Sociedad de Beneficiencia

The Sociedad de Beneficiencia was the major welfare-dispensing agency in Argentina in the nineteenth century. After the Independence Wars, the incipient Argentine government struggled to reassert order. In 1823, Government Minister Bernardino Rivadavia created the Sociedad de Beneficiencia to run the asylums, hospitals, and orphanages of Buenos Aires, in order to keep streets clear of the infirm, diseased, and homeless. Although it was proclaimed illegal during the period 1838–1852, when the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas considered it an arm of liberal Unitarists, the Sociedad became, by the late nineteenth century, Latin America's most extensive social welfare and public health institution. In particular in the 1860s, mainly as a result of casualties of the War of the Triple Alliance (1865–1870) and disease (such as the cholera epidemic of 1867–1868, and the outbreak of yellow fever in 1871), there was a proliferation of hospitals and clinics. One distinctive feature of the Sociedad was its control and management by women of the Buenos Aires elite. Its importance culminated with the establishment of the Rivadavia Hospital for Women in 1887. The directors came from the city's most prominent families and often bequeathed sizable sums upon their death.

The Sociedad became the most important means for women to participate in the public life of Buenos Aires. They used this position, however, to propagate traditional paternalistic and religious values. In 1880 President Julio A. Roca made the Sociedad de Beneficiencia a national institution. Ultimately, its management of the medical system conflicted with the growing professionalization and male control of medicine, provoking bitter disputes in the 1890s. Furthermore, the city's rapid growth and pressing social problems led to the creation of parallel institutions, especially those controlled by immigrant mutual aid societies. The care of homeless children remained one of the Sociedad's most important tasks; it ran the foundling home, and the girls' and boys' orphanages. As spaces grew scarce, the Sociedad shifted to fostering, the placement of homeless children with families or single persons. In 1946, President Juan Domingo Perón took over its activities and reorganized them under the Dirección Nacional de Asistencia Social, directed by his wife, Eva.

See alsoPerón, Juan Domingo; Perón, María Eva Duarte de; Rivadavia, Bernardino; Roca, Julio Argentino; Rosas, Juan Manuel de; War of the Triple Alliance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carlos Correa Luna, Historia de la Sociedad de beneficia, 2 vols. (1923).

Cynthia J. Little, "The Society of Beneficence in Buenos Aires, 1823–1900" (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1980).

Additional Bibliography

Moreno, José Luis. La política social antes de la política social caridad, beneficiencia y política social en Buenos Aires: Siglos XVII a XX. Buenos Aires: Trama editorial/Prometeo libros, 2000.

                                        Jeremy Adelman