Transnational Feminism and Spanish Magazines at the Turn of the Century

Berliner Philharmonie, June 9, 1904, 8:00 p.m. A large audience eagerly awaited the opening of the second public meeting of the International Council of Women in Berlin. Created sixteen years earlier to connect women across the globe, the Council was about to confirm its support for women's suffrage. For the next two days, president-elect the Countess of Aberdeen (from Britain), and vice presidents Mrs. Siegfried (France), Maria Stritt (Germany), and Hierta Retzius (Sweden), among numerous other international delegates, delivered speeches on female suffrage, white slavery, and world peace, in front of an audience of 700–1,000 delegates and members of the public.¹ On that night of June 9, the audience seemed "impatient of nothing excepting suggestions of the omission or abridgement of some speech," even when the event ran for three instead of two hours, as scheduled.² One eager listener was Spanish-Portuguese feminist Alicia Pestana (1860–1929). She later reported on her German experience in La Lectura, one of the leading cultural magazines printed in Madrid. There, and inspired by the event, Pestana encouraged women from all social classes to shed their fetters and unite in the fight for gender equality (Pestana, "Asambleas de Berlín," 43).³

The impact of the International Council of Women Conference on Pestana and other attendees points to the council's performative quality. Barbara Green has identified the theatrical and performative character of the suffrage campaign, which frequently involved pageants, marches, demonstrations, and public meetings. All these activities, Green argues, shaped political thinking, performativity being at the heart of suffrage activism.⁴ The Council in Berlin and Pestana's periodical report, I suggest, share some of this performative quality. It is this quality of Pestana's essay, and of other essays in the Spanish press, that I wish to explore in what follows. I expand on Green's argument to propose that, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain, periodicals such as La Lectura performatively helped forge international links among women.

The importance of such international connections for a better understanding of the history of modern feminism has already been established. In her pioneering Golden Cables of Sympathy (1999), Margaret McFadden studies the formation of an international feminist matrix in the early and mid-nineteenth century, thanks to the rise of technology, greater travel opportunities, the anti-slavery movement, and advances in education. For McFadden, this transatlantic network included Britain, the United States, Scandinavia, France, and Italy, primarily.⁵ Along similar lines, Bonnie S. Anderson surveys early developments of the international women's movement in Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 1830–1860 (2000). Her case studies are the lives of twenty leading campaigners across the world, such as Harriet Taylor Mill (Britain), Lucretia Mott (the United States), Jenny d'Héricourt (France), and Malwida von Meysenbug (Germany).⁶

Despite these and other excellent studies of the transnational women's movement, Spain remains notably absent from the historical picture of international feminism.⁷ There is good reason for such neglect: the woman movement took notoriously long to blossom in the country, due to a complex mixture of political conservatism, belated industrialism, and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church.⁸ As late as 1919 (when women over thirty had already achieved the vote in Britain), Spanish activist Margarita Nelken lamented the absence of a feminist tradition in the country: "Our feminism is recent and rare," she notes.⁹ Nelken blames Spanish women who, unlike their European neighbors, had largely remained aloof from the fight for their civic rights. What little activism there is, Nelken continues, is the effect of the pressure exercised by other countries—Britain, France, the United States, and Scandinavian and South American nations, where feminism has been flourishing for at least one century (La condición social, 29–30).

Such history of apparent belatedness and international "effects" makes the Spanish case particularly significant to understand the dynamics of European feminisms and the ways international connections are established. Nelken might have accused Spanish women of being "anti-feminist," but the wealth of recent scholarship...