Chapter 30

La Escasez Femenina y la Ciudad de los Hombres

“ City of Men, Shortage of Women”

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Part 1 – Comienza la Década Infame

Sometime between the late 1930s—early 1931.

“Women were abundant…
But there was a scarcity of fertility, legitimacy, and acceptable womanhood.”

After September 6, Argentina was not the same. It adjusted to its new social norms after the coup. The air around La Diagonal del Norte felt denser, as if the city was mourning its death and expecting the rise of something unknown but terrifying. The shift rippled beneath the cobblestone.

The military presence blended with the background as if it had never existed, as if the soldiers in their olive-green uniforms, blue Kragenspiegel collars, and leather boots were permanent figures. They were now part of the daily life of every Argentine. The strenuous sound of their dark brown boots on the streets rumbled from the Plaza de Mayo along the Diagonal del Norte, passing through the Catedral Metropolitana de la Santísima Trinidad.

Resignation was in the air, as revolt was not an option against this presence. Buenos Aires had one viable choice, and that was to assimilate, pray, and absorb the consequences as its identity fractured, splitting into two Argentinas.

Around Avenida Corrientes, cafés reopened their doors with the same menus; the only thing that changed was that the waiters were now neutral parties that just served hot coffee. Conversations became inaudible chatter, calibrated to hide the brewing anger toward the forced regime and Uriburu’s illegitimate presence.

Soon enough, censorship aimed to suppress dissent, while a list of acceptable topics that could be spoken about was published around the Plaza de Mayo. Clandestine newspapers written by caudillos with balls of steel started to circulate through the Villas Miseria, as the voice of the pueblo de verdad.

As the line for the employment offices filled the streets, simultaneously the line for the grocery stores controlled by the provisional government told a different story. Scarcity and poverty were now the reality brought by Uriburu.

Argentina was bleeding its heart out, and it was felt in its core—where it hurt the most. Las Villas Miserables in the poorest areas of Buenos Aires, especially Villa 31. Men drifted toward the Port of Buenos Aires, looking for opportunities along the promising sailor towns. La Boca district promised a steady life, abundance, and women.

The newcomers were faced with a new enemy in the shape of military-aged men from Europe—men of Italian, Jewish, and German descent. With the economy falling into an inevitable depression, Argentine men became resentful to the point of xenophobia. Others came from barrios in Barracas seeking fortune in the trams along the Belgrano del Sur routes.

The labor market was unpredictably volatile during this time as more men came from different barrios and even from rural towns. Many of these men were farmers, ranchers, or merchants—and now they were nobodies.

Their lands and riches were stripped from them by José Félix Uriburu’s men by military force. Those who refused to give up their possessions were executed by firing squad, blindfolded and on their knees, while their lands were plundered and their women were taken.

The influx of men into the city created another problem—a shortage of dwellings for them to reside in. Conventillos (small rooms in tight spaces) were soon overcrowded.

Rooms were too small to house more than one person; some would say they resembled a sardine can. The rooms that were lucky enough to have a bed had a sharing schedule—depending on whose shift it was to sleep comfortably, which would depend greatly on how skillful the men were at seducing the innhouse keeper. She was round around the eyes and not a very appealing woman.

But a woman is a woman, especially during hard times, the men would say to themselves.

The men struggled to secure jobs and feed themselves, so every meal was diluted with water to double it. There was literally no privacy, as they also had to shower together to save utilities—this eroded their male dignity.

Women, on the other hand, became more invisible than ever.

They produced babies, cooked in silence, and worked on factory floors. Some became maids for military households, while others sold flowers around the tram.

They were not gone—just invisible to society. Marriage was a transaction that demanded capital, as now women were judged by their reputation, obedience, and silence.

Mylene and Aimee, thanks to Frankie’s connections, ended up in Palacio Hume—quite an ostentatious place for two women to live alone; however, Mylene and Aimee were not ordinary women.

Yet they could sense the architecture of consequence—the beginning of the Infamous Decade—not by bullets but by erasure.

Buenos Aires did not miss women. It didn’t even recognize them as such.

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Part 2

El Cambio Demográfico, sin bebés no hay Estado.

January 6,1931—Buenos Aires

Ironically, the birth rates declined with the arrival of the new regime; women were blamed for the changes despite evidence to the contrary.

Buenos Aires did not miss women; it did not even recognize them as such. Women were considered vessels of life with the sole purpose of populating the country and satisfying men’s desires.

Even if these desires were bizarre, as it was known that the soldiers liked it rough, hence why they ventured into the poorest enclaves in the city, looking for a good ole’ time. The fertility rates saw a significant drop—around 24–25 new births per thousand Argentines.

These were alarming news items for the regime. Soon enough, the newspapers and radio stations became fixated on the falling birth rates, calling it the weakening of the family institution—an attempt at societal destruction which would lead to the extinction of its populace.

