Virginia Bolten was born in 1870 in
San Luis, Argentina, the daughter of a
German liberal who had been exiled from Europe. After her parents divorced, while she was still a teenager, she moved out to the industrial city of
Rosario and got a job as a
shoemaker. She was later employed in the Argentine Sugar Refinery, but was arrested after being caught distributing anarchist propaganda to the women working there.
In the Argentine anarchist movement Part of the second generation of
anarchist feminists, Bolten quickly developed a reputation as a "great orator" and an "indefatigable organiser", capable of drawing in large crowds to see her speak. Together with
Juana Rouco Buela and
María Collazo, Bolten became one of the few leading women in the
Argentine anarchist movement. As a member of the
Argentine Regional Workers' Federation (FORA), she travelled throughout the country on speaking tours, encouraging women to become involved in anarchist politics. As an anarchist feminist, she was disinterested in the
liberal and
socialist feminists' calls for
universal suffrage, advocating instead for the revolutionary abolition of the existing system rather than incremental reforms to it. In 1889, Bolten led Argentina's first women's strike, carried out by
seamstresses in Rosario. The strike was successful, resulting in the workers winning a 20% salary increase. The following year, she led the city's
International Workers' Day demonstrations with a
black flag. Her activism drew the attention of the Italian anarchist
Pietro Gori, who recruited Bolten into the anarchist movement in
Buenos Aires. Inspired by the feminist writings of the Catalan anarchist
Teresa Mañé, printed by
Errico Malatesta's newspaper
La Questione Sociale, by 1895, the first anarchist women's groups were being established in Argentina. These organisations produced a new generation of
radical feminists, among whom Bolten became especially active. With Gori's help, Bolten founded one of the world's first anarchist feminist publications,
La Voz de la Mujer (). With Bolten as one of its editors, the newspaper published nine issues from 8 January 1896 until 1 January 1897; with Bolten later reviving it in Rosario in 1901. Bolten and Gori also established an
anarchist-socialist organisation which was dedicated to abolishing
mores and traditions that they found
authoritarian, including the institution of marriage. In order to suppress the rising anarchist movement, in 1902, the Argentine government passed the "Law of Residence", which allowed the deportation of immigrants involved in anarchist activism. Bolten was punished under this law on several occasions: in 1903, Bolten was arrested for distributing anarchist propaganda in Rosario; and in 1904, again for organising a women's strike committee in the Buenos Aires fruit market. In January 1905, after receiving news of the
Bloody Sunday massacre in the
Russian Empire's capital of
Saint Petersburg, Bolten publicly denounced the
Tsarist autocracy and directly compared its actions to those of the Argentine government.
Life in Uruguay In 1907, after participating in a tenants' strike in the Argentine capital, Bolten was deported to Uruguay under the Law of Residence. She was joined there by her long-term partner, the anarchist union leader Manuel Manrique, along with her fellow deported anarchist feminist organisers: Juana Rouco Buela and María Collazo. Undeterred, Bolten and her colleagues continued their anarchist feminist activism in the Uruguayan capital of
Montevideo. In 1909, Bolten, Rouco Buela and Collazo established the anarchist feminist newspaper
La Nueva Senda (), but hostilities from other Uruguayan anarchists resulted in the publication ceasing the following year. By this time, anarchist feminism was already being overtaken in South America by socialist and liberal forms of feminism. In May 1910, a Pan-American Federation was established in Buenos Aires by a Women's Congress, with the aim of working towards improving
women's rights while also upholding traditional gender roles. But the Federation delayed in establishing a Uruguayan section, stalled by its hopes for reform from the new liberal President
José Batlle y Ordóñez. In April 1911, radical feminists in Montevideo established the
Asociación Femenina "Emancipación" (), which took a distinctly
anti-clerical position on women's liberation. The Federation attempted to encourage the members of
Emancipación to affiliate with it, but differences between the two organisations over the Federation's liberal platform were quickly pronounced by the anarchists Virginia Bolten and María Collazo. Bolten's radical speeches discouraged affiliation with the Federation, with the Association ultimately voting against it. Immediately after the vote,
Emancipación agreed on anarchist-inspired statutes that upheld women's education and self-defense, while also advocating for integration with the progressive movement across gender lines. In contrast to the middle-class suffragism of the liberal feminists,
Emancipación focused on organising working women such as seamstresses and telephone operators. By 1913, the Association was splintering into factions: the anarchists, led by Bolten; and the members of the newly-established
Socialist Party of Uruguay, led by María Casal y Canda. In June of that year, the Socialist Party's newspaper published a hit piece against Bolten, which accused her of supporting the progressive Batlle government. By the following year, a sustained period of socialist attacks against the anarchists effectively suppressed their influence over the workers' and women's movements, with Marxism becoming the dominant force in Uruguayan radical feminism and anarchist women's organisations falling into obscurity. In 1923, Bolten helped to establish the Centro Internacional de Estudios Sociales (). Later in her life, Bolten continued to speak at demonstrations on International Workers' Day and
International Women's Day, before her death in 1960. ==Legacy==