Beyond Models: The Many Paths to Feminism in Modern Spain

In 1994, Mary Nash published a paper that changed the course of historiography on feminism in Spain. In her influential work, Nash highlighted the dilemmas affecting women's history, specifically the inflexibility of the interpretative models at the time and the tendency to identify feminism with suffragism. ¹ These problems underlay the important pioneering works of researchers like Rosa Mª Capel, Concha Fagoaga and Geraldine Scanlon, ² who had singled out the unsound historical establishment of feminism and women's exiguous interest in their political rights in Spain. ³ In their works, however, these historians did not pay sufficient heed to forms of protest that had nothing to do with political equality. There were three reasons behind the limitations of this pioneering research on the history of Spanish feminism. First and foremost, it coincided with the end of the Franco dictatorship and with the emergence of a feminist movement, whose initial objective was to repeal the regime's discriminatory laws. The struggle for equality and full citizens’ rights was central to the feminism arising in the 1970s, and the analysis of its history was also imbued with this identification. Secondly, the link – characteristic of social history – established between the advent of feminism and infrastructural changes, especially the industrial revolutions and the development of the middle classes along with their political expression in the construction of liberal states, was of prime importance. These historical conditions would explain why Spanish feminism was a tardy and insubstantial phenomenon. Lastly, and associated with the previous factor, the experience of suffragist feminism in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States appeared to be paradigmatic. The Spanish case had no place in that narrow concept of feminism. ⁴

In reality, the depleting effect of rigid interpretative models was – and still is to a certain extent – a problem affecting the history of feminism across the world. In response to the limitations imposed by those models, the definition of the concept of feminism has simply changed over the past few decades, broadening its meaning as new contexts and issues have been addressed in research. In this connection, the 1990s were decisive for the critique of monolithic thought and narrow visions. By ‘using southern theory’, ⁵ or by critically employing current epistemological resources, it has been possible to reveal the huge diversity of gender relations and to highlight and theorize on feminist action and protest differing from those of northern societies. ⁶ Studies of Islamic feminism, black feminism and racialized women in Latin America, to offer just a few relevant examples, have helped to understand the complexity of feminist subjects and their strategies in the past and at present. ⁷

As already noted, also in the heart of the Old Continent some narratives had been serving as models for analyzing historical feminism, ⁸ giving rise to important interpretative dilemmas in countries like Spain. Karen Offen's reflections on the definition of feminism in the 1980s offered new interpretative keys that allowed for analyzing Spanish feminism in a more comprehensive and convincing fashion. ⁹ In her ground-breaking paper published in 1988, Offen claimed that her intention was to conceptualize the term in a dynamic, flexible and global manner. Accordingly, she proposed distinguishing between ‘relational’ feminism and its ‘individualist’ counterpart. This differentiation opened up an explanatory field differing from that established by the Anglo-Saxon individualist tradition. Unlike feminism focusing on the demand for individual human rights, relational feminism placed the accent on the rights of women as such, basically defined by maternity. ¹⁰ According to Offen, although individualist feminism had characterized the Anglo-Saxon discourse, in continental Europe relational feminism had predominated. Her proposal, as with Nash's in her aforementioned paper published in 1994, involved a profound change in the way of analyzing historical feminisms, and had a mixed reception both in Spain and abroad. Notwithstanding the controversy, it is possible to claim that the spirit of those proposals, aimed at exploring different experiences of unrest and feminist protest, and at understanding the ‘multiple itineraries and strategies for female emancipation’, ¹¹ were successfully incorporated into the analysis of historical feminisms in Spain. ¹²

All the same, it was still necessary to define those analytical categories, particularly the concept of feminism. In some cases, it was decided to comply with the criterion prevailing in the sources, considering only those who professed to be feminists as such. This criterion managed to avoid, as Nancy Cott observed some years ago, the imprecisions and anachronisms resulting from a too inclusive and lax category of feminism. ¹³ This precaution made a certain sense in Spain, where, avoiding narrow definitions of feminism, the scope of this term could be widened to such an extent that practically any action performed by a woman, even the most unintentional, was susceptible to being regarded as feminist – particularly when it involved the conquest of new spaces in occupational fields or political spheres monopolized by men. The concept was thus blurred to the point of losing its explanatory capacity. But Cott's proposal posed the problem of identifying the analytical category of ‘feminism’ with the object of study per se, mixing two different levels. In my opinion, the real challenge for gender historians was to know how to equip themselves with concepts that were sufficiently flexible to function in different contexts and sufficiently defined to maintain their interpretative capacity.

