American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS)

Review: The Politics of Gender in Spain's "Illustración"

Author(s): Elizabeth Lewis
Source: Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Summer, 2003), pp. 577-579
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sponsor: American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies
(ASECS).
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30053610 .
Accessed: 26/04/2011 13:10

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Johns Hopkins University Press and American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS) are
collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Eighteenth-Century Studies.

http://www.jstor.org
 64OOK REVIEWS
Edited by Clorinda Donato and Carl Fisher

ELIZABETH LEWIS, Mary Washington College

The Politics of Gender in Spain's Ilustraci6n

M6nica Bolufer. Mujeres e ilustraci6n: la construcci6n de la feminidad en la

Espaia del siglo XVIII (Valencia: Diputaci6 de Valencia, 1998). Pp. 427.
E14.20.

Rebecca Haidt. Embodying Enlightenment: Knowing the Body in Eighteenth-

Century Spanish Literature and Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).
Pp. xi + 279. $45.00.

Spain, like its counterparts throughout Europe, experienced many soci-

etal changes during its brief, but nonetheless important, Enlightenment period.
Perhaps nothing altered Spanish society and culture more than the evolving con-
cepts of gender-of both femininity and masculinity-and their right place in
Spanish social politics. Carmen Martin Gaite was the first to recognize the impor-
tance of gender politics to the Hispanic Enlightenment, in her book Usos Amoro-
sos del dieciocho en Espaia (1972, later translated as Love Customs in Eigh-
teenth-Century Spain, trans. Maria G. Tomsich [Berkeley:University of California
Press, 1991]). Since Martin Gaite's important book there have been several stud-
ies on gender in Spain's eighteenth century, most notably, Paloma Fernandez-Quin-
tanilla, La mujer ilustrada (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1981), and Sally-Ann
Kitts, The Debate on the Nature, Role and Influence of Woman in Eighteenth-
Century Spain (Lewiston, NY: The Edward Mellen Press, 1995). However, the
two recent monographs under review here stand out for their originality and time-
liness, placing the importance of gender to Spain's ilustraci6n at the forefront of
eighteenth-century Hispanism. Although very different studies-Bolufer focusing
on the development of Spanish femininity and Haidt the construction of mascu-
linity through representations of the body-both books concur in their emphasis
on the importance of gender to the cultural and social environment of eighteenth-

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 36, no. 4 (2003) Pp. 577-615.

578 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES 36 /4

century Spain. Both men and women during this period were concerned, perhaps
even obsessed, with gender, interrogating themselves and their colleagues about
the physical, emotional, and intellectual differences between men and women,
the culturally acceptable roles for each, and what it meant to be a man or a wom-
an. Both Bolufer and Haidt insightfully explore the underlying anxieties articulat-
ed in these queries, and both come to similar conclusions about the over-arching
importance of gender to the Spanish Enlightenment.
Monica Bolufer calls Spain's eighteenth century a "crossroads" between
traditionalist views of the physical, intellectual, and emotional inferiority of women,
and a new way of understanding femininity. She finds the question of woman (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 what she calls the "cultural debate" of
the eighteenth century. Beginning in the first part of her book with the early intel-
lectual debates-notably the famous essay by Benito Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres
(Defense of Women, 1727) and the controversy surrounding it-Bolufer shows
how the querella de las mujeres dispelled ideas of women's supposed inferiority.
However, even after Feijoo, support for women's rights was still based more in
male self-interest than in a belief in real gender parity. Later in the century, when
the sensibility cult entered the gender debate, Rousseauian idealized domestic
femininity overshadowed previous notions of women as potential intellectual or
even political equals to their male counterparts, proscribing them to certain ways
of feeling, thinking, and behaving. In the second part of her book, Bolufer exam-
ines contemporary pedagogical and medical texts about women. She shows how
by the end of the century, women's education was seen as valuable to male ilustra-
dos insofar as it would benefit society by fitting them for motherhood. The fash-
ion-obsessed petimetra was criticized by these writers and countered by the posi-
tive image of the buena madre (the good mother). Although male writers about
female education saw only societal benefits for educating women, female writers
viewed their gender's education differently, seeing it as personal: "un instrumento
por el cual las mujeres podian satisfacer su ambici6n" (an instrument through
which women could satisfy their ambition, 133).
Although male writings are a large part of Bolufer's sources, she also
turns to texts by women, especially Josefa Amar y Borb6n and Ines Joyes y Blake.
In part three of her book, Bolufer examines the presence of real women in Span-
ish Enlightenment culture as readers and writers, spectators and participants, in
Spain's growing culture of reform. As part of the battle between public and pri-
vate spheres for women-between acceptance of women as active intellectuals
and the preference for the image of the domestic angel-came the controversy
over women's admission to the Royal Economic Society of Madrid in 1787. In-
stead of being accepted into the male body as equal members, a Junta de Damas
(Ladies Group) was created for them. Bolufer sees in the creation of this separate,
and not quite equal, civic space for women, a difficult solution to the public
versus private debate. Women were given a sort of honorary citizenship in the
new Spanish Enlightenment society, but one which would not be extended to
other arenas. A few decades later, when the first Spanish constitution was being
formed in Cadiz, women were not only not invited to join the constitutional con-
gress (formed of numerous former members of Madrid's economic society), they
were forbidden from even witnessing the proceedings. Citizenship, concludes
Bolufer, would only be conjugated in the masculine (370).
 REVIEWS 579

