Pants!

I am currently reading a biography of Luisa Capetillo, a late 19th, early 20th century Puerto Rican feminist and anarcho-syndicalist. She organized strikes, wrote books, and traveled to Mexico, Cuba and the U.S. mainland...but what do people remember most about her?

According to Luisa Capetillo, Pioneer Puerto Rican Feminist:

Historian Angel Quintero Rivera comments, "When we asked the old labor leaders about her, all of them -- without exception -- began by mentioning that she was the first woman in Puerto Rico to wear pants or pant-skirts."

Capetillo was even arrested in Havana for wearing pants and "Causing a Scandal"! Times have changed a lot: now they arrest you if you're NOT wearing pants. Can't people make up their minds?



In addition, Capetillo was also an outspoken advocate of free love.

So you'd figure this pants-wearin', free-lovin' anarchist would have been an early voice for queer rights, right?

WRONG!

Capetillo, in Mi Opinión, a book of essays on feminism, explicitly takes on lesbianism...as a social ill. If human beings practiced free love, Capetillo believed lesbianism -- and masturbation -- would disappear! Women would have a "natural" outlet for their passions, instead of needing to turn to other women or to the 19th century Puerto Rican equivalent of a vibrator (I imagine that would be a woodpecker). Lesbianism and jacking off were unnatural acts in her mind; sex was for reproduction, and was most naturally between a man and a woman.

Capetillo hated the hypocritical priests of the Catholic Church, but clearly her concept of love and sex was heavily influenced by religion. Capetillo's version of free love was serial monogamy.

Free love as defined as "straight people should be able to love who they like, one at a time, within marriage, with certainly no jacking off" seems...quite different from the definition I've acquired from watching PBS documentaries on Woodstock. But Capetillo's Puerto Rico was so prudish that her ideas were as shocking as a bare ankle.

I find it interesting that Capetillo was able to be such a nonconformist, but was still bound by her culture and early upbringing, to such an extent that her ideas on love would seem right-wing today. I think it illustrates how political discussions can be shifted so far off center that any opinion in the opposite direction looks extreme. Perhaps we should not hedge our opinions for fear of being ridiculed as wackos. Go out, wear our pants (or dresses), and not moderate ourselves to the point that we are actually supporting those who would oppose us.