Editorial Identities, Business Models, and Social Strategies: Spanish Women Editors in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

This article examines women’s periodical editorship in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain. Drawing on library collections and digital periodical databases, it revisits the pioneering research on a small number of major figures undertaken since the 1990s and tests it on a much larger scale. Was female editorship a negligible phenomenon in the history of the Spanish press, or are we only beginning to discover its scope? And if more women editors are identified, to what extent can we extrapolate insights into the profiles, networks, and strategies of a few grandes dames to larger numbers? Our approach not only enables us to answer these questions on a quantitative level, it also opens up a large corpus of periodicals for more in-depth qualitative research. Specifically, after presenting some quantitative findings and general observations, we examine three factors that played a role in the success and failure of Spanish women’s periodical editorship: editorial identities, business models, and social strategies.