Female education: brief background

On April 12, 1823, at the initiative of Bernardino Rivadavia, government minister of Buenos Aires in the government of Martin Rodríguez, the Sociedad de Damas de Beneficencia was institutionally created, related to what we know today as mutual or mutual aid associations ( De subventione pauperum).
Promoting female education and guaranteeing the organization of appropriate establishments were its determining objectives, assigning women a relevant role in the educational mission, a role omitted and neglected at that time.

The Charity Society functioned as such until September 1946, when President Juan Domingo Perón ordered its intervention, putting his supporter Armando Pérez de San Martín, in charge of it.
An important piece of information or the heart of the matter was that President Juan Perón was enraged when the appointment of the then Argentine first lady, María Eva Duarte, as “honorary president” was vetoed. The basis for such a veto was precisely the youth of “Evita” among other disqualifications.
Since then, incipiently, embryonic populisms began to “influence” with clientelism as a political method that General Perón had already used in other public departments.
Consequently, the functions of the Sociedad de las Damas de Beneficencia were divided into secretariats that were publicized as achievements of his wife Eva Duarte de Perón. Obviously, the Sociedad de Beneficencia ceased to exist a year later when, paradoxically and in its place, the idea of the Eva Perón Foundation materialized.
However, since its inception, the management of said charitable society was in the hands of women who had to be in charge, -in addition to other objectives and purposes-, of the education of girls in a city like Buenos Aires which, until At that time, there were no schools for them.

From the European emergence of “public relief” (15th century), the solidarity ideal of Christian humanism was combined with the needs for social control and those of tempering poverty, typical of an incipient bourgeois and capitalist society, without social responsibility.
But if it were a question of feminine Christian humanism, like no one among us, the priest José Gabriel del Rosario Brochero (1840/1914), holy shepherd of traslasierras, without speculation or politicking, from the beginning of his parish or ministry he dealt personally and selflessly for female education and the promotion of women.
He did it in each educational recommendation to young girls from the mountains or rural areas, achieving for this the construction of a school for girls, a spacious building (today as a historic Brocheriano Museum it works in the primitive House of Spiritual Exercises built by the Brochero priest in 1877 , building declared a National Historic Monument on May 9, 1974) destined for a boarding school where a vast and solid female education was provided, so useful and necessary for the dignity, development, respect, autonomy and progress of women. inside high inside.

Finally, how not to imitate and replicate Brochero´ in the face of an educational policy that has gone astray without novelty?, with schools from the 19th century, teachers from the 20th century and students from the 21st century; with undignified starvation wages where even the rulers strive to recover school days (quantitative) rather than update and rescue content (qualitative); all this without valuing and properly equipping its teachers, students, classrooms and non-teachers, in the face of the dismantling, politicization and corruption of the Argentine welfare state and its citizenship rights such as education, not only for women.
Finally, enough of statistical alterations or parties for graduates, only with functionally illiterate young people.
*Coneau expert in cooperativism.