On a Friday night, a personal project unfolded in the writer’s living room. While watching television, she realized that among the greatest Spaniards in history, not a single woman was represented. So she decided to create a homemade program herself, free from public participation via phones, QR codes, or social media. She would set the rules. People might accuse her of bias or a lack of transparency. Yes, perhaps. But after all, when have women ever been in charge? Now it was her turn, she thought.
Her reflection touched centuries of predetermined paths: wives, mothers, or that she would enter a convent. Noble roles, yes, but what about freedom? Women had always been treated as minors in the law. First under the father’s guardianship, then under the husband’s. Politics, universities, the arts, the royal academies, social clubs, sports—all were designed for men.
In 1861, Concepción Arenal submitted her work La beneficencia, la filantropía y la caridad to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences under her son Fernando’s name. It was the only way to be acknowledged. The jurist from Ferrol already knew that to study law, she had to cut her hair and dress as a man. Upon discovery, the rector allowed her to attend classes because of her good grades, but she had to be escorted by a doorkeeper to a room and then picked up by a professor. When finished, she waited alone for a family member to fetch her. No socializing with other students. In 1869, in The Woman of the Future, the pioneering prison visitor defended equal access to all levels of education for women.
Until 1910, women could not enter university “without having to consult the Superior Authority,” according to the Royal Order of the Ministry of Public Instruction on March 8. What a landmark date to remember—yet the move annoyed many men. When aspiring female students reached the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in Madrid, they were jeered and insulted by fellow students. The free-thinking Rosario de Acuña challenged the press, criticizing the fear of competition from women, which sparked protests in several cities. Cruelly, she had to flee to Portugal after a hunt and slander orders.
In fiction, any woman who dared publish under her own name was placed into the category of “feminine literature,” deemed second-rate. Emilia Pardo Bazán, a leading figure of realism, insisted in the mid-19th century that she should not be called a writer. She was a masterful novelist who could stand with the best, yet male critics rose to the challenge. The linguists of the Royal Spanish Academy blocked her entry three times, with the final denial arriving in 1912.
María Moliner of Zaragoza was nominated to join the RAE in 1972. After compiling the Diccionario de Uso del Español, which streamlined the Royal Spanish Academy’s dictionary, she was not admitted. On January 28, 1979, with Carmen Conde’s admission, a long-standing injustice in literary circles was acknowledged, the poet from Cartagena proclaimed in her address.
The 20th century also witnessed the mistreatment of two exemplary intellectuals: Carmen de Burgos, a professor, writer, and journalist, and Clara Campoamor, a jurist and deputy during the Second Republic. Both crossed paths with Madrid’s suffrage circles in the 1920s. Campoamor, famed by the nickname Colombine, began the campaign for women’s suffrage in 1906 with a survey in Heraldo de Madrid. In 1903 she implemented this method to poll readers about a divorce law. In 1921 she led the first demonstration before the Congress of Deputies demanding equal rights for men and women.
Yet it took another decade to extend the vote and the right to stand for office to women. Campoamor, even against her own party, succeeded in pushing the measure through the Cortes on October 1, 1931. When the Civil War broke out, unable to guarantee personal security in the Republican government, she chose exile in Switzerland. Francoist persecution targeted Campoamor and Burgos for various reasons. Although the novelist had died in 1932, an irrational process was opened against her. The two would have faced, among other penalties, twelve years in prison if not for exile or death.
On the night of March 1–2, after her own televised contest, the writer dreamed that the gender pay gap had closed and that Spanish women boxing champions won Olympic gold in Paris. She thanked the pioneers of feminism from the nineteenth century and the contemporary champions who keep pushing forward. The best in history, indeed.