If, as in my case, we think that ‘only something which has no history can be defined’, ¹⁴ it is not possible to define feminism. But to renounce a strong, universal definition of feminism, or to deny a privileged relation of the term with a stable signifier, does not entail dispensing with this concept as an analytical tool for history. In this article, I will use this category of feminism as a discursive and political practice guided by the will to, in some way, subvert the gender order. Moreover, I will start from an understanding of gender relations as power relations. ¹⁵ Feminism would thus be a form of counter-conduct, a creative act of rebellion against the sexual hierarchy that goes beyond the strictly negative notion of disobedience. ¹⁶ This is about the rebellion of the will; an intentional resistance whose ethical and subjective component prevails over the practical results of protest. The history of feminism would therefore be more of a history of struggle than a history of conquest. Beyond this consideration, the aspirations and practices of feminists, whether individual or collective, take on a wide variety of political meanings. The Spanish case reveals this diversity, which is not easily classifiable according to the classic distinction between the feminism of equality and that of difference.

Offen cautioned that individualist and relational feminisms were not mutually exclusive, but two strategies that, in practice, converged and combined in diverse ways, even in the suffragist movements in England and the United States. Despite her words of warning, it is true that her approach did indeed point to a clear distinction between the so-called ‘difference feminism’ and ‘equality feminism’. From a theoretical perspective very different from Offen's, the historian Joan W. Scott suggested some years later the need to surmount this dichotomy. In an attempt to offer ‘an alternative to the typical approach to the history of feminism’, Scott called for abandoning ‘the insistence that all feminists in the past demanded either equality or difference and that one of these was (and still is) a more successful strategy than the other’. To her mind, this proposal essentially reproduced the ideological discourse in which feminism had operated. Versus this type of approach, Scott considered analyzing the contradictions of the political discourses that had given rise to feminism and which it appealed to and challenged at the same time: ‘These were the discourses of individualism, individual rights, and social obligation as used by republicans (and by some socialists) to organize the institutions of democratic citizenship in France’. ¹⁷ The paradox to which Scott was referring derived from the fact that feminism was a protest against the political exclusion of women, a struggle to eliminate ‘sexual difference’ in politics, which, at the same time, should formulate its demands on behalf of ‘women’. ‘This paradox – the need both to accept and to refuse “sexual difference” – was the constitutive condition of feminism as a political movement throughout its long history’, Scott asserted. ¹⁸

Scott's work led to the rethinking of the history of feminism also in Spain. ¹⁹ It was not only a matter of rejecting the application of certain models of feminism to the Spanish context, but also of going beyond the very classification of equality and difference feminism. To this dilemma was also added another issue addressed by Scott, relating to the meaning of the category of ‘women’. In recent years, she has insisted on the fact that the meaning of what is favourable for women and of the term ‘women’ per se have varied in each historical context and age, for which reason their analysis is crucial for inquiring into that meaning. ²⁰ As Jeanne Boydston has rightly observed, if our analytical categories were invested with the authority of permanence and universality, we would cease to be historians to become propagandists of a particular epistemological order. ²¹ Thus, it seems reasonable to take on these two challenges proposed by Scott when studying historical feminisms.

In the following pages, an attempt will be made to apply this dual concern – on the one hand, to take into consideration the essence of the discourse in which feminism operated in order to unravel its ‘paradoxes’, and, on the other, to historicize the category of ‘women’ – to the study feminism in Spain from the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Primarily, the intention is to underscore the fickleness of the category of ‘women’ and its expression in feminisms during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Specifically, attention will be paid to the important role played by two feminists of the period, Concepción Arenal and Emilia Pardo Bazán, in the evolution of the meaning of sexual difference. Following this, it will be seen how, in the first decades of the twentieth century, Spanish feminisms trod many different paths in a context resulting from diverse ideological proposals. In other words, feminists of the period formulated their demands by leveraging different ‘anchor points [points d’ancrage]’ ²² for criticism.

