In his book Periodismo y feminismo en la Argentina: 1830–1930 (1988), Néstor Tomás Auza writes, ‘la historia del periodismo que denominamos femenino se inicia con un fraude periodístico’. The ‘hoax’ in question is the periodical publication La Argentina (1830–31), whose anonymous editor was identified by bibliographer Antonio Zinny as Manuel de Irigoyen. La Argentina was Buenos Aires's first periodical that claimed to be written and edited for, and indeed by, women (‘las editoras’). The journal was printed on Sundays in the Imprenta Republicana (except for the last issue, which was printed at the Imprenta del Estado), and cost two reales (rising to three reales in 1831). The first issue, which included a short prospectus, came out on 31 October 1830, and the last, on 17 July 1831. The periodical featured comic news stories, columns, poems and fictional correspondence, taking a cynical view of everything. Unlike the texts which have been the subject of the previous chapters, La Argentina was written under the rule of Federalist governor Juan Manuel de Rosas, in a political climate which lacked the belief in the march of Enlightenment progress which characterised the Rivadavian years. This chapter will demonstrate that, because the editor of La Argentina did not set out to deceive the public, Auza's term, ‘fraude’, is an inaccurate description of the periodical. It will argue instead that La Argentina is a periodical which is ostensibly humorous and satirical and, as such, ‘draws attention to its artifice immediately with its ludicrously repetitive hyperbole’.

La Argentina needs to be understood in terms of another periodical publication, La Aljaba, a serious periodical publication written by a woman, which came out concurrently, and will be explored in more detail in Chapter 6. This chapter will argue that one of Irigoyen's main purposes was to reflect on city life and to ridicule the concept of innate female virtue, as presented in La Aljaba. He did this by adopting the voice of a group of frivolous female personae. However, as we shall see, women were not Irigoyen's only targets; the periodical exposed all kinds of folly in Buenos Aires and many aspects of the city's elite culture fell prey to La Argentina's barbs. In this respect Irigoyen follows in the eighteenth-century English and Spanish periodical tradition.