| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Danièle Bussy Genevois, editor. Les Espagnoles dans l'histoire: Une sociabilité démocratique (XIX^e-XX^e siècles). (Culture et Société.) Saint-Denis, France: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes. 2002. Pp. 282. €23.00.
Like their Anglo-American counterparts, French historians attracted by Spanish history and culture first concentrated on the country's literature. Their attention later turned to Spanish politics, then the influence of the Annales school prompted a focus on social history, and in the 1960s radicalism seemed to leave no room for any history other than workers' movements. In recent years, the study of sociability has moved to the forefront. Women's history was meanwhile relegated to the sidelines, at least in comparison with the interest shown by Anglo-American writers. Biographies were published of prominent intellectuals, like Concepción Arenal and Emilia Pardo Bazán, exceptional women for their times, along with studies of liberal associations and institutes, such as the Institución Libre de Enseñza school (Free Institute of Teaching) or the anarchist group "Mujeres Libres" (free women), spawning grounds for the new feminist consciousness. The volume edited by Danièle Bussy Genevois studies the evolution of sociability in Spain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with special focus on the role of women.	1
This book embraces a perhaps overly diverse range of subjects. Some essays, for example, study sociability in the institutional sense, like Marie-Claude Lécuyer's contribution on the mid-nineteenth-century lyceums, cultural associations with active female participation. Despite the liberal revolution of the times, their purpose was not as openly political as the male-only athenaeums or casinos, although their goals did include change in social relations. In a related vein is Concha Fagoaga's study of the Lyceum Club, a 1920s elitist conclave that eventually took up the suffragist cause. At the birth of the republic in 1931, some of its prime movers, like Clara Campoamor and Victoria Kent, accepted political positions, but the Franco regime understood well the link between the new women's sociability and the republican program and closed down the club.	2
This institutional sociability contrasts with the informal feminist networks of "passive resistance" to Francoism, such as those that arose from prison visits, discussed in a very original essay by Mercedes Yusta. Quite a different world is portrayed in Jean-Louis Guereña's investigation of female participation in campaigns to abolish prostitution and Michel Ralle's discussion of the large-scale entry of women in the Catalonian textile labor force in the 1880s, and the misgivings it stirred in workers' organizations, including those of anarchists. The reader's focus is again shifted in time and place to Régine Ilion's examination of the 1936 celebration of International Woman's Day in Saragoza and its clear antifascist message, in keeping with the headier days of the Popular Front. A quite different topic is taken up in Amparo Moreno Sardá's highly ideological analysis of recent developments in the situation of women. Denouncing the consumer society and the "androcentric focus" of historical studies and attributing those changes to women's rejection of the "unappealing" lives of their mothers makes for a less than compelling description of the complexities of the spectacular historical changes in Spain; the flight from rural zones and de-Catholicization of society, accompanied by massive female entry into the labor force, make for a more cogent explanation of the challenge to women's traditionally subordinate roles. This way of approaching the problem has little to do with the final summary provided by Bussy Genevois, a literary study of the transition from magazines for women written by men in the nineteenth century, filled with external exhortations to act, to feminist magazines urging women to take action on their own behalf.	. . .

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