The Construction of the Feminist Subjects in Nineteenth-Century Spain

At the end of the nineteenth century, Concepción Saiz and Adolfo Posada, two advocates of the feminist cause, looked back on the past to take stock of the situation. In 1897, Saiz claimed,

The issues of feminism, so theoretically tumultuous in the European nations that do not have, unlike ours, the ingrained habit of lagging behind, has started, albeit timidly, to emerge in Spain. Few writers, although prominent owing to their quality, have hitherto devoted their time to its study; the general masses remain for the moment indifferent or scornful. ²³

In 1899, Posada similarly wondered whether or not it was possible to speak of the existence of a feminist movement, in the strict sense of the word, in Spain. His answer was ‘no’. By his reckoning, ‘a bold feminism, with determination and organized nationwide, as in the United States’, had never existed in the country, and neither had organized feminist associations proliferated, as in France, nor had public opinion come out in support of women as it had done in England. For him, the conclusion was clear: ‘In Spain, there is no real feminist current’. ²⁴ Notwithstanding this pessimistic diagnosis, Posada recuperated the experiences of that century pertaining to the Krausist current ²⁵ – to which he himself belonged – and its Free Institute of Education. It is incontestable that from this liberal milieu emerged the main initiatives for opening up spaces, above all in the field of education, for women during the second half of the nineteenth century. ²⁶ Yet, there were other experiences arising from political spheres differing from Krausism, such as republicanism and utopian socialism. In the past few years, historiography has paid due attention to freethinking, lay and Masonic ²⁷ feminism, sometimes associated with theosophical and spiritualist tenets, ²⁸ whose most outstanding proponents included Rosario de Acuña. Analyses have been performed on the political action of women who, in the context of radical republicanism and proletarian internationalism, rallied against the great landowners in pursuit of the abolition of slavery and even participated in insurrections in the country's cities. ²⁹ Lay feminism, albeit a minority, was an important precedent for the subsequent suffragist movement which managed to unite significantly large groups of women. ³⁰ In a very different ideological context, the proposals of conservative feminists like Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer also deserve to be highlighted, as the historiography on gender has done in recent years. ³¹ In short, despite the jaundiced opinion of its contemporaries, and although it was comparatively weaker than its counterparts in other countries, it is possible to state that a diverse and plural feminism did indeed exist in nineteenth-century Spain.

Accordingly, this section will focus on the discourses of the two most influential figures of feminism at the time, to wit, Concepción Arenal and Emilia Pardo Bazán. The reason behind this choice is that they allow for addressing the interpretative challenge posed by Scott in her analysis of French feminism. On the other hand, they got to the root of that contradiction, with mixed results. In short, they both help to clarify the idea that feminists did not only act in a specific discursive field, coping with their obligations and contradictions, but also collaborated in its construction and altered its limits: Arenal by redefining – and strengthening – the category of ‘women’; and Pardo Bazán by refusing to accept an increasingly more powerful category that violated her identity.

The feminist discourse of the lawyer and writer Arenal is hard to classify in terms of equality and difference. As is well-known, she did not seek equality between men and women in different spheres of life. But, on the other hand, when she formulated her feminist discourse in the mid-nineteenth century, neither was the status of women capable of conferring legitimacy on the demands made on their behalf. Arenal's initial aim was thus to build a dignified collective identity with the capacity to construct a female subject, because, as she herself observed, ‘Women diminished in the conception of all and in their very own do not demand, cannot demand, even the rights that they already possess’. ³² Thus, Arenal employed the moral elevation of femininity as a resource when formulating her demands, and that elevation became the desired goal. In order to achieve the dignity that she sought for women, she was obliged to combat the widespread preconception of their inferiority: ‘The heart, instincts and awareness continuously oppose in practice the theories which contend that men are morally superior to women’. ³³

Arenal moved in a discursive frame grounded in the conviction that women were intellectually, physically and morally inferior to men. To combat these prejudices, she resorted to mechanisms that had been used for centuries to the same end, such as the recuperation of illustrious female personages, especially queens. ³⁴ She also challenged theories shrouded in scientific authority, like those of the founder of phrenology Franz Joseph Gall. And, most importantly, she placed special emphasis on debunking the theory of women's moral inferiority, asserting their greater natural sensitivity, compassion, charity, patience, resignation and piety. In her project of moral exaltation, Arenal gave centre stage to maternity. Not least she vindicated the role of women as guardians of the Catholic faith in a dignifying strategy accompanying, at a distance, the institutional attempts of the Church to transform women into the bastion of religious tradition in a context of progressive secularization. ³⁵ From a modern perspective, Arenal's discourse might seem lukewarm and even normative. Certainly, in her struggle against misogyny she made use of an essentializing notion of femininity and a static vision of gender difference. Despite its contradictions, hers was a strategy aimed at constructing women as political subjects of resistance and change.

