Feminism and the Fin De Siècle in Spain

As the century drew to an end, the Restoration system's promise of order, stability, and prosperity came to seem increasingly hollow. The tranquility of the system established in 1886, whereby elections were rigged in order to ensure the peaceful transfer of government back and forth between the two parties, was only apparent; it masked escalating anxieties about socio-political instability and imperial decline, as well as intractable social problems such as suicide, prostitution, syphilis, and violent crime. The history of the Restoration, as one commentator notes, was one of an increasingly precarious social,

political, and economic equilibrium that barely masked the signs of impending crisis.^[3] By the early 1890s some members of what was to become known as the generation of 1898 were already elaborating new socio-philosophical theories that posed Spain itself as a problem, attributing its cultural and economic stagnation to abulia (apathy). As early as 1889, a youthful Angel Ganivet ascribed Spain's malady to the lack of what he intriguingly termed ideas madres (matrix ideas). The fin-de-siècle era in Spain was marked by a sense of approaching national apocalypse, heralded by a marked increase in strikes, terrorist and anarchist acts, and assassinations. Galdós himself, who commented in response to the recently inaugurated May Day demonstrations that Spain was on the edge of a volcano, in 1890 painted a dire picture of a collapsing society and implied that the world he knew was coming to an end.^[4] The bourgeois oligarchy was in the throes of crisis in a number of arenas: in class relations through the growth of working class and anarchist militancy, in empire and race relations through the colonial uprisings in Cuba and the Philippines and the growth of the abolitionist movement, and in sexual relations. Women, the working class, and the natives were all threatening to seek independence.

Middle-class intellectuals were busy formulating theories about what they saw as the physical and mental degeneration of society. A number of new disciplines were born in Europe at this time. Neurologists and psychologists, following the example of pioneers such as G. Stanley Hall, Henry Maudsley, and Jean-Martin Charcot, sought answers to the perturbing increase in mental illness, describing and investigating new diseases and sexual perversions, such as hysteria and nymphomania. Criminal anthropology emerged in the late 1880s in response to the perceived rise in violent crime and alcoholism. All over Europe science, which was playing such a vital role in transforming western structures of thought, also helped to shore up aspects of the old order in the face of threatened social changes. Biology having become the determining factor in social theory, the stage was set for medical science to play its peculiarly decisive intervention in nineteenth-century culture, policing the patriarchy. In 1889 Geddes and Thomson advanced their popular theory of the essentially gendered nature of metabolism, strengthening the case that physicians such as Edward Clarke had already made against female education as exhausting women's smaller stock of vital energy and leading to

neurasthenia and, eventually, to sterility.^[5] The female physique, it was argued, automatically and naturally disqualified women from undertaking a strenuous education or competing with men in the public sphere. Weir Mitchell proposed confinement and his famous "rest cure" for overactive women, including the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Anthropometric studies measured and compared human frames, giving rise to conclusions that were blatantly misogynist, racist, and classist. Cesare Lombroso and Gustave Le Bon, at the forefront of the new science of physical anthropology in Italy and France, argued that women, criminals, and "savage" races were all evolutionary anachronisms, cases of arrested development. Evolution, they believed, had bypassed women, leaving them with smaller skulls, stunted frames, and a greater propensity to insanity.^[6]

In Spain, a major part of the pervading sense of impending collapse stemmed from a perception of a disease in gender relations threatening to invade the heart of the country. As one writer put it, in biblical rhetoric, women's emancipation was "la mala nueva de los tiempos apocalípticos de la revolución social que nos amenaza" (the bad news of the apocalypse of social revolution that is threatening us).^[7] Since the middle of the century, conservative apologists had written of the disturbing developments in women's rights movements abroad. But whereas in 1877 an amendment in the Spanish parliament proposing a limited degree of female suffrage could sink almost without trace in the press, by the late 1880s those advocating an expansion in women's role beyond the domestic sphere had a great deal more support. Thanks to the efforts of the Asociación para la Enseñanza de la Mujer, the foundations of some possibilities for women to work outside the home were being laid. In 1884 Concepción Arenal, who had disguised herself as a man in order to attend classes at Madrid University in the 1840s, arranged for her analysis of the situation of Spanish women, The Woman Question in Europe , to be published simultaneously in North America, Britain, and France.

