Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modem Spain.

Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modem Spain. Edited by Victoria Loree Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff (Albany, New York: State University Press of New York, 1998. xiv plus 443pp.).

This collection of essays explores the gender ideology of separate spheres and its relationship to lived experience and identity construction in modern Spain. Spanish women are shown here to have frequently operated beyond the rigid private and domestic areas that the two spheres model implies, laying to rest what was left of the notion that Spanish women were locked in "traditional" roles until the last quarter of the twentieth century. Victoria Loree Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff have done an exemplary job of bringing coherence to fifteen disparate pieces of work, some of which are more explicitly historical than others.

The book is organized into three sections beginning with chapters examining prescriptions for female identity. Mary Nash, whose previous works have laid much of the groundwork for Spanish women's history, shows how the dominant discourse on gender in Spain after the turn of the century, paralleling West Europe's, shifted from one whose rationale for women's difference was based largely on religion toward increasing biological essentialism. Aurora Morcillo Gomez and Maria A. Escudero each offer interesting accounts of Franquist gender discourse with attention to the educational system. Clotilde Puertolas focuses on the highly gendered nature of Pomplona's Sanfermines. All four of these chapters show the ideological constructs that operated to reinforce ideas of gender difference and reveal some of the complex ways in which these ideas were transmitted and reinforced in modern Spain.

The second section of the book deals with work identities and includes two chapters on late nineteenth and early twentieth century female tobacco workers by Rosa Maria Capel Martinez and D.J. O'Connor. Focusing on rural settings, Timothy Rees examines women in agricultural production in the southern province of Badajoz between 1875 and 1939, and Heidi Kelley offers an ethnographic analysis of the women of Ezaro, a coastal Galician village. Together these chapters show that modern Spanish women formed work-related identities outside any narrowly construed boundaries of the domestic realm. Of the groups examined here this appears to have been most true of the women of Ezaro, whom Kelley portrays as deeply identified with either agriculture or elements of the coastal economy much more than with their sexual honor.

The last section of the book focuses on some of the specific ways in which modern Spanish women engaged in political activities even where denied formal access. Sarah L. White writes about the vilification of Isabel II in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1868 and the powerful gendering of the monarchy, the Republic, and the populace by the press and pamphleteers. John Lawrence Tone treats women in the resistance to Napoleon, comparing the popular imagery of bellicose women driving the French from the Peninsula with evidence of their actual participation in combat. Temma Kaplan, whose substantial body of previous work on Spanish women has garnered the widest audience of any of the contributors in this volume, here writes about the political action of women in the Rio Tinto mining community. Pamela Beth Radcliff, focusing on poor women's participation in consumer riots, shows how this form of protest remained a powerful political tool well into the twentieth century. Also included are two chapters on women's suffrage in Spain, the first by Judith Keene and the second by Gerard Alexander. Ending this section is a piece by Victoria Loree Enders about the Seccion Femenina of the Falange in which the author argues that the continued ideological polarization of Spain has prevented feminists from considering the possibility that fascist women might have had historical agency. These seven chapters illustrate the many ways in which Spanish women influenced political processes and the highly gendered nature of politics itself.

Though a number of the contributors successfully apply in the Spanish context approaches that have proved useful elsewhere, some of these pieces offer historical insights that will undoubtedly inform research and analysis on women's history and gender construction well beyond the Iberian peninsula. Gerard Alexander's and Pamela Radcliff's contributions are particularly noteworthy in this respect. Alexander examines the presumption that Spanish women voted more conservatively than Spanish men in the 1930s and 1970s and finds instead that women tended to vote in the largest numbers for centrist parties and candidates. Alexander asks whether re-examining voting in France, Italy, and Germany might reveal similar patterns. Pamela Beth Radcliff's work on female consumer protest likewise raises important comparative questions. Having uncovered considerable evidence of widespread and ongoing female consumer rioting across the peninsula at the turn of the century and then in the years during and immediately after the First World War, she argues that these episodes should not be treated as an anachronistic and ineffective mode of twentieth century protest. Rather, Radcliff shows that women's consumer protests succeeded in shaping provisioning policies where male led trade unions were unable to do so. Radcliff's typology of consumer riots and her conclusion that poor women were able to use this form of protest effectively because they adapted it to the rules of twentieth century mass politics will cause historians to re-examine similar episodes in other western European contexts.

Indeed, the editors and contributors to this volume have attempted to carefully place their work within a broad comparative context by showing that the experiences of modern Spanish women were characterized by more similarities than differences with their western European peers. Though certainly the relationship between the Catholic Church and state and the duration of the Franco dictatorship make for some distinctions, these essays show that Spanish women were subject to most of the same types of ideological constructs, political developments, and market transformations as other women on the continent.

Constructing Spanish Womanhood represents an important contribution to Spanish historiography. As with all edited volumes there is some uneveness; Enders and Radcliff have ameliorated this by including tightly-written introductory essays to each section and by encouraging the contributors to consider and incorporate each other's work in their essays. There is much here that will be useful to social historians of modem Europe and to women's historians more generally.