1. Michelle Perrot, "The New Eve and the Old Adam: Changes in French Women's Condition at the Turn of the Century," in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars , ed. Margaret R. Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret C. Weitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 52.

2. Urbano González Serrano, La amistad y el sexo: Cartas sobre la educación de la mujer por Adolfo Posada y Urbano González Serrano (Madrid: Fernando Fe, 1893), 24-25. In another piece entitled "Los derechos de la mujer" ( La Ilustración Española y Americana , 30 September 1896), Gónzalez Serrano associated feminism with socialism and anarchism and raised the spectre of countries such as Britain and Russia dominated by a "third sex" of monstrous spinsters.

3. Some of the more notable examples include George Gissing's Odd Women (1894), Grant Allen's Woman Who Did (1895), Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895), and, of course, Galdó's own Tristana (1892).

4. Rata Felski, "The Counterdiscourse of the Feminine in Three Texts by Wilde, Huysmans, and Sacher-Masoch," PMLA 106, no. 5 (1991): 1094.

5. Damián Isern, Del desastre nacional y sus causas (1899), quoted in Enrique Tierno Galván, Costa y el regeneracionismo (Barcelona: Editorial Barna, 1961), 81.

6. Manuel Tuñón de Lara, Medio siglo de cultura española (1885-1936) , 3d ed. (Madrid: Tecnos, 1984), 57.

7. Both these concepts of Costa's are cited by Tuñón de Lara, Medio siglo de cultura española , 61.

8. Tierno Galván, Costa , 148, 91.

9. Tierno Galván, Costa , 238; Ricardo Macías Picavea, El problema nacional (Madrid: Suárez, 1899), 368-70.

10. Lucas Mallada, Los males de la patria y la futura revolución española (Madrid: Alianza, 1969), 56-58.

11. Benito Pérez Galdós, "La sociedad presente como materia novelable," in Benito Pérez Galdós: Ensayos de crítica literaria , ed. Laureano Bonet (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1990), 159.

12. Carmen Bravo-Villasante writes in Galdós (Madrid: Mondadori, 1988) that Galdós considered women's rights and workers' rights purely utopian until around 1895, at which point she believes that he became a feminist (88-89). Lisa Condé also sees the year 1895, with the staging of Voluntad , as Galdó's triumphant celebration of the new woman, arguing that the new heroine Isidora is modelled on Galdó's leading lady, María Guerrero ( Stages in the Development of a Feminist Consciousness in Pérez Galdós [1843-1920] [Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1990], 257, and Women in the Theatre of Galdós: From Realidad [1892] to Voluntad [1895] [Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1990]). The same broad line of argument is pursued by Josefina Acosta de Hess in Galdós y la novela de adulterio (Madrid: Pliegos, 1988), although she situates Galdós's conversion somewhat earlier, beginning in 1889 (88).

13. Maryellen Bieder, "El sacrificio: Tema y recurso dramático en la obra teatral de Benito Pérez Galdós, 1892-1903," in Actas del Tercer Congreso Internacional de Estudios Galdosianos (Las Palmas: Excmo. Cabildo Insular, 1989), 2:384.

14. Benito Pérez Galdós, La loca de la casa , in Obras completas: Novelas , ed. Federico Carlos Sáinz de Robles (Madrid: Aguilar, 1982), vol. 3. Translations are my own.

15. Angel del Río, "La significación de La loca de la casa ," in Estudios Galdosianos (Zaragoza: General, 1953), 37.

16. Bonnie Smith analyzes how, in northern France, women in the early phases of the rise of capitalist enterprise contributed to running the family business, a phenomenon that was phased out as women became more and more purely domestic ( Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981], 36, 49).

17. Galton's first work in the direction of eugenics began in 1869, with a book entitled Hereditary Genius .

18. Río, "La significación de La loca de la casa ," 44-45.

19. See Geraldine Scanlon, La polémica feminista en la España contemporánea, 1868-1974 (Madrid: Akal, 1986), 215-22.

20. E. Inman Fox, "Galdos'[Galdós'] Electra : A Detailed Study of its Historical Significance and the Polemic Between Martínez Ruiz and Maeztu," Anales Galdosianos 1 (1966): 137.

21. Page references are taken from Benito Pérez Galdós, Electra (Madrid: Hernando, 1981). Translations are mine.

22. Librada Hernández, "Electra y su Máximo: Galdós y la libertad de la mujer en Electra ," in Crítica Hispánica 15, no. 2 (1993).

23. See Librada Hernández for a more detailed version of this reading.

24. Julio Rodríguez-Puértolas, introduction to Benito Pérez Galdós, El caballero encantado (Madrid: Cátedra, 1982), 14. All citations from the novel will refer to this edition. Translations are mine.

25. H. Chonon Berkowitz, Pérez Galdós: Spanish Liberal Crusader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1948), 204.

26. Rodríguez-Puértolas, 17. Although Rodríguez-Puértolas does not mention this, the pendulum was later to swing the other way again, and Galdós, who in 1912 began vainly seeking a rapprochement with the monarchy, would deny testily by 1915 that he had ever seen anything useful in Republicanism (Berkowitz, Pérez Galdós , 403, 446).

27. Scanlon, La polémica feminista , 232; she gives other examples of the phenomenon on 236-37 and 246.

28. Anne Martin-Fugier, La bourgeoise: Femme au temps de Paul Bourget (Paris: Grasset, 1983), 284.

29. Perrot, "The Old Adam and the New Eve," 57.

30. Martin-Fugier, La bourgeoise , 283.

31. Benito Pérez Galdós, prologue to Casandra , in Ensayos de crítica literaria , ed. Laureano Bonet (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1990), 193.

32. Diane Urey, The Novel Histories of Galdós (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 156.

33. Noël Valis contests the view that the metafictional elements in Galdós signal his renunciation of historical signification ("Fabricating Culture in Cánovas ," MLN 107, no. 2 [1992]: 250-73).

34. Mallada, Los males de la patria , 42. Translation is mine.

35. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 191-92.

36. Benito Pérez Galdós, La razón de la sinrazón , in Obras completas: Novelas , ed. Federico Carlos Sáinz de Robles (Madrid: Aguilar, 1982), vol. 3. Translations are mine.

37. Joaquín Costa, "Discurso en los Juegos Florales de Salamanca" (1901), in Joaquín Costa: Oligarquía y cacicismo, Colectivismo agrario y otros escritos (Antología) , ed. Rafael Pérez de la Dehesa (Madrid: Alianza, 1969), 217-18.