Constructions of Femininity in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Lewis, Elizabeth
Bolufer Peruga, Mónica

Spain’s eighteenth century was a crossroads between traditionalist views of the physical, intellectual, and emotional inferiority of women, and a new way of understanding femininity and its importance to society. In her groundbreaking book, Mujeres e Ilustración. La construcción de la feminidad en la España del siglo XVIII, Mónica Bolufer Peruga finds the “woman question” (la querella de las mujeres)—as expressed by both men and women, conservatives and liberals, in a variety of literary, political, medical, pedagogic, and journalistic texts—to be a central point of conflict of the eighteenth century in Spain. From the early intellectual debates, to pedagogical and medical texts about women, and finally to examples of women’s active participation in Spanish Enlightenment culture, Bolufer traces the debates over gendered definitions of femininity and of women’s proper place in society. A standard for feminist studies in the Hispanic Enlightenment since its publication in 1998, this new English translation, updated and accompanied by a bibliographic survey of important publications since (and many as a result of) the publication of Mujeres e Ilustración, reintroduces the book and the important subject of women, gender and the Spanish Enlightenment to Hispanist and non-Hispanist scholars of the eighteenth-century and beyond, especially in the UK and US.