The woman and el eterno femenino in Rosario Castellanos

Abstract

Rosario Castellanos is one of the most eminent Mexican writers of the twentieth century. With numerous award-wining works written in various literary styles (essays, tales, novels and plays), she denounced women's oppression and mysthification of the feminine by androcentric cultural systems and patriarchal societies. She undertook the feminist flag of the seventies and struggled
with her literature and creative force against the macho culture of her own country, which inspired women all over the American continent, even though she remained little known in Brazil. In her book Mujer que sabe latín (1973) she compiled her most important ideas about feminine subordination and, in the play El eterno femenino (1975), she employed these conceptions as her own art material, creating, in an ironic and caricature way, several Mexican women's personas
with the purpose of denouncing country's sexism and hypocrisy. Between one and another work, wenregain some of the strength's features of her committed literature and her existence with her battles with the words to give woman freedom and ending her social subordination.