Abstract
This pronouncement, made in 1903 by José Prat to an audience of women, was indicative of the anarchist engagement with the question of women’s emancipation in Spain at the turn of the twentieth century. The anarchist, or libertarian, movement with its strongholds in rural Andalusia and industrial Barcelona was exceptionally successful in Spain, eventually growing into one of the largest left-wing movements in Europe in the early twentieth century.2 It was a movement that showed a significant interest in the question of women’s emancipation. There was no organized women’s movement in Spain until the foundation of the National Association of Spanish Women in 1918. None the less, ‘the Woman Question’ (la cuestión femenina) was widely discussed and highly controversial in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Debate on the subject was fostered under the auspices of other movements and encouraged by individual women and men.3 The Woman Question became an ideological battlefield where traditionalist Catholicism, liberal secularism and anarchism confronted each other.
Your former and current condition as men’s slaves was and is due to the fact that all religions and systems of government were formed by and made up of men who were ignorant of the scientific truth and firmly believed that women were essentially and organically inferior to men …1
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Notes
José Prat, A las mujeres, first edition 1903 (Barcelona: Salud y Fuerza, 1912), p. 24. Prat (1867–1932) was a prolific contributor to the anarchist press, an editor of the journal Natura and an administrator at the Modern School in Barcelona.
For anarchism in Spain, see Temma Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia, 1868–1903 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977);
George Richard Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989);
José Álvarez Junco, La ideología del anarquismo español, 1868–1910 (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1991);
and Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991).
The most comprehensive history of the women’s movement in Spain is still Geraldine M. Scanlon, La polémica feminista en la España contemporánea, 1868–1974 (Madrid: Akal, 1986).
Sharif Gemie, ‘Anarchism and Feminism: A Historical Survey’, Women’s History Review 5 (1996): 422.
For the role of science in anarchist thought see Álvarez Junco, La ideología del anarquismo español, ch. 3; Richard Cleminson, Anarchism, Science and Sex: Eugenics in Eastern Spain, 1900–1937 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000);
and Álvaro Girón Sierra, Evolucionismo y anarquisino en España, 1882–1914 (Madrid: Consejo de Investigaciones Científicas, 1996).
See Mary Nash, ‘Un/Contested Indentities: Motherhood, Sex Reform and the Modernization of Gender ldentity in Early Twentieth-Century Spain’, in Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliffe, eds, Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 25–49;
and Catherine Jagoe, ‘Sexo y género en la medicina del siglo XIX’, in Catherine Jagoe, Alda Blanco and Cristina Enríquez de Salamanca, eds, La mujer en los discursos de género: textos y contextos en el siglo XIX (Barcelona: Icaria, 1998), pp. 305–67. This argument about medicine and science has also been made in relation to other countries.
See Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989);
and Anne Digby, ‘Women’s Biological Straitjacket’, in Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall, eds, Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinaty Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 192–220.
See Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914 (London: Penguin, 1995);
and Katharina Rowold, ‘“The Academic Woman”: Minds, Bodies and Education in Britain and Germany, c. 1860–c. 1914’ (PhD Thesis, University College London, 1997).
See Ramón Ruiz Amado, La educación femenina (Barcelona: Librería Religiosa, 1912);
and Amado, La educación moral, first pub. 1908, 2nd rev. edition (Barcelona, Librería Religiosa, 1913).
Frances Lannon, ‘Los cuerpos de las mujeres y el cuerpo politico católico: autoridades e identidades en conflicto en España durante las décadas de 1920 y 1930’, Historia Social 35 (1999): 71.
Frances Lannon, Privilege, Persecution, and Prophecy: The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1975 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 54; Lannon, ‘Los cuerpos de las mujeres y el cuerpo político católico’, 66.
See Rafael Rodríguez de Cepeda, ‘Misión de la mujer cristiana en le hogar doméstico y su importancia para resolver la cuestión social’, Revista Católica de las Cuestiones Sociales 8 (November 1902): 642; and Julio Alarcón y Meléndez, ‘Un feminismo aceptable’, Razón y Fe (April 1904): 455.
Richard Cleminson, ‘Beyond Tradition and “Modernity”: The Cultural and Sexual Politics of Spanish Anarchism’, in Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, eds, Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 118.
Vicente Daza, ‘Lo que debe ser el trabajo de las mujeres y de los niños’, La Revista Blanca, 3 (1 July 1900): 30. This approach which conceived of women primarily as reproducers was exemplified by Ricardo Mella in Spain.
Mary Nash, ‘Estudio preliminar,’ in Nash, ed., ‘Mujeres Libres’: España, 1936–1939 (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1976), pp. 10–11.
See Prat, A las mujeres, pp. 24–6; Anselmo Lorenzo, ‘La mujer (Para un libro en preparaci6n)’, Tierra y Libertad 4 (30 May 1907); Soledad Gustavo, A las proletarias (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca de la Questione Sociale, 1896), p. 10.
Julio Camba, ‘Sobre la emancipación de la muter’, La Revista Blanca 124 (15 August 1903): 101.
L. Manouvrier, ‘Antropologia de los sexos y aplicaciones sociales’, Natura 12 (15 March 1904): 177. Manouvrier critiqued biological determinism and attacked anthropological systems of human group inequality throughout his professional career.
See Jennifer Michael Hecht, The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), ch. 6.
Stephen J. Gould has called him ‘the nondeterminist black sheep of Broca’s fold’. See Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 58.
Theodor L. W. von Bischoff, Das Studium der Medicin durch Frauen (Munich: Th. Riedel, 1872).
Martha Ackelsberg, ‘Mujeres Libres: Identity, Community, Sexuality, and Power’, Anarchist Studies 9 (2000): 100.
