Maria Benita de la Cueva

Peruvian entrepreneur who pioneered industrial development and women's rights in 19th-century South America

Maria Benita de la Cueva y Silva (1812-1889) was a visionary entrepreneur who transformed Peru's textile industry while championing women's education. Born into Lima's aristocracy, she shocked society by becoming a widow at 22 and then taking over her husband's failing textile mill. Over 30 years, she expanded it into a multinational enterprise exporting alpaca wool to Europe, using innovative methods like the first hydraulic looms in South America. Her 1857 establishment of the Escuela de Artes y Oficios para Mujeres in Lima provided technical training to over 500 women annually, breaking gender barriers in skilled labor. She also funded Peru's first female-owned newspaper La Voz de la Mujer (1865), which debated women's suffrage decades before it became a global movement. Her business acumen is evident in surviving ledgers showing she paid workers 20% above market rates, a policy later adopted by Peru's labor laws. Though often overshadowed by male contemporaries like Guillermo Billinghurst, her 1873 speech at the International Exhibition in Vienna made her Peru's first internationally recognized female industrialist. Modern historians highlight her as a pioneer of corporate social responsibility - her factory provided childcare and healthcare long before such benefits were standard. Visit Lima's Textile Museum to see her original machinery. Her legacy lives in the Maria Benita Industrial Park and the Benita de la Cueva Prize for Women Entrepreneurs. While no books are yet dedicated solely to her, she features prominently in Peru's Industrial Revolution and Women in Latin American Business History. No films have been made about her, but her story is preserved in the National Archives of Peru's digitized records.