The term feminism itself was coined in France around 1882 and migrated abroad in the following decade.^[8] An article by one Adolfo Llanos on North American feminism, printed in 1883, carries a distinctly minatory tone, and he goes to great pains not just to dismiss women's emancipation but to show how American women themselves are unhappy with their independence.^[9] His strategy is more openly defensive than the confident ridicule of feminism seen in ear-

lier texts and must be placed (albeit on the margins) in the context of the growth of feminism within Spain itself: in 1883 feminist conferences were held in Palma de Mallorca and Barcelona, arousing a number of satirical attacks in the press.^[10] A feminist journal, La Ilustración de la Mujer , also founded in that year, celebrated the fact that Spain was on the eve of a gender revolution and attacked the notion of the ángel del hogar in a piece called "O votos o rejas" (either votes or prison).^[11]Las Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento argued provocatively that "la mujer ni es joya, ni perla, ni ángel del hogar, ni tanto y tanto adjetivo como la prodiga su discreto admirador; es un set humano digno de todo respeto" (woman is neither a jewel, nor a pearl, nor an angel in the house, nor any of the endless adjectives bestowed on her by her tactful admirer; she is a human being worthy of the greatest respect).^[12] In the 1890s María Goyri, the first woman to matriculate in the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at Madrid University, began to write the "Crónicas del feminismo" for the Revista Popular . Galdós himself noted with scornful concern, as a manifestation of the volatility of bourgeois social order, a socialist feminist meeting in Barcelona: "Entre las curiosidades de estos días, la más señalada es el meeting de mujeres celebrado hace dos días en Barcelona. ¡Las mujeres también en huelga! ¡Emancipación, igualdad de derechos con el hombre! La cosa se complica" (Among the curiosities of the day, the most noteworthy is the women's meeting held two days ago in Barcelona. Women on strike too! Emancipation, equal rights with men! Things are getting complicated).^[13]

An important sign of the sea change under way was the Congreso Pedagógico Hispano-Portugués-Americano held in 1892, where for the first time a special section was devoted to women's education; the most radical feminists in Spain took impassioned positions supporting women's right to higher education for its own sake, rather than as preparation for motherhood, the argument previously used to buttress demands for educational reform.^[14] Throughout the 1890s a series of debates between major intellectual figures marked the importance of the woman question, such as the Posada-Serrano correspondence on whether friendship was possible between the sexes, stimulated by Pardo Bazán's spirited attack on a recent book by González Serrano. The polemic between antifeminism and feminism continued on a literary level in the dialogic texts of three fictional versions of the Adam and Eve myth, each imbued with their author's ideology on the

woman question; Clarín's Cuento futuro (1892), Pardo Bazán's Cuento primitivo (1893), and Blasco Ibañez's Establo de Eva (1896).^[15] In the last year of the century Adolfo Posada wrote that "la marcha que sigue en todas partes el llamado movimiento feminista , es de tal naturaleza, que apenas pasa un día sin que se produzca, ó una manifestación doctrinal . . . ó bien una disposición legal, . . . ó bien por último, una institución dedicada á la propaganda del feminismo" (the progress being made everywhere by the so-called feminist movement is so great that scarcely a day goes by without the appearance of some manifesto . . . or law . . . or institution devoted to feminist proselytizing).^[16]

