The second quotation above is taken from a letter sent by the soon-to-be Argentine President, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, from New York to his friend Juana Manso on October 15 1867. Sarmiento was consoling Manso, who had had foul-smelling plant gum (asafoetida) smeared on her dress and stones thrown at her by a group of men during a small ceremony marking the opening of the public library in Chivilcoy, in the Pampas. The object of their anger, Sarmiento writes, is not Manso's speech on women's education, nor that she is a writer and a teacher, but that she is a ‘mujer inteligente’: ‘Sabe usted de otra argentina que ahora o antes haya escrito, hablado o publicado, trabajando por una idea, compuesto versos, redactado un diario?’ (Sarmiento 1961: 73). She was the first such woman in Argentina and he knows of only three others: one in Spain (possibly Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda); and two in Chile, the poets Clara Condarco and la señora (Mercedes Marín) del Solar, who no longer write. In this letter, Sarmiento typically draws a clear dichotomy between backwardness and progress: the former is represented by Muslim women and the Spanish Catholic Church, and the latter by Parisian science and women in the United States. Manso is instrumental in moving Argentina from barbarism (religion, Spain) to civilisation (science, medicine, education, and Europe/United States):

Women's entry into the secular world of education and science is the sign of modernity.