Some years later, in 1881, Arenal wrote her second book dedicated to the feminist issue entitled, La mujer de su casa (The woman at home). In this work, she included that rigidly dichotomic notion of the sexes, insisting that the differences between men and women were qualitative, rather than quantitative, and to be found ‘in the nature of things’. ³⁶ But this time, Arenal elaborated a now openly feminist discourse on this notion. Maternity continued to form the kernel of her proposal, but in 1881 the maternal dimension would serve, in her own words, to extend ‘the direct scope of action beyond the domestic setting’. This was the so-called ‘social maternity’. During the following decade, she used these ideas to devise a comprehensive feminist programme, which has been defined as ‘relational’, ³⁷ conceived from and for difference, with calls for reforms in the occupational, educational and legislative fields. And the concept of social maternity, indebted to her legacy, would become enormously important for Spanish feminism in the 1920s and 1930s. ³⁸

Arenal contributed to the construction of a feminist subject as an act of protest against misogyny, although it had a clear – and in this regard paradoxical – normative dimension. In contrast, the Galician writer Emilia Pardo Bazán made the struggle against that subject the specific objective of her particular emancipatory crusade. This was so at least during the first stages of her life and her oeuvre. ³⁹ It was intellectually, physically and morally impossible to establish a lasting female essence, a nature that served both to oppress it and to continue the struggle on its behalf. Accordingly, she criticized the ‘sentimentalism’ and ‘romanticism’ that had led Arenal to perceive a superior morality in women, reducing them to the level of ‘noble savages’, versus ‘the variety of psychological nuances’ that civilized men displayed. ⁴⁰ Similarly, Pardo Bazán baulked at the mystification of maternity, which she called a temporal and adventitious function to which women could not dedicate their entire lives. ⁴¹ Putting her religious beliefs to a different use than Arenal, she contended that the destiny of women should be determined, first and foremost, ‘by the rationality that the Creator bestowed on them to distinguish them from beasts’, and not by ‘the consequences of the role of apparatuses and organs destined for the reproduction and conservation of the species, which we share with irrational animals’. ⁴²

Pardo Bazán refused to allow an increasingly more robust category, that of ‘women’ in nineteenth-century Spain, to determine her entire existence. She desired to be judged according to her merits or demerits and her acts. And she also wanted to evade that determination by vindicating her right to circumvent that biological mandate and to perform virility in an exercise of individual sovereignty. ‘Of the two orders of virtue that are demanded of mankind, I choose that of men … and enough said’, ⁴³ she remarked in 1889 in a letter to Benito Pérez Galdós, while claiming that writing, freedom in her personal relationships and her financial independence had accentuated her transformation from the status of woman to that of man on a daily basis. ⁴⁴ But the freedom that Pardo Bazán demanded, and which she believed that she had achieved at some stage, was much further away than she might have imagined. She was successfully interpellated as a woman through prohibitions, exclusions and affronts, and ultimately had to allude to women as a whole so as to talk about herself. She was a reluctant feminist because, much to her regret, she was regarded as a woman. And she ended up becoming, as she herself admitted in around 1910, a radical feminist. ⁴⁵

In the nineteenth century, Spanish feminism had to get by in a complex state of affairs with respect to the meanings of sexual difference. The very different feminist discourses of Arenal and Pardo Bazán should be understood in this unstable and changing context. Notwithstanding the differences of opinion, both were called, at some juncture, masculine – virile, in the language of the period. It should be noted how this attribute of virility adopted very different meanings, serving to extol and to show contempt, alike. On occasion, this accusation was levelled by men anxious to denigrate the principal advocates of the feminist cause and their ideas. It is a known fact that Pardo Bazán, in particular, was the main target of many contemporary misogynists who put her purported virility down to an error of nature. But that epithet was also a token of respect and admiration. As was the case of a critic of the Revista Contemporánea, who, in 1887, declared that Pardo Bazán was a paragon ‘of virility, faith and enthusiasm for everything great and beautiful’. ⁴⁶ By the same token, Arenal was described as being ‘physically and intellectually mannish’, in a tone of praise, by such close friends as Gumersindo de Azcárate in a posthumous tribute to the Galician feminist. ⁴⁷ And when extoling the qualities of other women, feminists themselves resorted to epithets of this sort. For instance, Gimeno de Flaquer did just that when praising the genius of Rosario de Acuña: ‘Rosario's numen is virile, her thought exceedingly vigorous’. ⁴⁸

