The Emerging Female Citizen: Gender and Enlightenment in Spain (review)

This excellent study invites us to spend time with a group of upper-class, largely educated, imaginative, and hard-working Spanish women who believed that the era of enlightenment in the 1770s and 1780s belonged to them as well as to men. A pragmatic lot, they deployed (in contemporary terms) the arguments of both parity and difference. They called upon nature to underline their special and necessary contribution to the Enlightenment project while at the same time arguing that all the monarchy’s subjects bore equal responsibilities and rights in the new age of utility. But they, like their French counterparts a few years later, ended up excluded from the public sphere, victims of the inevitable paradox pointed to by Joan Scott in the French context: they were forced to invoke the very difference they sought to deny.

Theresa Ann Smith starts her story by going all the way back to the late fifteenth century, perhaps a stretch but also important for pointing out some key differences between Spain and the rest of Europe. Females could and did rule in Spain, and women under certain circumstances could own property and businesses and vote in public meetings. The first treatise that set the stage for the emerging female citizen was “Defense of Women,” written by Benito Jerónimo Feijoo in 1726, which provoked an impassioned debate over the subsequent decades. Smith says the work’s principal thesis, that women were rational, equal beings, was largely accepted among the intelligentsia by mid-century.

Noblewomen began hosting salons, or tertulias, where they discussed literature, art, and travel; the most outstanding of these cultured hostesses was the Count- Duchess of Benavente and Duchess of Osuna, María Josefa Alonso-Pimentel Téllez-Girón, who had an impeccable lineage, lots of money, and a thirst for new and interesting ideas and correspondents. At the same time, women fought for access to Spain’s leading arts academies. In both cultural spheres, women were forces to be reckoned with.

But the chief nongovernmental organisms of the Spanish Enlightenment were the economic societies, which first arose in the Basque Country and later were encouraged and propagated throughout Spain by one of the Bourbon monarchy’s most prominent ministers, Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes. These were sites of learning and debate regarding, in essence, Spain’s economic modernization. They were to be the incubators of the new Spain.

From the point of view of the reformers, women were part of the problem, not the solution. Idle hands and frivolity were stains upon the female sex, a belief clearly not unique to Spain, though at times Campomanes in particular seemed obsessed with the numbers of idle women constraining the country from leaping forward. Lower-class women (and their children) therefore should be put to work at sex-appropriate tasks, making themselves useful for the patria in the new “popular industries,” basically a putting-out system. The economic societies established schools to teach girls practical skills, and the despised craft guilds were ordered in 1779 (and again in 1784, 1789, and 1790) to admit qualified women. If women of the lower classes were to contribute by working, those of the better classes were to contribute by being enlightened mothers and consumers of whatever the lower classes were producing.

There were some elite women who figured they could do more than that, however, and the saga of their battle to enter the realm of the economic societies is a valiant and sad one. In 1775 a member of the Madrid Economic Society proposed that women be allowed to join. After some discussion, the matter was tabled and forgotten, at least by the men. But Benavente and another noblewoman somehow became members in January 1786, and their entry triggered a renewed debate about women’s contributions to the...