Evelyn Paniagua Stevens

Evelyn Paniagua Stevens (1919 – March 19, 1996) was an American scholar of Latin American studies. She spent much of her career at the Latin American Studies Center in the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a scholar of Latin American politics and women's studies. Stevens may have been the first to introduce the concept of marianismo to the academic literature, when she controversially argued in 1973 that marianismo was a widespread counterbalance to machismo. Stevens was the 10th President of the Latin American Studies Association, and the first woman to be president of that organization.

Life and career Stevens was born in Chicago in 1919. She attended Northwestern University and the University of Puerto Rico, but did not complete a degree at either school.

After obtaining her PhD, Stevens held faculty appointments at the University of Akron and then Loyola University Chicago, before joining the Latin American Studies Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Stevens has been credited with introducing the idea of marianismo to the academic literature (re-defining a pre-existing word that had referred the exaltation of the Mary, mother of Jesus) in her 1973 work, Marianismo: The Other Face of Machismo, though it has been argued that others described the idea of marianismo earlier. Defining marianismo as "the cult of female spiritual superiority which teaches that women are semi-divine, morally superior to and spiritually stronger than men", Stevens argued that marianismo was a widespread phenomenon across Latin America which counterbalanced the cultural idea of machismo. The concept proved to be highly influential over the following decades, but it attracted substantial controversy as scholars debated whether it really existed across Latin America as Stevens argued,

Stevens died on March 19, 1996, in Alameda, California.

Selected works Puerto Rico's "peaceful Revolution" (1963) "Marianismo: The Other Face of Machismo" (1973) Protest and Response in Mexico (1974)