In nineteenth-century Spain, it thus seems that the coexistence of such opposing views on the meaning of virility when applied to a woman was indeed possible. As a belated lesson of sorts, Pardo Bazán offers us the key to understanding this debate. In her last article, published in the newspaper ABC following her death, she criticized the author Juan Valera, pointing to the error behind his very blinkered anti-feminist ideas: ‘He perhaps believed, like a good pagan, that the lines and contours of the body irrevocably condition the spirit, and that women and men are all those who have such a shape’. ⁴⁹ As will be seen in the following section, however, Pardo Bazán's vision of gender and the human body could scarcely endure at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Feminisms in the First Third of the Twentieth Century

The feminisms of Arenal and Pardo Bazán contributed to creating a feminist subject from very different stances. But in Spain in the 1920s and 1930s, the conditions of possibility of feminism changed notably. ⁵⁰ The relative instability of the meaning of sexual difference in the nineteenth century was now water under the bridge and feminism was constructed in more solidly defined terms, on the basis of a firmly established category of ‘women’. Consequently, the temptation to classify the new currents according to the division between equality and difference feminism is greater for historians when analyzing this context. In light of this, at attempt will be made here to avoid that seemingly unproductive temptation when approaching those feminisms, with an eye to understanding the causes behind gender unrest and how calls for change were formulated.

There are many ways in which gender dissatisfaction, which is both emotion and discourse, can be felt. ⁵¹ The politicization of emotions, even when these are understood as cultural and social practices, ⁵² is a complex process that requires a discursive frame and categories that contain and give meaning to those emotions. Only in this way is it possible to formulate political demands. ⁵³ As noted at the beginning of this paper, this operation requires what Michel Foucault called ‘anchor points’ for a critique, ⁵⁴ discursive frames in which to give political meaning to that dissatisfaction and to formulate legitimately the feeling of anger or grievance – as opposed to a specific way of being governed. In Spain, during the first third of the twentieth century, there were basically three discursive frames: that of Catholicism; that deriving from a radically sexualized worldview; and, lastly, that aimed at appealing for ‘universal and indefeasible rights’, on the basis of the Enlightenment principle of equality. These paradigms, only distinguishable in the field of analysis, combined and overlapped in practice without respecting the frontier between political cultures or different feminist tendencies. Thus, many feminists far removed from the Catholic movement possessed a religious sentiment. And Catholic feminism was also imbued, as it could not be otherwise, with the logic of universal rights. Furthermore, this radically sexualized worldview affected practically all feminists at the time. It is impossible to speak of three differentiated feminist strategies. Yet, exploring separately the different paths of critique will contribute to gaining a better understanding of the full complexity of feminism during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Over the past 20 years, historiography on gender has paid increasingly more attention to Catholic feminism, with excellent results. As recently observed by the historian Inmaculada Blasco, who is an essential benchmark in this line of research, this historiography has managed to surmount a narrative in which women were merely tools of the Catholic Church, relegating them to the status of victims of the misogyny of a conspicuously patriarchal institution. In Blasco's opinion, neither should the insistence on the active participation of women prompt us to project a female subjectivity, revolving around the principle of individual autonomy or the quest for spaces of freedom, into the past. ⁵⁵ Rather, it would involve gaining further insights into the conditions that made the identities and actions of Catholic feminists possible. ⁵⁶ The collective work in which Blasco expressed this last idea is a good example of the vitality of this historiographical field, which has posed new questions and introduced new analytical perspectives, such as the study of Catholic masculinities, plus the relationship between gender and anti-clericalism or between feminism and nationalism. ⁵⁷

How were the demands of Catholic feminism formulated in Spain? For Catholicism, exercising criticism would have been, in principle, incompatible with its dogma, the Church being the only legitimate interpreter of the Holy Scriptures and the word of God. In spite of this theoretical impossibility, the struggle over their interpretation also existed in the Catholic world. The mechanisms exploited by Catholic feminists in Spain were, by and large, akin to those employed in other contexts and, specifically, the existence of an asexual soul was an element central to feminism based on religious presuppositions. ⁵⁸ Similarly, the unity of the human species, particularly when combating the conceptions deriving from evolutionism, was a fundamental anchor point. The defence of the idea that men and women were created in the image and likeness of God, thus participating in the imago Dei, ⁵⁹ was crucial for legitimizing Catholic feminism. It could even be claimed that these feminists tackled the misogynous radicalization of the scientific discourses at the turn of the century, bent on demonstrating women's inferiority by deploying supposedly evidenced-based arguments, more efficiently than their lay counterparts. Carmen Díaz de Mendoza, Countess of San Luis, sarcastically bewailed the impossibility of physically measuring the soul: ‘What a pity it is that it cannot be measured, like Aristotle measured craniums, or classified like ribs, or analyzed like viscera, so as to arrive at the comforting conclusion that the soul of a woman is inferior to that of a man!’ ⁶⁰

