and times when political and social changes made by national male elites directly affected women's lives and decisions. Equally important is the fact that the author is a good storyteller, and she successfully tells the life story of one of her ancestors from an objective perspective.
— Hispanic American Historical Review

This is a well-written, complexly contextualised and enormously interesting biography

that will attract the attention of scholars involved in women and gender

studies, transnational studies, and, to a lesser extent, those interested in the history

of education. Non-Argentine readers will learn a great deal about Argentina during

the beginning of the Golden Age (1880-1920), while Argentine readers can find

much information about frontier life, female education and the East–West cultural

gap in the United States. I have learned much from this book; I really enjoyed

reading this biography and would expect other readers to have a similar experience.
— Journal of Latin American Studies