Beyond Models: The Many Paths to Feminism in Modern Spain

Abstract

This paper addresses feminisms in Spain during the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century, proposing a number of interpretative keys for their historical analysis. Spanish feminism has been diverse, and its emancipatory aspirations, demands and discourses often have not coincided with those of the European or American suffragist movements. In these pages, an attempt is made to gain further insights into the principal challenges that Spanish historiography has met when analyzing this complex phenomenon, while suggesting that this has contributed to breathing new life into research on historical feminisms as a whole. Special attention is also paid to how feminist critique developed on the basis of different ways of understanding sexual difference. Lastly, I look at how expectations for change were created and how feminist vindications were formulated in different discursive frameworks, namely those of religion, liberal principles and socialist and anarchist political cultures.