Celebrating 99 years of feminist journalism in the Dominican Republic

On July 15, 1922, at 11 José Reyes Street in San Pedro de Macorís, the teacher and feminist journalist Petronila Angélica Gómez Brea, the housewife and columnist Consuelo Montalvo de Frías and the Puerto Rican feminist María Luisa Angelis de Canino, together with the mayor Vetilio Valera Reyes, published the first issue of Revista Fémina, the first and so far only publication of “vanguard suffragism” printed in the Dominican Republic, of which there are documentary records.

When commemorating 99 years of this AGENCY (understood as the capacity that emancipated women have to act independently and make their decisions freely), the digital platform República Fémina, values the milestone indicating that the evidences that demonstrate the activisms developed in San Pedro de Macorís, such as the formation of an editorial board to argue about the urgency for women to be allowed full political, economic and social participation, reaffirms the historical subject of Dominican women in the exercise of their subjective rights, despite the lack of political and civil rights.

The magazine Fémina is an example of the awareness raised by women teachers in the first two decades of the 20th century and their interest in dismantling the inequalities that prevented them from achieving higher professional qualifications, deciding their destiny outside marriage, participating in the reestablishment of Dominican sovereignty and holding public office, among other inequalities, according to the creators of República Fémina, poet and senior gender historian Ylonka Nacidit-Perdomo and journalist Elvira Lora.

To evidence the transcendence of Fémina, the platform that since November 2018 rescues the memory of feminist journalistic praxis, retraces the expression with which its founder and director dismissed the feminist editions, as a result of the growing oppressions of the Trujillo dictatorship; as well as letters of congratulations that in the course of 17 years of uninterrupted publications made the “vanguard suffragettes”, and also media companies such as Listín Diario and allied feminist men, at that time.

From this 99th anniversary, the República Fémina platform prepares the commemoration of 100 years of the AGENCIA that gathered more than 76 feminist women journalists from all over Ibero-America, starting next August with the series of “feminaries” that will also allow “the re-foundation of the millenary “knowledge” of women”, and the collective construction of the referent developed by Petronila Angélica Gómez Brea, Consuelo Montalvo de Frías and María Luisa Angelis de Canino.

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