Catholicism repeatedly contended that its arguments were superior to those of rationalism and the lay feminist currents, basing itself on its greater capacity to dignify women. This diverted attention from the most ingrained misogyny of the Catholic Church, which had led freethinking feminists, like Rosario de Acuña, to describe Catholicism as ‘the slavery, debasement and humiliation of women’. ⁶¹ Shunning this negative view, Catholic thinkers were careful to give God credit for elevating women from the status of slaves to that of companions of men. Thanks to divine action, and through the sublimation of maternity, women had overcome their status as sinners and sources of temptation, even becoming the driving force behind moral and political regeneration. ⁶² The Jesuit writer Alarcón y Meléndez, the author of a book tellingly entitled, Un feminismo aceptable (An acceptable feminism) (1908), expressed this idea in the following terms: ‘No; women are not serpents, above all since the blessed among all women crushed the head of the infernal serpent with her immaculate foot’. ⁶³ The dualism between Eve and Mary was resolved emphasizing maternity, which was now socially promoted. As the Catholic feminist Juana Salas de Jiménez asserted, the work of women was not solely ‘in the bastion of their domestic refuge’ and society was none other than one big family requiring social mothers and women of action. ⁶⁴ These ‘women of action’ organized themselves in influential associations, like the Women's Catholic Action (Acción Católica de la Mujer), created in 1919. Some years later, Catholic Action would have 100,000 members, placing it on par with similar initiatives in other Catholic European countries, ⁶⁵ an experience that was not exclusive to feminism in the Catholic world. ⁶⁶

Feminist critique on behalf of, and respecting, sexual difference was often, but not always, performed on the basis of religious presuppositions. During the first third of the twentieth century, feminism was largely characterized by a radically sexualized worldview, in which gender eclipsed all other dimensions of women's existence. Over the past decades, as already noted, historians of feminism have managed to recuperate this dimension of feminist experience, thus enriching our vision of the phenomenon. To understand how this feminism that respected sexual difference was constructed, it is essential to bear in mind that the rights and obligations governing gender relations establish the terms and conditions of legitimate protest, ⁶⁷ and that this system varies over time. At around the time of the First World War, something important altered the dominant visions of gender in Spain with respect to the previous decades, and this change had direct repercussions for feminism.

In around 1912, the feminist journalist and writer Carmen de Burgos y Seguí noted a change that, albeit concealing a new way of stressing the inferiority of women, ushered in a new era for feminism: ‘The superiority or inferiority between the two sexes called upon to complement each other in a common and different mission is not now discussed’. Feminists and the sector most concerned about upholding the gender order agreed on this point. The physician and writer Gregorio Marañón, who was possibly the main architect of the discursive renovation in Spain in the 1920s, conceded, ‘The formula of the inferiority of women has now been replaced with this other one: neither of the sexes are inferior or superior; they are simply different’. ⁶⁸ As a matter of fact, he himself went to great lengths to define that difference, normatively reconstructing femininity and renewing the maternal mandate for all women. Although this change was not as drastic as Marañón would have liked, it is indeed possible to claim that there had been an evolution with notable consequences for feminism, which did not now devote so much time and energy to refuting the idea of women's inferiority as it had done in the past, and had to formulate its proposals in a normative context that had been reformed after a fashion.

As in other countries, many Spanish feminists converted ‘female nature’ into the basis and source for legitimizing their demands. The socialist writer and feminist María Lejárraga, who managed to explain this operation lucidly, placing the spotlight on maternity, wondered, ‘What does the difference between feminism and anti-feminism entail? That difference is that men deploy precisely this argument [maternity] to deny women all rights, and women resort precisely to this argument to reclaim them all’. ⁶⁹ This type of claim cut across different political cultures, emerging in both progressive liberalism and socialism, and even in anarchism. Although, as observed above, each one of the political cultures spawned very different ways of understanding feminism, it is possible to assert that the dominant feminist strategy in that context was to demand women's rights not so much based on their status as individuals as on that of their gender. The values associated with the maternity and moral elevation of women served to formulate social and civil demands, including not only the right to education and qualified employment, but also political rights. The vindication of women's suffrage appealed to its anticipated regenerating effect. ⁷⁰ As the teacher and feminist leader Julia Peguero Sanz declared, the intervention of women in politics would enrich political life, ‘imbuing it with the potential to purify and renovate itself’. ⁷¹

