Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain (review)

This collection of essays explores the gender ideology of separate spheres and its relationship to lived experience and identity construction in modern Spain. Spanish women are shown here to have frequently operated beyond the rigid private and domestic areas that the two spheres model implies, laying to rest what was left of the notion that Spanish women were locked in “traditional” roles until the last quarter of the twentieth century Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff have done an exemplary job of bringing coherence to fifteen disparate pieces of work, some of which are more explicitly historical than others.

The book is organized into three sections beginning with chapters examining prescriptions for female identity. Mary Nash, whose previous works have laid much of the groundwork for Spanish women’s history, shows how the dominant discourse on gender in Spain after the turn of the century, paralleling West Europe’s, shifted from one whose rationale for women’s difference was based largely on religion toward increasing biological essentialism. Aurora Morcillo Gómez and María A. Escudero each offer interesting accounts of Franquist gender discourse with attention to the educational system. Clotilde Puertolas focuses on the highly gendered nature of Pomplona’s Sanfermines. All four of these chapters show the ideological constructs that operated to reinforce ideas of gender difference and reveal some of the complex ways in which these ideas were transmitted and reinforced in modern Spain.

The second section of the book deals with work identities and includes two chapters on late nineteenth and early twentieth century female tobacco workers by Rosa María Capel Martínez and D.J. O’Connor. Focusing on rural settings, Timothy Rees examines women in agricultural production in the southern province of Badajoz between 1875 and 1939, and Heidi Kelley offers an ethnographic analysis of the women of Ezaro, a coastal Galician village Together these chapters show that modern Spanish women formed work-related identities outside any narrowly construed boundaries of the domestic realm. Of the groups examined here this appears to have been most true of the women of Ezaro, whom Kelley portrays as deeply identified with either agriculture or elements of the coastal economy much more than with their sexual honor.

The last section of the book focuses on some of the specific ways in which modern Spanish women engaged in political activities even where denied formal access. Sarah L. White writes about the vilification of Isabel II in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1868 and the powerful gendering of the monarchy, the Republic, and the populace by the press and pamphleteers. John Lawrence Tone treats women in the resistance to Napoleon, comparing the popular imagery of bellicose women driving the French from the Peninsula with evidence of their actual participation in combat. Temma Kaplan, whose substantial body of previous work on Spanish women has garnered the widest audience of any of the contributors in this volume, here writes about the political action of women in the Rio Tinto mining community. Pamela Beth Radcliff, focusing on poor women’s participation in consumer riots, shows how this form of protest remained a powerful political tool well into the twentieth century. Also included are two chapters on women’s suffrage in Spain, the first by Judith Keene and the second by Gerard Alexander. Ending this section is a piece by Victoria Lorée Enders about the Sección Femenina of the Falange in which the author argues that the continued ideological polarization of Spain has prevented feminists from considering the possibility that fascist women might have had historical agency. These seven chapters illustrate the many ways in which Spanish women influenced political processes and the highly gendered nature of politics itself.

Though a number of the contributors successfully apply in the Spanish context approaches that have proved useful elsewhere, some of these pieces offer historical insights that will undoubtedly inform research and...