Puerto Rican Women's Roles in Independence Nationalism: Unwavering Women

This dissertation investigates the construction of women and feminism in the Puerto Rican nationalist project as presented in Claridad, "the newspaper of the Puerto Rican nation." This study relies on an interpretive approach to methodology which weaves together several strands of sociological analysis. The research method is content analysis to study the newspaper Claridad as a social artifact for analysis. The sample of articles for analysis consists of 769 newspaper articles using content analysis coding and interpreting the textual material from Claridad in the period 1980 - 2006. I also consult a range of other materials and observations as background for analysis. The analysis concentrates on women's roles in independence nationalism in Puerto Rico. The work of Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1989) and Yuval-Davis (1997) offer tools for inquiry into the roles or frames for women as heuristic devices to conduct the analysis of gender and nationalism. This study finds that the coverage of women's roles and feminism in independence nationalism in Puerto Rico is minimal or only 1.5 percent, and that for the notion that Claridad is "the newspaper of the Puerto Rican nation," women's roles in this independence project are marginal.