Last but not least, there was a third anchor point for feminist critique, which challenged the fundamentals of the gender division in terms of a notion of universal individual rights. The capacity to question a naturalized perception of sexual difference in an act of ‘reflective indocility’, ⁷² versus a purported scientific truth, was infrequent in the Spanish feminism of the period. This stance required revealing the ideological character of those scientific discourses and the hierarchy that was hidden behind the natural complementarity between men and women. But this position was also to be found on the political stage, coexisting with other ways of understanding feminism in the ranks of liberal republicanism, socialism and anarchism. It also marked the evolution of feminist organizations such as the National Association of Spanish Women (Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Españolas, ANME), created in 1918. ⁷³ The different ways of understanding gender both within and without feminism emerged in important debates at the time, the controversy surrounding women's suffrage, which was ultimately granted in 1931, being particularly heated.

In the social controversy and the parliamentary debate on women's suffrage, the essentialist vision of sexual difference and the idea of the theoretically non-hierarchal complementarity between the sexes prevailed. This naturalized vision even served as a basis for the demand that women deputies represent the female sex, thus participating in parallel in the country's government. ⁷⁴ But a sector of feminism had been pursuing women's political rights on the grounds of the principle of equality: ‘No privileges for either sex, no antagonism, no isolation’, Carmen de Burgos y Seguí declared, while stating that being feminine was the objective of naïve women, subject to sexual imperatives. ⁷⁵ Regrettably, the defence of equality produced a shift in some of the feminist discourses towards a profound contempt for femininity, in a context in which there was also a deep-rooted preconception of women's conservatism and fanatical religiosity. As a result, some influential feminists, like the deputy Victoria Kent, were against granting women the right to vote while they were unworthy of it. ⁷⁶ That the republic would be endangered by women's suffrage was an idea shared by some feminists and non-feminists, alike. In light of these fears, socialist support for women's suffrage was decisive. Unlike the majority of republican liberals, for the socialists it was a question of democratic principles and convictions, rather than of political inopportuneness. ⁷⁷ Unfortunately, the socialist deputy in Parliament Margarita Nelken voted against women's suffrage, postponing this right until women had ceased to be minors. ⁷⁸

One of the feminists who most boldly met the challenge of combating these prejudices in pursuit of equal political rights was perhaps the lawyer and parliamentary deputy Clara Campoamor. Mustering, as she herself would confess years later, all of her dialectical resources and pugnaciousness, she opposed the idea of converting Spain into ‘an aristocratic republic of male privilege’. ⁷⁹ Her feminist discourse reveals the contradictions arising from the principle of equality that attenuated the category of ‘women’, on whose behalf, however, the right to vote was being demanded. On the one hand, Campoamor refused time and again to believe that her gender status pervaded her personal and political identity, because, as she herself declared in Parliament, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I feel more like a citizen than a woman’. ⁸⁰ At the end of the day, however, as had occurred before with Pardo Bazán in another context, she also had to allude to women as a whole so as to express her personal views. When, in 1936, she recalled the debate that, some years before, had led to women's suffrage in Spain, Campoamor confessed that, in a hostile atmosphere, she had felt ‘the spirit of my sex, imperative, injured’, vibrate within me, seeing more clearly than ever my duty to carry on the fight to achieve that goal. ⁸¹ Her identity as a woman, imperative and injured, and more imperative than ever because of that injury, was built to the rhythm of the reigning exclusion and of her own desire for change.

One of the most interesting currents of Spanish feminism was associated with anarchism. Compared with other political cultures of the time, anarchism embraced many varied feminist experiences from a broad understanding of the meaning of power and oppression. The organization Mujeres Libres (Free Women), which in 1938 had over 20,000 members, was the clearest expression of the vitality of this complex feminism. Mujeres Libres called for the unity of all women ⁸² to fight against male tyranny. This women's organization claimed to want to put an end to a civilization that had made one half of humanity independent and the other half slaves. Even the poorest of male slaves were above dejected, docile female servants. ⁸³ At the same time, the activists of Mujeres Libres defended mutual interests with their comrades in the common fight against social injustice. Paradoxically, many of those women denied being feminists because they identified this concept with bourgeois feminism or with a kind of masculinizing feminism that they rejected. All in all, it is not possible to speak of only one form of anarchist feminism in Spain of that time.

