Constructing Spanish Womanhood

The first anthology in English on modern Spanish women's history and identity formation.

The first anthology in English on modern Spanish women's history and identity formation.

This book, the first anthology in English, links the concerns of Spanish women's history to those of women's history elsewhere in Europe and throughout the world. The contributors, representing the best of the new historical scholarship, expand our knowledge of the general field of Spanish history and contribute to the reconfiguring of European history through the inclusion of the Spanish experience. They tie empirical inquiries into the history of women in Spain to current feminist theoretical concerns, including debates about identity and agency, and they show how "contesting identities" also lead to "contesting categories" and into broad debates about cultural particularism.

Victoria Loree Enders is Associate Professor of History at Northern Arizona University. Pamela Beth Radcliff is Associate Professor of History at the University of California at San Diego. She is the author of From Mobilization to Civil War: The Politics of Polarization in the Spanish City of Gijón, 1900–1937.

"Until recently, synthetic treatments of European women's history in the English-speaking world have inadvertently neglected (due more to unfamiliarity than ill-will) the important findings of historical research on women and gender in Spain, even as all too few historians outside Spain had embarked on such analyses. Constructing Spanish Womanhood assures that such neglect by the English-speaking world will no longer be possible. This is a wonderful book, a landmark collection of well-integrated, highly readable scholarly studies by a cross-section of Spanish-based and Anglo-based research scholars. Its contents will virtually double the amount of contemporary historical and theoretical scholarship on modern Spanish women and gender issues available in the English language." — From the Foreword by Karen Offen

"Constructing Spanish Womanhood represents an important contribution to Spanish historiography … There is much here that will be useful to social historians of modern Europe and to women's historians more generally." — Journal of Social History

"As an edited collection on woman's history in Spain, this volume stands alone. More comprehensive than comparable works available in Spanish, it draws on a burgeoning area of Spanish historiography." — South European Society & Politics

"A great contribution to the modern history of Spanish women. Enders and Radcliff describe diverse women: tobacco workers, miners' wives, women of seacoast villages and religious orders, or the activists of modern political movements—real people in a gender-repressed society." — Robert Kern, University of New Mexico