Spanish Women and the Colonial Wars of the 1890s

In the late 1890s, a journalist wrote, "Spanish women would rather weep at a husband's or a son's gravesite than blush for lack of patriotic fervor." Yet, at a time when women were expected to sacrifice their sons and husbands willingly for the sake of the nation, women organized and led three significant demonstrations against conscription in Spain. This volume contextualizes these demonstrations and elucidates what they suggested to contemporaries about the role of women in public life in late nineteenth-century Spain. The appendix includes excerpts from primary sources that present often-neglected ideas and programs of dissident women, including Teresa Claramunt, Soledad Gustavo, and Angeles Lopez de Ayala, that afford specific insights into the formidable obstacles of the Catholic Church, class, and gender animosities that blocked change in the status and role of women in Spanish society.