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Eve’s Enlightenment: Women’s Experience in Spain and Spanish America, 1726 – 1839

2010; Duke University Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2010-091

1527-1900

Pamela Voekel,

Historical Studies in Latin America

The new objective science, the public sphere of reasoned debate with its ever-expanding readership, the separation of home and work, the distrust of ascriptive authority, the proprietorship of the individual author, the new universalism — this volume tackles these big-ticket Enlightenment themes with scholarly élan and much-needed attention to how women’s experiences enhance our understanding of the period. Emboldened by au courant revisionism — particularly the decoupling of the Enlightenment and secularization — these 14 scholars are sure-handed guides to novel sources on women’s lives during the Age of Reason. This interdisciplinary group from Europe and the Americas also offers thought-provoking angles on women’s exclusion from the new universal humanity and their ongoing strategies to redress it. While historians will find some of the conclusions underdeveloped or disconnected from their contexts, the book pays off in the sheer number of fresh hypotheses to be tested by the archivally minded.In the classic telling, the Enlightenment challenged the concept of inspiration as God’s gift to a writer in favor of the notion that ideas reflected the unique minds of autonomous individuals. This shift presented new challenges for would-be literary women, who now had to justify their writing based on their autonomy, a deeply problematic move indeed, as they were juridically fixed under their husbands’ tutelage. Hence the vogue in literary cross-dressing, as women employed male pseudonyms to circumvent their spouses’ vetoes. In an insightful chapter, editor Catherine M. Jaffe demonstrates the not-so-subtle cultural barriers to women’s participation in reasoned written debate. An article reprinted in the Seminario de Salamanca, for example, savaged the literary pretensions of a childless widow by vividly describing her use of books not as fonts of wisdom but as home and landscape decorations. By bracketing her reading with the frivolity of consumption, external display, and superficial adornment, Jaffe argues, male editors and readers revealed their perception of Spain’s female readers and writers as absurd, hybrid creatures, inhabitants of neither the male public world nor the private realm of the family.But the Enlightenment also cast the mind as a blank slate written upon by sensory experience, opening the possibility that a revised curriculum could cure women’s perceived intellectual inferiority. In her treatment of education, Isabel Morant Deusa nimbly analyzes the efforts of Josefa Amar y Borbón, the president of the women’s auxiliary of Madrid’s Amigos del País chapter, to encourage upper-class women’s study of language and literature. Where Rousseau’s Sophie is innocent and moral but not cultured or educated, Amar mounted a spirited defense of women’s literary pursuits, although she advocated strictly domestic education for working-class women.As the editors point out, the Enlightenment underscored men’s capacity for moral self-government and adhesion to universal rationality, replacing the divine sanctification that had formerly legitimated authority. Women’s exclusion from public life therefore required revised justifications as well, and often found reinforcements in the ranks of medical science. Beatriz Quintanilla-Madero analyzes Bartoloche’s treatment of hysteria in the Mercurio Volante (Mexico City), emphasizing the scientist’s stress on natural rather than moral causes of the disease. Bartoloche regarded this ailment as central to women’s experience, asserting that 60 percent of women and 80 percent of nuns were thus afflicted, with particularly high rates among the nobility. During the city’s vida común controversy — a battle to push wealthy nuns into more ascetic and regimented lives — the beleaguered women lapsed into hysteria manifested by convulsions and illness. Although the moderate consumption of chocolate and other measures could stave off the disease, it nevertheless affected exclusively women and prevented them from living a rational life. In another vivid chapter concerning emerging methods to exclude women from universal humanity, Ana Rueda reads Spanish novels on the theme of “virtue in distress” and concludes that the feminine sensibility that once enhanced women’s credibility became redefined as a negative trait that indexed their lack of rationality. Historians of the emotions will find much food for thought in Rueda’s wide-ranging musings.The entire collection is similarly thought-provoking and instructive about sources on women’s lives. Textiles, descriptions of court life, certification of widowhood cases, and warrants to the Indies housed in church archives, Goya’s magisterial depictions of women, the writings of nuns and newspaper contributors — these constitute just a few of the documents examined by this group of historians, psychiatrists, art historians, and literary critics. But it is not just the fresh sources that make this volume so indispensable to analysts of the era’s politics, economics, and culture. Chapters like Lucy D. Harney’s cautionary tale of assuming scientific racism in Cuba before the late nineteenth century provide real intellectual pith. In sum, archival investigators should not miss this opportunity to load up on stimulating questions, even if the answers do not always satisfy.