Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
VICTORIA OCAMPO IN
A PERONIST JAIL, 1953
T
Though she remained apolitical throughout her long career, Victoria
Ocampo still ended up in a Peronist jail. Ocampo was born to
a distinguished family of the old oligarchy, grew up in a sumptuous
home on the banks of the Río de la Plata north of the capital, and
spent summer months at her family's
estancias
and vacation homes.
She and her parents frequently traveled abroad. Young Victoria always
maintained literary aspirations and wrote poetry and essays. She avidly
read European and Latin American literature. An unhappy marriage to a
domineering husband—hardly a rarity in the male-dominated milieu of
the day—ended in legal separation.
Personally wealthy, Ocampo indulged herself in an independent
lifestyle beyond the means of the vast majority of Argentine women.
She founded the literary review
Sur
in 1922 and associated with
Albert Camus, Aldous Huxley, Jorge Luis Borges, and other literary
figures of her time. Ocampo also advocated the rights of women.
When Juan and Evita Perón succeeded in passage of the law grant-
ing women the right to vote, however, Ocampo declined to support
them. She equated Peronism with fascism and told her friends that
she could not condone the kind of Argentine feminism that Peronistas
had in mind. Her private contempt of the Peróns landed Ocampo in
jail shortly after an attempted assassination of the president in 1953.
She remained imprisoned for 26 days until a personal plea by the
Chilean poetess and Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral motivated Perón
to release Ocampo.
The experience of imprisonment did not dampen Ocampo's zeal
for feminist causes. “Friday, I am going to talk on television about my
jail experience and about the changes that I believe should be made in
the women's prison,” she confided to Mistral following Perón's ouster.
“All these things concern me and keep me busy, as you can imagine.”
Ocampo died in 1979.
Source:
Quotation from Meyer, Doris.
Victoria Ocampo: Against the Wind
and the Tide
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 167.
of the middle classes had preceded military coups d'etat, and the
middle class had joined the oligarchy in denouncing elections if they
portended working-class victories. Nonetheless, Peronism would
