La Vida Manda: Novela.

Rodríguez Acosta, Ofelia. La Vida Manda: Novela. Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Rubén Darío, 1929. 

Rare, signed first edition of a novel that "created a vivid argument for female equality" by the novelist and journalist Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta, one of Cuba's most influential suffragists and social reformers. She "enjoyed extraordinary public visibility" through her journalism and editorials in Bohemia. Her radical feminist writings supported free love, reproductive freedom, and homosexual marriage.

La vida manda (1929) was her second novel, an intimate portrait of the psychological subjugation of women within marriage. It scandalized the public with its eroticism and the sexually liberated heroine’s rejection of patriarchal mores. A lesbian character, Delia, seems to be the only independent and fully self-realized woman in the book. Homoerotic scenes between her and the main character, Gertrudis, may be the first descriptions of lesbian desire in Cuban literature.  

OCLC lists four North American holdings: Claremont, Harvard, Univ. of Miami, Northwestern. 

First edition. 18.9 cm; 254, [12], pp.; pages darkened, first three leaves with fore-edge lightly chipped. Half-leather, spine with gilt title and author’s name. Author's ink dedication to the Cuban poet Arturo Alfonso Roselló on epigraph page, signed and dated “Habana, 1929.” 

See:

Daniel Balderston and José Maristany, "The lesbian and gay novel in Latin America," in The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel (2005), pp. 200 - 216.

Madeline Camara, "The feminist discourse of Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta: Garzona or Espartana,"  in Cuban Women Writers, Imagining a Matria (2008), pp. 19-52.