Spanish Female Writers and the Freethinking Press, 1879-1926 by Christine Arkinstall (review)

Christine Arkinstall has written a thorough and thoughtful book exploring the writings of three (now) mostly unknown Spanish women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their contributions both to the freethinking press and to various progressive movements of the time. Spanish Female Writers and the Freethinking Press has a number of different foci; most significantly, it aims to recover the lives and work of these women, each of whom had extensive publications, both journalistic and literary, in her day. As well, it highlights the connections among them and their prominent roles in progressive movements of the time, including freethinking, spiritualism, socialism, anarchism, internationalism, feminism, and rationalist education, among others. Even more, it makes clear the specifically feminist character of their criticisms and, in the process, the ways in which they were developing a critique of what mid- to late twentieth-century feminists were to call the “private/public division” (p. 6). Thus, the book makes important contributions to the history of progressive movements and of feminism in Spain—firmly centering the place of these women within those movements.

A product of many years’ sifting through materials in archives throughout Spain, the book draws on the writers’ journalistic efforts and their literary works. Each of the three women on whom the book is focused—Amalia Domingo Soler, Ángeles López de Ayala, and Belén Sárraga—wrote extensively in general progressive journals and in newspapers or newsletters that they themselves edited. In addition, each wrote novellas, novels, dramas, and/or poetry. Arkinstall argues that they should be recognized as members of the Generation of 1898 and that they participated in cultural and political movements along with those males of the time who have been more generally remembered, such as Miguel de Unamuno, Blasco Ibáñez, Azorín, Alejandro Lerroux, and Pío Baroja. To ignore these women and their contributions is to have a diminished sense of what those movements were about and little awareness of the significance of the social, cultural, and political interconnections among them.

The claims Arkinstall makes for the specifically feminist dimensions of the authors’ stories are particularly intriguing. She argues that in a society where the idealized view of women as “ángel del hogar” (the angel in/of the house) was dominant, journalism provided a way for these women to escape (at least partially) from the home and to enter political debates in a relatively public way (p. 30). They wrote in their own voices; they published sharp critiques of the consequences of Spain’s educational system (especially its consequences for the working class and for women); and they used both their journalistic and their more literary writings to make the case for opening more opportunities to women. Domingo Soler, who was deeply involved in spiritism, used that medium to “give voice to the worlds of poverty and hardship experienced by working-class society” (p. 36). Indeed, Arkinstall argues, the testimonio genre of spiritism “allows the dispossessed and illiterate to speak through the medium of a more educated other, and it authorizes the educated—but socially, politically, and economically disempowered—female subject to write in the public sphere, given that her words are, and are not, her own” (p. 37).

López de Ayala was an active supporter (in her journalism and as a charismatic speaker) of both republicanism and working-class causes. She saw the causes of working-class and women’s uplift as intimately connected; both groups were held back by illiteracy and by the traditionalist, if not reactionary, policies of the Catholic Church. She believed that “education was the fundamental weapon in the class struggle” for workers and for women (p. 128). Even more than claims for women’s public engagement, Arkinstall argues that López de Ayala’s work, including her dramas and novels, was characterized by an insistence that “any transformation of the national body into a viable democracy...