t is known that we, individuals, are socially placed according to the coordinates of time and space in which we are bound to live. From psychoanalisis it has been sketched the idea that the present subject is not the same of previous centuries, since his position is determined, in part, by history.

My first work was: "The place of woman in tango poetry", but as soon as I was going further I found myself with the necessity of spotting the social place of women in Buenos Aires. I decided to place it between 1880 and 1960. That is to say, from the birth of tango until some time after the first half of this century, considering its features in accordance with the way popular poets saw it.

My surveys and readings follow a course and, consequently, the conclusions I draw are still partial. Nonetheless, as soon as I go on, the following hypothesis is confirmed: the social place given to women depends on the subjectivity of the time. That is to say that the discourse in force determines its value.

Lacan thinks that we cannot talk about "Woman", since there is no universal which contains it. This means that the feminine pleasure is inscribed into the particularity of each one. Instead for all men there is an equivalent way of sexual pleasure. It is from the heterogeneity of the pleasures that Lacan determines, through psychoanalisis, sexual difference. That is to say that the latter neither relies on biology, nor on anatomy (transvestism and transformism evidence it), but on a position of the subject towards her or his own sex.

A well-known Jacques Lacan´s syntagm is: "Woman does not exist". That is to say that there is no representation of woman since in the unconscious, sexual differentiation is not inscribed.

One of the tasks of the artist is precisely to create it. It is known that there were, at all times, women who have occupied the place of an inspiration muse. At the same time, art succeeds in creating a kind of woman that sometimes becomes the paradigm of her time.

In my research about tango lyrics, I have found authors, mainly men, who have been creating a kind of porteña woman. Chronologically considering nearly a century is possible to verify the discourse changes and the kind of woman that corresponds to each time.

I place the tango time from its birth in 1880 as music and dance until the 1960s, since from then on another kind of woman springs up in Argentina (and maybe in the world). So popular poetry remains, for me, displayed on the lyrics of the songs of the incipient national rock. So appears the "girl with paper eyes", while tango starts a two-fold trend: on one side the instrumental development is emphasized, especially in the styles of Piazzolla and Rovira, while on the side of the lyrics, the city of Buenos Aires is preferred as protagonist rather than its women. Curiously a female poet begins to stand out: Eladia Blázquez.

In the lyrics of the early tangos is possible to find a certain kind of woman who reappears throughout time and who embodies either the mother or the prostitute.

This duality, observed by Freud as typical of man's choice of object, has amazing features in the porteño man. To begin, it can be said that he chooses those women who can fit to these two positions at the same time.

Villoldo, in El Porteñito writes:

In fact, in our city the pimp was called, mockingly, the "coffee with milk pimp", because he owned only one or, at the most, two pupils who worked for him but he did not run a whorehouse. The enterprise bias of prostitution was brought by foreigners and, in general, was exploited by them. That is to say that the macho porteño, besides business, was tied to his woman by love bonds.

One of the functions to which the mother is associated is that of nurturing. So, by getting sexual pleasure from the same one who feeds him, the ruffian manages to get together the mother and the whore in one person.

It may be objected that not all porteños were ruffians, what it is true.

But it is true as well that the unhabitants of the city began to share a new language, lunfardo.

On that respect I must make a digression . That which is transmitted by means of word shapes the wishes and likings of the individuals who inhabit a language. Language, as woman, is not universal: there are languages as there are women . Language as woman are creations. To each time corresponds a way of speaking as also a type of woman. Little matters if she, such as the author describes her, exists in reality. What I highlight is that each one of those who do exist does not have another chance but placing themselves according to the discourse that determines them.

Lunfardo is used by poets since the very creation of tango-song and, in general, this beginning is considered with Mi noche triste , by Pascual Contursi.

There we already have masterly condensed the two typical features of the city of Buenos Aires woman. As mother she appears in the verses alluding home, its keeping and arrangement:

It is obvious that in these stanzas man misses a maternal woman and evidences a type of love in which tenderness prevails while in passion-love which ties him to the woman-lover he says so:

This tango marks the beginning of one of the typical of tango love dramas: forsaken man. Likewise this paradigmatic woman also begins to be built, who, with different nuances, will be repeated in so many lyrics.

In this case, man cries the two-fold loss: the sexual woman, debased in her condition of object of pleasure and the maternal woman raised to the rank of object of idealization.

From this perspective I say that the woman created by tango lyrics was a blend of weakness and strength.

Her position of dominance drives her near to the feature that Lacan highlights in what is the Mother for the small child: allmighty. When losing her, man destroys himself. It is a passional dimension of love incarnated in a type of woman that is capable of driving man to the worst.

Archetypes spring up of the creation. Like the milonguita, that loose woman.

In the early lyrics loose women abound, those who trying to get rid of a poor social environment find prostitution as the only way out. Flor de Fango, Margot, Zorro Gris, El Motivo, Mano a Mano, Ivette or Milonguita, are clear examples.

I transcribe some paragraphs from Flor de Fango by Contursi:

It is interesting to see how in these verses Contursi reflected the decision of a teen-aged girl who for having some fun had, necessarily, to "lose her honor". On many occasions I have heard that in this way tango has indicted women. I think that, in this case, it rather justifies her, since it understands that society does not allow another possibility.

He comes back with the subject in El Motivo:

In general all desire related to luxury and pleasure is thought through the guilt-punishment pair, since each one who chooses them will end badly: alone, lonely, without love, anguished, or, lastly, murdered.

At last, in Ivette, Contursi mixes, with a sarcasm that anticipates the grotesque, the loose woman with the forsaken man. Of her he says:

And after enumerating the gifts of dubious taste he had given her, he concludes like this:

Margot presents a similar scheme. Its lyrics were written by Celedonio Flores and from the start it depicts a woman who a man guesses, through subtle signs, the humble origin she tries to hide.

A little further he determines, again, that the reason of her doom is her desire.

In this case, unlike Pascual Contursi, Flores does not allow any alibi to the woman. Guilt does not fall on the environment or the others but upon herself, hence the anger with which he curses her at the end and the resource of calling upon the other, the mother.

Furthermore he discovers love, behind the hate, when he names her as "Mi Margarita".

In Mano a mano he foretells her an awful end:

Francisco García Jiménez, author of Zorro Gris sentences with these words the end of the loose woman:

Finally in Milonguita, a name that turned out generic for all loose women, Samuel Linnig writes:

In brief, I think these tangos are clear examples of the kind of woman found in the cabaret ambiances between 1917 and 1920.

There were two possibilities for women: marriage and with it motherhood as an escape or sinking into vice and doom. Placed at one and other end of the mother-whore pair, salvation through love had not still taken form, what later would appear in poets like Discépolo or Manzi.

That is to say that in the first two decades of the century, our authors created a woman mislaid by pleasure but condemned, by that, to pain and loneliness. So this peculiar type of woman springs up, the Milonguita, whose end, according to Linnig, is eloquent: