Particularly the stories of Elvira and Cecilia Deggeller will be remembered. By 1908, Sadie Town and her husband travelled to the United States and passed on their missionary enthusiasm to others. As a fruit of that trip several missionaries arrived in the continent, one of them was the nurse Meda Kerr. All these women were determined and tenacious, full of the Holy Spirit and of love for the Gospel. Some of them came to South America knowing they would not return to their homeland. They came to dedicate their lives to the evangelical mission. The missionary couples complemented each other in every respect and accordingly they carried out a valuable work with the definite and permanent help of the Most High.
It now remains to rewrite history adding the female contribution to God’s cause. Hanna Norheim said that “when women as a group are overlooked, they are also discredited and a notion is formed that they have not had a significant influence in the Christian church”.7 The idea is to enjoy remembering some of the “grandmothers, mothers and young ladies” of years gone by that gave themselves to spreading the Adventist message in South America. We hope that their stories will give courage to the efforts of women and inspire the rescue of bits and pieces of lost history.
2 Otilia Peverini de Ampuero, Delantales blancos [White Aprons] (n. p.: By the autor, n. d.), 80.
3 Ellen G. White, “Address and Appeal: Setting forth the Importance of Missionary Work”, Review and Herald 52, No. 25 (December 19, 1878): 1-2; White, Evangelism, 477-478.
4 Frank Westphal, Pioneering in the Neglected Continent (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Association, 1927).
5 Ibid.
6 Robert G. Wearner, “Lucy Post: Pioneer Pillar in Adventist Missions”, Review and Herald 65, No. 20 (March 3, 1988): 19.
7 Hanna Norheim, “Mujeres al servicio de Cristo [Women at the Service of Christ]”, Diálogo 21, Nos. 2-3 (2009): 17.
3
Historical Context
It was the decade of 1890 in Argentina. At that time, travelling wasn’t as easy and comfortable as today. You could travel afoot, by horse or mule, in a carriage or stagecoach, over dirt roads. The railroad was starting to stretch out from Buenos Aires to other important cities. Bicycles were a luxury and cars were scarce. The sky was bluer and distances longer, towns were small and inhabitants few.
Women went through more difficult times than today’s. To understand it, we must briefly summarize their civil situation, particularly in Argentina, during the period of time considered.
In the civil and political spheres, women were relegated, treated as inferior to men and, with their children, considered property. That decade is part of a century that marked a regression in the rights of women because of the blockage of the civil rights that existed earlier in this country inspired in Napoleon’s well known code (1804). The new laws constituted an inferiorization of the female status, that was a contrast to previous times. Probably this was a result of contradictory ideologies, that worked together strengthening the patriarchal perspective. Those ideologies led to the fixing of assumptions that a woman is unpredictable and ungovernable and to have the apparently scientific certainty of that time about their biological inferiority. This convinced the men of that time about the need to prevent women from being equalled before the law, because this could lead to a natural disaster. “Science” tried to make evident the differences between sexes. The most productive theory was Evolution, that pretended, under the disguise of science, to impose reason and thus explain the distributive imperfection between the sexes. That was how laws were enforced that resolutely increased the capacities of males and decreased those of women.8
Since the late 19th century, isolated voices presented their questioning about women’s legal inferiority. These voices were of women and also of not a few men of law, who explained the outrageous asymmetry between sexes in legal matters. In 1898, Doctor José Olegario Machado wrote: “It is time that our legislation, realizing the intellectual advancement of women, free her from the perpetual guardianship that has held her, and reduce the marital power to whatever is of absolute necessity for the management of the business of the community”.9
Machado stated:
Women’s civil incapacity answers to the need of a single management of the family, one head leader and one chief that rules; for the moment we do not see her as a partner with equal action in family issues, nor in those of civilian life, but the instruction and education she receives, her judgement and thoughts will mature with the passing of time […] and the day is not far away when she will be an associate to man with equal rights.10
Juan Agustín García, one of the most lucid jurists, from his chair and the press wrote in La Nación [The Nation] in 1902, at a time when the emancipatory project of Luis María Drago was not successful in Congress and the end of the feminine subjection was promoted, that to him was the cause of
Unspeakable suffering, real dramas full of pain, that only we, who by our profession intervene daily in these things, know. […] Women’s economic emancipation is imposed in all legislations based on the Christian marriage; implicit in its logical and historical development, in its fatal and irresistible tendency; in the working classes, because the wages belong to the one who wins it, because the general thesis is, that the mother is more thrifty and farsighted than the father; in the wealthy classes, to avoid wicked exploitations.11
Although the great battle for the female emancipation happened between de decades of 1910 and 1920, the Argentine woman remained legally discriminated until 1985 when the law of shared parental authority was enforced, during the rule of president Alfonsín.12
When taking into account the circumstances described and going back to the decade of 1890, when the SDA church started to spread the message in the South American continent, we are compelled to highlight the Christian and biblical concepts that the Adventist pioneers from other continents subscribed to in relation to the equality of men and women in the mission of the Church. The adventist message of 1890 included an anthropology, based in the Word of God, which promoted equality in the way men and women were treated as part of the plan of salvation by grace proclaimed by Jesus Christ. However, the influence of the pioneers was not enough for this equality to be clearly reflected in reality, as the denomination’s historical records show. There were still external influences that hindered the full understanding of the biblical concepts and their practice.
At the time of 1890, it was only