See Friedrich Engels, Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staates, first ed. 1884, in Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz, 1990).
See Teresa Claramunt, ‘A la mujer’, Fraternidad, 5 (6 January 1900); Claramunt, La mujer: consideraciones generales sobre su estado ante las prerrogativas del hombre (Mahón: El Porvenir del Obrero, 1905), p. 5. José Prat thought that the greater activity of the male and passivity of the female, visible in animal kingdom, led to women’s initial subjection. See Prat, A las mujeres, p. 7.
Doctor Klotz-Forrest, ‘La emancipación de la mujer’, Salud y Fuerza 26 (1908): 357.
For instance, Manuel Devaldés, ‘La individualidad femenina’, Salud y Fuerza 9 (1912): 177–8;
Nelly Roussel, ‘Feminismo y maltusianismo’, Salud y Fuerza 8 (1911): 65.
For anarchist neo-Malthusianism, see Mary Nash, ‘El neomaltusianismo anarquista y los conocimientos populares sobre el control de la natalidad en España’, in Nash, ed., Presencia y protagonismo: aspectos de la historia de la mujer (Barcelona: Serbal, 1984), pp. 307–40.
Ackelsberg, ‘Mujeres Libres’, 101. See Prat, A las rnujeres; Camba, ‘Sobre la emancipación de la mujer’; [Ana María Mozzoni], A las muchachas que estudian, first edition 1895 (Barcelona: José Garriga, 1903), pp. 7–8; Claramunt, La mujer, pp. 1, 19; Gustavo, ‘La mujer: a mi joven amiga Maria Montseny’ (7 March 1890).
Soledad Gustavo, ‘Movimiento feminista’, La Idea Libre 110 (5 June 1896). See also Aurora Vilanova, ‘Movimiento feminista’, La Revista Blanca 1 (1 July 1898): 23–4.
See also Richard Cleminson, ‘Viewpoint: Anarchism and Feminism’, Women’s History Review 7 (1998): 135–8.
For an anthology of later anarchist writings on homosexuality, see Richard Cleminson, ed., Anarquismo y homosexualidad: Antología de artículos de la ‘Revista Blanca’, ‘Generación Consciente’, ‘Estudios’ e ‘Iniciales’, 1924–1935 (Madrid: Huerga y Fierro, 1995).
For the controversy over Hippocratic medicine, see Tomás Ramos, ‘La polémica hipocrática en la medicina española del siglo XIX’, Archivo Iberoamericano de Historia de la Medicina 6 (1954): 115–61. For an examination of the Hippocratic model of sexual difference in nineteenth-century Spain, see Jagoe, ‘Sexo y género en la medicina del siglo XIX’, 315ff.
Schools in small villages in Spain were often co-educational by default, but in principle, there was a strong adherence to separate education for girls and boys. For Spanish anarchism and education, see Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), ch. 1, which discusses the rationalist school movement in Spain; and Álvarez Junco, La ideología política del anarquismo español, ch. 19.
Francisco Ferrer Guardia, La escuela moderna: póstuma explicación y alcance de la enseñanza racionalista (Barcelona, Imprenta Elzeviriana — Borrás, Mestres, y Compañía, 1912), pp. 54–5.
Dolores Aleu y Riera, De la necesidad de encaminar por nueva senda la educación higiénico-moral de la mujer: Tesis doctoral (Barcelona: La Academia, 1883), p. 27. For anarchists making reference to this passage, see Mañé, ‘El feminismo’, p. 68; Lorenzo, ‘La mujer’ (30 May 1907).
For Darwin’s ideas on gender difference, see Evelleen Richards, ‘Darwin and the Descent of Woman’, in David Oldroyd and Ian Langham, eds, The Wider Domain of Evolutionary Thought (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), pp. 57–111.
For evolutionism and Spanish anarchism, see Girón Sierra, Evolucionismo y anarquismo en España; Girón Sierra, ‘The Moral Economy of Nature: Darwinism and the Struggle for Life in Spanish Anarchism (1882–1914)’, in Thomas F. Glick, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper and Rosaura Ruiz, eds, The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World: Spain, Spanish America and Brazil (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), pp. 189–203; and the discussion in Álvarez Junco, La ideología política del anarquismo español, ch. 6.
Camba, ‘Sobre la emancipación de la mujer’, p. 100. For a similar argument, see ‘Prólogo: la mujer ante la ciencia’, in Cristóbal Litrán, La mujer en el cristianismo (Barcelona: La Academia, 1892), pp. 11–12 by Odón de Buen, who cooperated with Ferrer Guardia in the Modern School.
See Álvaro Girón, ‘La revolución come medicina: enfermedad mental y anarquismo en torno a 1898’, in Ana I. Romero, Juan Casco, Filiberto Fuentenbro and Rafael Huertas, eds, Cultura y Psiquiatría del 98 en España (Madrid: Necodisne Ediciones, 1999), pp. 109–18. For anarchism and eugenics, see Cleminson, Anarchism, Science and Sex.
Soledad Gustavo, La sociedad futura (Madrid: Antonio Marzo, 1899), pp. 17, 24;
see also Anselmo Lorenzo, El proletariado militante: memorias de un internacional, ed. Juan Gómez Casas (Madrid: Zero, 1974), p. 247.
Soledad Gustavo, ‘Del amor’, La Revista Blanca 59 (1 December 1900): 250.
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© 2007 Katharina Rowold
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Rowold, K. (2007). ‘Twenty Centuries of Christianity Weigh Heavily on Women’s Brains …’: Anarchism, Science and Women’s Nature in Spain at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. In: Bivins, R., Pickstone, J.V. (eds) Medicine, Madness and Social History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235359_12
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