Imagining 'America' in late Nineteenth Century Spain by Kate Ferris

Author:Kate Ferris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Spanish women, by contrast, had (theoretical) access to just two years of elementary education, could not work as judges, civil servants, sit on juries, testify legal documents or vote, and had limited rights to buy and transfer goods, deposit money and conduct business, which deferred entirely to their husbands upon marriage. Married Spanish women were required by the civil code to obey their husbands, who were their wives’ legal representatives and administered any communal goods; wives had scant legal recourse in cases of adultery or in relation to her children (including extra-marital). Divorce was rejected as a ‘Protestant heresy’.21

If the ‘discovery of women’ was the ‘discovery of the century’, or at least of the United States’ century, it follows that American women and the images of them that were projected and produced elsewhere would be taken as ciphers of both the USA and of modernity.22 American women were viewed as emblems (and repositories) of their country’s present and other nations’ futures. The reactions of Spaniards to the seeming liberties of American women varied considerably. Still, the Spanish images formed of American women more often than not fit within two reductive stereotypes: matrons and misses. The first image, the ‘matron’, prioritised education, industriousness, material means, morality and strength of character. The second image, the ‘miss’,23 focussed on beauty, coquettishness, materialism and carefree relations between the sexes. Both images contained emancipation and independence at their core: independence of thought, of means and of movement (the apparent possibilities of US women to move around freely, without compromise to their ‘honour’, were frequently noted by Spanish observers). Of course, both images, already highly reductive, were circumscribed by race and class. Spanish images of black American and of working class, often immigrant, women were of course produced, but with far less frequency and these were not taken to stand as ciphers of national identity or experience.

Conservative Spanish businessmen, whose work took them to the United States, reported back with bemusement, affection and often distaste the flirtatious character of US women and the sharp differences they perceived between them and their Spanish counterparts. Krausist educationalists and intellectuals looked with some approval to the model provided by the East Coast women’s colleges and female emancipatory movements and tried to reconcile their admiration for the educational provisions in the USA with an insistence that Spain would need to change its attitude towards women’s public roles at its own pace, acknowledging that reform was still a long way off. The pioneers of Spanish feminism viewed the United States as a kind of crucible of modern womanhood in practice from which they could retrieve an ‘arsenal of facts’ to bolster their claims for female equivalence and greater participation for women in public life.

This chapter examines the image of North American women from diverse perspectives: from the viewpoints of Krausists such as Rafael de Labra, Fernando de Castro and the Giner de los Ríos brothers; the pioneering feminists of the late nineteenth century Concepción Arenal and Emila Pardo Bazán; and of

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