Mi opinión: disertación sobre las libertades de la mujer; "Amor libre"; [...].

Capetillo, Luisa. Mi opinión: disertación sobre las libertades de la mujer; "Amor libre"; [...].  2. ed. corregida. Ybor City, Tampa Fla.: J. Mascuñana, 1913.

Luisa Capetillo (1882-1922) is often heralded as one of Puerto Rico’s and the Caribbean’s earliest feminist writers. She was a transnational social anarchist and labor organizer who lived and worked (mostly as a cigar factory reader) in Puerto Rico, New York, Florida, and Cuba. She was famously arrested for wearing pants in Havana, but her most important work was her anti-state political organizing and writing. 

Her manifesto on the rights of women is considered the first Puerto Rican feminist treatise. First published in San Juan in 1911, “Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer como compañera, madre y ser independiente,” was reprinted in a second, expanded edition in Florida in 1913 with a different subtitle. Both editions are exceedingly rare, the first is known through a copy at the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños (CUNY), the second in microfilm (we have not identified the source). Until a 2004 facsimile edition, the manifesto was not reprinted or translated.

The present copy of the second edition is signed “La Autora” and dedicated to the journalists of a Spanish Republican newspaper, España Nueva, which became a mouthpiece of the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) in the late 1910s and early 1920s.

19.8 cm, 178 pp.; two b/w pls., textblock toned and thumbed, some minor chipping on first two leaves; missing front wrapper, yellow rear wrapper with losses. Author’s ink dedication “a los valientes periodistas (de) España Nueva” appears on the verso of the portrait plate with the date November 22, 1913.