«La emancipada»: las primeras letras y las mujeres en el ecuador decimonónico

Abstract

The article analyses the impact of elementary education in the individual and public experience of women in nineteenth-century Ecuador, during the transition between the period of the Gran Colombia and the first half of the republican period. The first part examines the girls’ schooling process in the context of the establishment of the republican school system, as well as the decline experienced by the utopia of enlightened education in the mid-nineteenth century, when its egalitarian and inclusive mission failed. In contrast with this schooling dimension, the second part reveals an unknown dimension of the Lancasterian project that allowed women to acquire literacy levels adequate to undertake a self-taught way which, at the same time, the society did not stop censoring. The use of unconventional sources such as the novel La Emancipada (The Emancipated) opens new perspectives for research in History of Education with a gender perspective.