A gentle maiden aunt who has been victimized for years unexpectedly retaliates through her talent for making life-sized dolls filled with honey. The Youngest Doll, based on a family anecdote, is a stunning literary expression of Rosario Ferré's feminist and social concerns. It is the premier story in a collection that was originally published in Spanish in 1976 as
Papeles de Pandora and is now translated into English by the author. The daughter of a former governor of Puerto Rico, Ferré portrays women loosening the constraints that have bound them to a patriarchal culture. Anger takes creative rather than polemical form in ten stories that started Ferré on her way to becoming a leading woman writer in Latin America.
The upper-middle-class women in The Youngest Doll, mostly married to macho men, rebel against their doll-like existence or retreat into fantasy, those without money or the right skin color are even more oppressed. In terms of power and influence, these