Spanish anarchism is a good example of how the same political culture can harbour such dissimilar gender visions. In reality, anarchism's relationship with modernity was always conflictive, and that tension was also reflected in feminism. For instance, Federica Montseny came out in defence of ‘absolute equality’ between men and women in all spheres of life. But that defence of the unity of human beings, of natural laws, of an ideal of absolute harmony and of the broadest universalism left no place for feminism: ‘Feminism? Never! Always humanism!’ ⁸⁴ she stated categorically. Notwithstanding the fact that women's emancipation was, in her view, ‘the most pressing problem at the moment’, Montseny saw feminism as a retrograde and coercive force, especially and logically from her political position, when this movement aspired to participate in the country's government. It is interesting to note that, despite her radical defence of gender equality, Montseny incorporated a naturalized notion of femininity into her gender vision, which she plainly identified with maternity. This perception led her to claim, ‘A woman without children is a tree without fruit, a rose bush without roses’. ⁸⁵ In short, if the false dilemma between equality and difference feminism is applied to Montseny's discourse, it would not be too farfetched to suggest that her reliance on the principles of equality and difference was too strong to allow her to accept feminism.

Montseny's impossible feminism coexisted with the radical feminism of her fellow anarchist Lucía Sánchez Saornil. Nowadays, Sánchez Saornil's ideas stand out for their audacity and irreverence towards the scientific truths that subordinated women's entire life to a biological process, pregnancy: ‘The concept of mother absorbing that of woman, the function annulling the individual’, she declared, while decrying the trap that the exaltation of maternity represented for women. ⁸⁶ Sánchez Saornil also clearly saw the need to construct a political subject for feminism, which should have its own organizations to achieve its aims. With this conviction, together with other fellow anarchists, she promoted the creation of the journal Mujeres Libres, in an attempt to achieve a ‘triumphant and progressive women's unity’. ⁸⁷ That unique experience of feminist organization took place in a country that had already been plunged into civil war.

Conclusions

The history of feminism has been written, as could not be otherwise, from the perspective of current concerns. In Spain, in the 1970s, when this history began to be written, specific expressions of feminism, focusing on the struggle for equality and political rights, served as paradigmatic models of protest. Spanish historiography then had to overcome the limits imposed by narratives created in other European and American contexts to furnish itself with more versatile and useful tools. The opening up of the concept of feminism to forms of protest grounded in the idea of a female nature with its inherent rights, with a greater concern for social aspects than for strictly political ones, offered new ways of analyzing historical feminism. From this more inclusive perspective, it was possible to approach the experience and subjectivity of more feminists and to understand, as E. P. Thompson observed, that ‘their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience’; ⁸⁸ or at least to prevent history from denying them that validity. Despite the productiveness of this approach, the recuperation of the so-called ‘relational feminism’ for history exacerbated the differentiation between the two types of feminism, that of equality and that of difference. In view of this dilemma, Scott's reflections on the impossibility of dividing feminism according to its two differentiated strategies seem to be appropriate, also in Spain.

In this paper, I have attempted to offer an overview, among the many possible ones, of the complex picture of Spanish feminism, highlighting some specific issues. Firstly, there is the unstable meaning of the category of ‘women’ itself in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In this context, by reviewing the endeavours of Concepción Arenal and Emilia Pardo Bazán, two of the most outstanding feminists at the time, my intention has been to underscore not so much the paradoxical aspects of their feminisms owing to the fact that they acted in a discursive frame that imposed its logic on them, as their ability – or inability – to alter the essence of that logic. With respect to Arenal, I have emphasized her role in dignifying women, versus the idea of women's inferiority, and her capacity to undertake this task with a view to formulating feminist demands. The moral elevation of femininity was not then a necessary counterweight to or derivation of the idea of complementarity between the sexes, but the result of the struggle against the prevailing misogyny, in which feminists like Arenal played a leading role. And as to Pardo Bazán, I have drawn attention primarily to her refusal to be addressed as a woman and her failure in this regard. In the times in which she lived, that demand was too powerful and unanimous, and its punitive and discriminatory effects ended up forging a radical feminist, as she called herself.

In Spanish society in the 1920s and 1930s, feminist demands had to be formulated in a more stable normative framework as regards the meaning of the category of ‘women’. But it was precisely the feminists who became decisive political actors by provoking much instability in gender relations during that period. And they achieved this in many different ways. The perception of grievance had to be expressed in political terms using mechanisms of a different nature. The unity of the human species from Catholic premises, the principle of citizen equality and the capacity of a dignified femininity to engender rights were the main anchor points of feminist critique. But, as has been seen, the paths of that critique can only be plotted in the field of analysis, with the result that, in practice, feminism reveals itself as a confusing but fascinating web of desires for change.