Over the past fifteen years, Argentines have been exposed regularly to the sound of former President and Senator Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's voice on the radio and television. Some complain about her strident, hectoring tone, while others find her speeches inspiring, but nearly everyone agrees that she sounds a lot like another influential woman in Argentine history: Eva Duarte de Perón. ‘Evita’ was a successful radio actress before she met Juan Perón in 1944. As First Lady and head of both the Eva Perón Foundation and the Women's Peronist Party, she used her voice to strengthen the Peronist movement and consolidate her power. She built what she called a ‘bridge of love’ between Perón and his people that endured long after her death in 1952, and probably inspired Fernández de Kirchner's speaking style.
In Radio and the Gendered Soundscape, Christine Ehrick argues that Eva Perón's voice ‘did not emerge in a vacuum’ (p. 1). This interdisciplinary analysis of women's voices on the radio in Argentina and Uruguay draws on insights from both gender studies and sound studies. Ehrick surmises that her readers may be comfortable ‘look[ing] for gender’, and urges them instead to ‘listen for it’ and to recognise ‘sound as a signifier of power’ (p. 7). Her innovative approach requires some technical language. Voices on the radio are not ‘disembodied’ but ‘acousmatic’: listeners hear them without seeing the people who produce the sound (p. 13). In the 1930s and 1940s, female radio personalities ‘introduced a new dissonance into the gendered soundscape’ (p. 3). Dissonance, in turn, became an ‘engine of historical change’ (p. 17). Ehrick's methodological ambitions will interest scholars from a range of fields, while her readable prose makes the book suitable for history students.
The book offers a series of sympathetic, celebratory portraits of women who diversified the soundscape in the region of the Río de la Plata by ‘speaking with authority’ (p. 199). Ehrick carefully reads her sources to restore agency and voice, while also analysing why women's voices proved threatening. The first chapter focuses on an Uruguayan journalist and radio personality, Silvia Guerrico, who gave voice to the modern girl on the radio in Buenos Aires. Like most of Ehrick's subjects, Guerrico did not identify as a feminist, but her radio programmes opposed patriarchal power. Ehrick contends that her voicing of female desire proved subversive, and may have inspired regulations about radio content instituted in Argentina in 1934. Chapter 2 reconstructs the history of Radio Femenina, a forgotten all-women's radio station in Uruguay. One of the station's female hosts argued that radio could ‘convey to feminine souls an exact idea of what women need to be today’ (p. 79).
Chapter 3 considers two women who used radio propaganda to different political ends: Uruguayan feminist Paulina Luisi and Eva Perón. Like many Latin American feminists, Luisi called on women to oppose fascism and promote world peace. Ehrick was unable to find any recordings of Luisi's radio broadcasts, so she encourages readers to imagine the sound of her voice as they read her words. Paulina Luisi and Eva Perón spoke in different registers and to different audiences, but both used their voices to make change, and both fought for women's rights. In Chapters 4 and 5, Ehrick analyses the radio performances of two Argentine entertainers: Niní Marshall, whose satirical impressions of working-class women showed that women's voices could be funny, and Nené Cascallar, whose ideas about duty and desire echoed Peronist rhetoric.
This book constitutes an extraordinary effort, given the limited availability of recordings and the many gaps in the documentary record. Ehrick relies heavily on radio periodicals like the Programa oficial de estaciones Uruguayas de radio and Radiolandia, but also uses a range of archival sources from Uruguay, Argentina and the United States, as well as libretti from private collections. She analyses how women may have sounded to their listeners, and how their tones changed over time. Her capable translations of poems and comedic sketches make for an entertaining read.
For historians of Argentina, the book's most surprising aspect is its comparative and transnational analysis of what Ehrick calls the ‘rioplatense cultural zone’ (p. 17). Cultural influences circulated between Montevideo and Buenos Aires, broadcasts from one city reached the other, and people travelled back and forth too. Radio personalities like Niní Marshall fled Peronist Argentina and reappeared on Uruguayan radio. Ehrick prompts historians of Argentina to pay attention to these connections. She also draws productively on recent developments in the cultural history of Peronism, especially the increased focus on consumption. Her description of Peronism as a ‘noisy phenomenon’ (p. 104) resonates with Ezequiel Adamovsky and Esteban Buch's La marchita, el escudo y el bombo (Planeta, 2014).
Most historians of Peronism would not think to compare Eva Perón to Paulina Luisi or Nené Cascallar, but Ehrick's analysis raises questions about the role of women in the public sphere that could push future scholarship in unexpected directions. Studies of Peronism tend to focus on the working class, but the example of Nené Cascallar's melodramas hints at the degree to which Peronist ideas and rhetoric infiltrated middle-class life. How did women of various class backgrounds respond to the political, social and cultural messages they heard over the airwaves? By 1947, Argentina had one radio for every two households across the country, and a number of radio stations in provincial capitals. Radio played an important role in connecting listeners in rural regions of the interior to national and international issues. To what degree did those listeners identify with the values of Ehrick's ‘rioplatense cultural zone’?
Ehrick argues persuasively that ‘radio was a crucial arena for struggles over women's citizenship and place in the public sphere’ (p. 208). Her examples show that the debate about women's rights involved many women who were not affiliated with the feminist movement. This book highlights the advantages of an expansive, interdisciplinary approach to the history of women and gender.