Fear of women's economic and sexual liberation gave rise to growing misogyny among many male writers by the end of the 1890s. Turn-of-the-century antifeminist writings escalated in number and urgency of tone; many made direct reference to a last-ditch attempt to close the barriers to feminism, which they portrayed as a revolting foreign aberration. Once the doors were opened, they argued, "á esa inmunda cloaca iría a caer la sociedad moderna, envuelta en una corrupción universal" (modern society would fall into that filthy sewer, and be swamped by decaying matter). The same writer raised the possibility of the sexes themselves disappearing into a monstrous androgynous figure, "el hombre-femina " (the man-woman). Feminism was represented by its detractors as an infectious disease afflicting women, who were particularly vulnerable to "el creciente contagio de un feminismo morboso, de que adolecen tantas neuráticas [sic ], histéricas, desequilibradas, hipnotizadas y autosugestionadas que . . . sólo son útiles a la medicina" (the growing spread of a diseased feminism, contracted by so many neurotics and hysterics who are disturbed, mesmerized and deluded and . . . are only of interest to the medical profession).^[17] Misogyny seems to have been endemic in western Europe during the turn of the century period, as Bram Dijkstra attests in his study of the visual arts.^[18] Nietzsche, a virulent opponent of the women's movement, which he termed "one of the worst developments in the general uglification of Europe," was the intellectual guru for members of the up-and-coming generation of 1898 such as Maeztu, Baroja, and Azorín.^[19] One of Galdós's most important colleagues, Leopoldo Alas, published numerous antifeminist articles in the 1880s and 1890s. Another influential young writer, Angel Ganivet, was working on La conquista del reino de Maya in 1893, in which he depicted women happily confined to segregated quarters

in the home, required to love like domestic animals and forcibly returned to their families if they proved sterile. In Granada la bella (1896) he attacked the recently formed women's Telephone Operators Schools, while in his Cartas finlandesas (written 1897–1898) he grappled with his mingled repugnance and grudging admiration for the relatively emancipated Scandinavian women. He spoke for the vast majority of Spanish men of his generation when he remarked that "Muy hello sería que la mujer, sin abandonar sus naturales funciones, se instruyera con discreción; pero si ha de instruirse con miras emancipadoras ó revolucionarias, preferible es que no salga de la cocina" (It would be fine if women could be educated sensibly, without abandoning their natural functions; but if they are to be educated with a view to emancipation or revolution, it's better that they stay in the kitchen).^[20]

The idea of even the most exceptional women entering the male sphere was hotly resisted. Clarín and Valera ridiculed the candidacy of Pardo Bazán to the Academia Real in 1890, rightly suspecting that the issue was a symbolic one, and attacked women's growing extra-domestic pretensions as absurd and dangerous. While Valera tried unsuccessfully to belittle the issue, entitling his comments "una cuestión social inocente" (an innocuous social question), Clarín was more brutal, returning to the theme of keeping the sluice gates firmly closed: "Si hoy hacemos académicas a tres que valen, mañana pedirán plaza las muchas que creen merecerla" (If we make three decent women academics today, tomorrow all those who think they're any good will be asking for places). Intellectually, women, he boasted, "comparadas con los hombres se quedan tamañitas" (are nothing compared to men).^[21]

The woman question must have touched Galdós on a personal level, and not just through his literary relationships with male colleagues such as Clarín and Valera. Intriguingly, despite all the evidence of his adherence to his culture's ideology, Galdós had a clandestine affair with Spain's leading feminist, Emilia Pardo Bazán, in 1889 and 1890.^[22] During the latter part of her affair with Galdós, Pardo Bazán was reading and translating John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women (1869). Her translation, the first in Spain, was entitled La esclavitud femenina and appeared in her series entitled 'Biblioteca de la mujer" in 1891. Galdós came the closest to semifamilial stability in Santander with Lorenza Cobián, who bore his child, María, in

January 1891. Yet he was also engaged in another documented affair at that time, with the struggling actress Concha-Ruth Morell. This liaison dated at least from the summer of 1891, suggesting that Galdós was simultaneously involved with at least two if not all three of these women. Morell's letters weakly echo some of Pardo Bazán's feminist positions, expressing Morell's more inchoate and often contradictory longings for independence, love, and a successful career. While the ambivalence in Galdós's novels on the issue of women's place seems to parallel his real-life attraction to, and subsequent abandonment of, these women for whom domesticity was not enough, the Galdosian enigma is ultimately preserved, since his letters to them have never been made available. The only evidence we have to go on is their alternately passionate and pleading letters to him, as he gradually withdrew.^[23]