Constructions of femininity in eighteenth-century Spain
Series: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment; 2026:04;
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Product details:
- Publisher Voltaire Foundation
- Date of Publication 14 April 2026
- ISBN 9781805966050
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages368 pages
- Size 234x156 mm
- Weight 666 g
- Language English 0
Categories
Long description:
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.
MoreTable of Contents:
Translator preface (Elizabeth Franklin Lewis) Author’s note Introduction Part I: The Intellectual debate Chapter 1: Confronting “misogyny” and “excellence” with new images for an enlightened society: Feijoo and the rationalist rupture
1.1 Profiles of a conflict: the “woman question” and its inflections
1.2 Feijoo’s “Defense of women.” Between tradition and change
1.3 “The soul is not male or female.” Women’s reason, or the dody as prison
1.4 The Scales of virtue
1.5 The Crisis of the old order and new justifications of political and domestic power
Chapter Two: “A habit that we call Nature” 2.1 The “Complementarity” of the sexes or squaring the circle
2.2 Doubts and paradoxes
2.3 Critical and self-satisfied views of western customs
2.4 Women’s voices in the polemic
Part II. Styling behaviors
Chapter 3: Knowledge and place: the controversy over women’s education 3.1 Pedagogical texts and their social referents
3.2 Nuance and shadow: the gendered spirit of enlightened education
3.3 Between the social and the domestic: regenerating society through women’s education
3.4 Knowledge and power: feminine culture as threat
3.5 Domestic instruction
Chapter 4: The Rhetoric of appearances
4.1 Wealth and virtue: towards an enlightened justification of luxury
4.2 Eve’s finery: luxury and lust in religious discourse
4.3 Women in the new discourses of luxury
4.4 Medical rationality and appearance
4.5 Realities and strategies in the feminization of showing off
Chapter 5: Disciplining bodies through hygiene
5.1 “Nature” domesticated: hygiene education and women’s conduct
5.2 The Science of maternity, between instinct and learning
5.3 Managing infant bodies. Lactation, the metaphor of maternity, and social ties
5.4 The Feminine body, the family body, the social body
5.5 Women’s readings of the discourse of hygiene
Chapter 6: Women for the Family
6.1 Anxieties and answers: the natural grounding of the family
6.2 The Tribunal of the Press or the construction of a crisis
6.3 Women in “Enchanting Society”: the new Enlightenment sentimental discourse
6.4 Cracks and dissention: women’s perspectives
Part III: New Spaces
Chapter 7: Women spectators and actors in the World of Letters
7.1 A New readership
7.2 Women of Letters
7.3 Clothed in modesty
7.4 Baring necessity or ambition
7.5 Writing in the margins: strategies of women translators Chapter 8: The Reform Platform
8.1 Tertulias and Society, from the Exception to the Rule
8.2 Building a Wall: The division of spaces
8.3 Cutting the “Gordian Knot”
8.4 The publicity of “hidden virtues.” Women’s maneuvers on the fence Conclusion: at the crossroads of the Enlightenment
Works Cited Three decades of Gender and Enlightenment in Spain. A Bibliographic survey
