Gabriela Mistral and motherhood

Abstract

Gabriela Mistral, an active promoter of women’s emancipation since her adolescence, wrote that the essence of femininity was found in motherhood. This would make our Nobel Prize winner an influential exponent of a feminism that vindicates women’s rights based on equality with men, but also on the intrinsic and unique capacity that it has to capture life. However, our poet claimed that being a woman was not limited to biological motherhood and that this, at the same time, went beyond its biological nature, expanding to cultural creation. To demonstrate the above, the author delves into Gabriela Mistral’s prose, poetry, private correspondence, and personal diaries, to argue that she lived an ideal life as a material (adoptive) mother and an independent and spiritual woman (poet, political, and mystique), who tried to reconcile all these roles, achieving an astoundingly full life.