The provisional presidency of José Félix Uriburu printed pamphlets idealizing the fertile woman and dictating what was acceptable womanhood. It felt eerily close to the theories of the Übermensch of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Uriburu grossly misunderstood Nietzsche’s teachings, mistaking them for eugenics rhetoric, as if he were getting ready to calculate a Punnett square. His intentions were to quietly exclude the “wrong or undesirable women.”

The “fertile woman” was of ample bosom, wide hips, naturally rosy lips and rosy cheeks, healthy black or brown hair, with a body made for “child rearing.” She came from a good family and good fortune. She was a lady. She did not speak as if she worked on the docks, surrounding herself with sailors like Carmen from Habanera.

She was not a strong-willed woman who offered her love as she was free to fly away; no—this woman was bound by duty.

“Love is a gypsy child, it has never known a law; if you don’t love me, I love you.” These simple arias from Bizet’s Carmen were the opposite of what Uriburu was attempting to redefine as adequate femininity.

Meanwhile, women worked menial jobs to survive and put food on the table.

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Part 3

Mujeres Presentes, Derechos Ausentes

While upper-class women set the standards for acceptable femininity, they were the face of the state—the maternal mold against which others were compared. Lower-class women were still visible, working as cooks, seamstresses, telegraph operators, food-processing plant workers, and even in the oldest profession of all time… prostitution along the Buenos Aires ports, in Las Villas de la Miseria.

Local women were now in competition with the influx of Jewish women who were escaping religious persecution from countries such as Poland, Russia, and Germany to seek new opportunities and possibly raise themselves out of poverty. Because of inflexible religious laws regarding agunot, many wives were unable to obtain a divorce, which forced them to fall victim to trafficking.

During this period, “white slavery”—a term often used to refer to the sexual trafficking of women that were sold as sex slaves and then coerced into prostitution—was extremely lucrative, especially for groups such as Zwi Migdal, a prostitution cartel with international connections and brothels all over South America.

Zwi Migdal exported and imported Jewish women on and off from the Buenos Aires port, then taking the girls to the famous Madam Emma “La Millonaria” to be inspected, then sent to Luis Migdal and taken to the different brothels across the city.

These brothels were not exclusively Jewish; Argentine women and other migrant women were part of the menu that affluent men often visited to satiate their animal thirst.

Women that were of higher status were groomed by acceptable fertility and femininity standards; for them, premarital sex was off the table—for as good girls do not feel tickles underneath their garments.

Lower-class women soon became resentful of the new standard; many saw it as an insult to the very core of their essence.

“¡Que no sois mujeres completas!” (That we are not complete women!) —said a factory worker to another while discussing the exclusion of their kind.

“¡Que va! ¿Vais tú a creer que ahora todas sois desechables?” —said the second worker.

This comparison amongst the women was the perfect ground to breed envy. The lower-class women felt disenfranchised, while the upper class looked down on them.

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Part 4

Tango, Prostitución y la Ilusión del orden

While the state’s only concern was to police femininity and moralize womanhood, the rise of the working belle was inevitable. The division between the lower and higher classes started to fracture Argentina’s already weak societal infrastructure.

Morality became the new norm, and upper-class women were the enforcers; they became vicious in their quest for acceptable womanhood. The idealized figure of the fertile woman was as caricaturesque as it was grotesque.

Objectification was the new language of the state, dressed in legal jargon so as to justify the rising inequalities. Buenos Aires’ darkest allies exploded with the influx of immigrants from countries such as Poland,Russia, Italy,Spain, Germany ,Portugal and Ukraine settling in the poorest barrios around Belgrano .

This influx brought a new market, one that the prostitution cartels saw as a golden opportunity for profit. Every corner of Buenos Aires quickly turned into a clandestine hub for brothels, while the moralist upper class grew obsessed with cleansingness, social necessity and order.

Casas de Toleracia (“Houses of Tolerance “) were funded to register all the lower class women, and if that was not enough humiliation, these women would also be categorized after thorough medical examination. This social stratification was not just cruel but dehumanizing.

The upper-class women knew that men had needs that were less than adequate for social standing, but there were “disposable women” for such atrocious actions; this led to the acceptance of mistresses, as if it were better to have a husband with a clear mind than a husband full of testosterone and milk.

Meanwhile, the lower-class men in the docks around the Port of Buenos Aires, in their spare time, began to practice a coupled dance. This dance was full of anger, frustration, and passion.

In each castigada, as the 4/4 time tempo permitted between each step, the embraces would be forceful, while the back of the hand would slide down the middle of the chest, and the partner would raise their leg, locking it on their partner’s back.

The bandoneón moaned along with the singer as men rehearsed with each other for a chance of intimacy when it was their turn to try it on a woman. As the men traced figure eights on the floor, distilling passion, manliness, and testosterone, the music fused the bodies into one.

And this is how tango was born.

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