However, the notion of "masculinity" itself was also contested ground.

In her book, Embodying Enlightenment, Rebecca Haidt too sees Spain's eigh-
teenth-century as a crossroads, a time of tension and change. Haidt studies repre-
sentations of the (male) body throughout the century in a variety of texts, from
early medical treatises to depictions of the male body in art and literature. Haidt
contends that a study of the depiction of these bodies helps us to understand
better the most important concerns of the Spanish Enlightenment. In the texts
Haidt examines, the body was a source of knowledge and experience, as well as a
"crucial nexus of cultural diffusion" (7).
The texts studied in Embodying Enlightenment are divided into two gen-
eral kinds of representations of the body-those that address contexts of bodily
experience and those that depict constructions of "enlightened" masculinity. The
first chapter examines the importance of anatomy and naming to eighteenth-cen-
tury bodily experience. Haidt studies the changeover from traditional understand-
ings of the body's inner workings (based on the texts of the ancients) to the new
medical ideas based on observation and experimentation. Into this debate came
the influential Spanish thinker Father Benito Feijoo. Feijoo in his medical writ-
ings privileged the individual inner experience of the body, thus encouraging in-
tellectuals at the end of the century "to direct their faculties of reason and imag-
ination toward the analysis of the body's role in awareness and feeling" (62).
Thus the subjects of Haidt's next chapter-the pornographic writings of late-
Enlightenment intellectuals Samaniego, Moratin, and Melendez Valdes, as well as
Goya's erotic painting of the Nude Maja-continued Feijoo's emphasis on sensa-
tion, to connect seeing with bodily sensation.
A privileged site of knowledge and sensation, the male body also became
a place for transmission of culture-of true "masculinity." To this end, the pe-
timetre-that effeminate dandy whose female counterpart, the petimetra was also
harshly criticized (as discussed in Bolufer's book)-became the "embodiment" of
the aberration of masculinity. Through the practice of physiognomics, the body
could be "read" through its external signs, and the body of the petimetre was
interpreted as not male, and therefore not human. In contrast to the sub-human
petimetre was the virtuous hombre de bien (the good man), who, as depicted in
Cadalso's Cartas marruecas, was the Enlightenment masculine ideal. Following
Aristotle's model for "virtuous friendship," Cadalso creates "the model for a wider
program of national ethical restoration, one predicated on knowledge of bodily
performance of tempered and rational acts" (154). While other bodies in Cadal-
so's narrative are out of control, the hombre de bien is the model citizen for
Spain's moral and political reform, and for rational, enlightened, masculinity.
Thus both Bolufer and Haidt arrive at similar conclusions about the role
of gender in the new ideal of citizenship in Spain at the end of the century. With
the Napoleonic invasion of 1808, and the subsequent political, economic, and
social turmoil of the entire nineteenth century, these Enlightenment notions would
take a course perhaps different than envisioned by the ilustrados. Still, the seeds
of the nineteenth-century bourgeois hombre de mundo (worldly man) and his
domestic "angel of the hearth" can be certainly found in the debates of their
eighteenth-century fathers and mothers.