Señora Solar was of the earlier age of Chilean feminine culture and was greatly hampered by the conditions existing in her period of largest activities; but a later writer, Rosario Orrego de Uribe, has carried on the work so admirably begun and has added to its range and effect. For years Señora Orrego de Uribe was at the head of a large journal, the _Revista de Valparaiso_, and thus found a suitable medium for the expression of her theories. Moreover, as a novelist she has attained high rank, and she has written poetry which is above the average. Her influence has been steadily for the emancipation and advancement of her sex, and her work is not yet finished, though she has seen the cause she embraced with such enthusiasm prosper even beyond the highest hopes of its first advocates.
Among the notable women of Chile may also be mentioned the name of Juana Ross de Edwards. As the name implies, she is of Anglo-Saxon descent and has strengthened the blood by marriage. She is noted as a philanthropist, giving largely and wisely to worthy objects, and she is so admittedly a power in the land that she was one of the first to suffer banishment when Balmaceda came into power in 1891. The powerful dictator feared the influence of Señora Edwards more than the plots of the most virulent of his masculine foes.
The Argentine Republic has also some great names to boast among its women. Juana Manso de Noronha was a potent influence in the cause of education. She early came under the influence of Sarmiento, the greatest of South American educators, and she was actually appointed by the government of Argentina to edit the _Annales de la Educatión Comun_, a paper in the interests of public education, founded by Sarmiento himself. Both in theory and practice, for she conducted a large school at one time, she proved herself a woman of profound thought and eager energy in the subjects to which she devoted her life, and Argentina owes her no small debt for its advance in culture. Her work, since her death in 1890, has been to some extent carried on by Eduarda Mansilla de Garcia, though Señora Garcia is known rather as a writer than an educator. Her novels have won deservedly high repute and one of them found tribute from so absolute an authority as Victor Hugo. Another great influence in the cause of feminine culture was Juana M. Gorriti, an Argentine; but her activities were mainly exerted in Peru. This latter country has hardly kept apace of her South American sisters in the cause of feminine emancipation and culture; yet even Peru has some names of which she may boast, as those of Mercedes Cabello Cabonero, a writer on philosophical and social questions, and Clorinda Matto de Turner, a novelist whose work is rather of the ultra-realistic school. Both women are enthusiastic and influential, nor do they stand entirely alone in the circles of Lima. Yet in that old city the advance in the matter of feminine culture has been very slow; the doors of the University of San Marcos, in Lima, are still shut to women students, and there are no signs that there will soon be encouragement to women to take their modern place among men in the old land of the Incas.