Constructions of femininity in the Spanish Enlightenment

Elizabeth Franklin Lewis is Professor of Spanish and Director of Undergraduate Research at the University of Mary Washington, USA, specializing in women and gender in Spain’s Enlightenment period. She is the author of Women Writers in the Spanish Enlightenment (Ashgate 2004) and co-editor with Catherine Jaffe of Eve’s Enlightenment: Women’s Experience in Spain and Spanish America, 1726-1839 (LSU Press 2009), and of Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment (2019) with Mónica Bolufer Peruga and Catherine Jaffe. Mónica Bolufer Peruga is Professor of Early Modern History at the European University Institute (Florence), specializing in eighteenth-century cultural, intellectual and gender history of the Spanish world in European and global context. Her books include Arte y artificio de la vida en común (Art and Artifice of Life in Common, 2019), La vida y la escritura en el siglo XVIII (Life and Writing in the Eighteenth Century, 2008) and, as co-editor, The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment (with Elizabeth Franklin Lewis and Catherine Jaffe, 2020), European Modernities and the Passionate South (with Xavier Andreu, 2023), and Gender and Cultural Mediation in the Long Eighteenth Century (with Laura Guinot-Ferri and Carolina Blutrach, 2024).

• 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 rupture1.1 Profiles of a conflict: the “woman question” and its inflections1.2 Feijoo’s “Defense of women.” Between tradition and change1.3 “The soul is not male or female.” Women’s reason, or the dody as prison1.4 The Scales of virtue1.5 The Crisis of the old order and new justifications of political and domestic powerChapter Two: “A habit that we call Nature” 2.1 The “Complementarity” of the sexes or squaring the circle2.2 Doubts and paradoxes2.3 Critical and self-satisfied views of western customs2.4 Women’s voices in the polemicPart II. Styling behaviorsChapter 3: Knowledge and place: the controversy over women’s education 3.1 Pedagogical texts and their social referents3.2 Nuance and shadow: the gendered spirit of enlightened education3.3 Between the social and the domestic: regenerating society through women’s education3.4 Knowledge and power: feminine culture as threat3.5 Domestic instructionChapter 4: The Rhetoric of appearances4.1 Wealth and virtue: towards an enlightened justification of luxury4.2 Eve’s finery: luxury and lust in religious discourse4.3 Women in the new discourses of luxury4.4 Medical rationality and appearance4.5 Realities and strategies in the feminization of showing offChapter 5: Disciplining bodies through hygiene5.1 “Nature” domesticated: hygiene education and women’s conduct5.2 The Science of maternity, between instinct and learning5.3 Managing infant bodies. Lactation, the metaphor of maternity, and social ties5.4 The Feminine body, the family body, the social body5.5 Women’s readings of the discourse of hygieneChapter 6: Women for the Family6.1 Anxieties and answers: the natural grounding of the family6.2 The Tribunal of the Press or the construction of a crisis6.3 Women in “Enchanting Society”: the new Enlightenment sentimental discourse6.4 Cracks and dissention: women’s perspectivesPart III: New SpacesChapter 7: Women spectators and actors in the World of Letters7.1 A New readership7.2 Women of Letters7.3 Clothed in modesty7.4 Baring necessity or ambition7.5 Writing in the margins: strategies of women translators Chapter 8: The Reform Platform8.1 Tertulias and Society, from the Exception to the Rule8.2 Building a Wall: The division of spaces8.3 Cutting the “Gordian Knot”8.4 The publicity of “hidden virtues.” Women’s maneuvers on the fence Conclusion: at the crossroads of the EnlightenmentWorks Cited Three decades of Gender and Enlightenment in Spain. A Bibliographic survey