She's Leaving Home: Girls' Elopements, Dolce Vita, and Social Drama in 1960s Buenos Aires

MANZANO, VALERIA

Minneapolis

Conferencia; 14th Berkshire Conference on Women's History; 2008

Berkshire Conference of Women's History

On May 15, 1962, seventeen-year-old student Norma Penjerek left her house in a middle-class neighbourhood in Buenos Aires. As every Thursday, she went to her private English classes at night. Nonetheless, that was a particular Thursday: there was a general strike, public transportation did not work, and Buenos Aires streets were almost empty. Norma never came back home: her body was found two months later in the City outskirts. She had been raped and murdered. The “Penjerek case,” as the press deemed it, awoke heated public debates on an alleged “evil of the time:” girls’ elopements. However, neither the topic nor the images used to address it were new: journalists, sociologists, psychologists, and family mothers’ leagues deployed a vocabulary and a series of metaphors that had been publicly available in Argentina from the late 1950s. The repertoire of images and metaphors around girls’ elopements involved a discussion on youth cultures and crime (or ‘Dolce Vita’, to recover its lexicographic embodiment at the time) and conflicting models of girlhood. Further, it also implied a discussion around cultural modernization and political mobilization, in a context marked by extreme political instability. By drawing on movies, plays, and television scripts, along with an exhaustive analysis of psychoanalysts’, sociologists’, and psychiatrists’ writings and national and feminine presses, I focus on the construction of images and interpretations on girls’ elopements from 1956 to 1963. I demonstrate that it became an insistent trope, which is crucial to unravel public anxieties about girlhood. In a context of lasting and almost invisible democratization of family life and girls’ increasing participation in the educational system and labor force, the trope of elopement served to discuss sexual and gender relations amidst the “new generation” as well as to imagine a plethora of dangers that allegedly threatened young people’s lives, which ranged from crime to Communism. Indeed, filmmakers, novelists, psychoanalysts, sociologists, and journalists, albeit from different perspectives, linked the trope of elopement to the ‘Dolce Vita.’ Shorthand for referring to youth cultures, crime, and sexual deviancy, the ‘Dolce Vita’ was the final horizon for eloped girls, according to most of the accounts. Further, to the most conservative voices –such as the Catholic Family Mothers’ League or the newspaper La Nación-, the ‘Dolce Vita’ was the first step for youth involvement in radical politics, a “danger” reinforced after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. A meticulous reading of police reports and statistics does not show major changes in the figures of girls’ elopements in those years. The judicial file on the “Penjerek case,” for its part, does not indicate that Norma had any intention of running away her home. However, in July 1963, when Norma’s body was found, the trope of girls’ elopements reached the headlines of most of the newspapers, became an object of scrutiny in countless roundtables. To analyze that sexual panic is crucial to understanding not only the changing symbolic and cultural place of girls in Argentina but also broader concerns regarding cultural modernization and political instability.