Feminism as a transatlantic bridge to modernity: María de Maeztu’s Residencia de Señoritas and the American International Institute for Girls in Spain (1917–1936)

Abstract

ABSTRACT At the beginning of the twentieth century a globalization of women's associations, driven mostly by the United States, Great Britain, and France, was instrumental in the Western advancement of gender equality. Modernist feminist authors disseminated and promoted ideas about suffragism, the integration of women in higher education, pacifism, and gender equality along international networks. In this essay I study two women’s academic institutions that contributed to forming a solid transatlantic web of intellectual alliances between Spain and the United States of America: The International Institute for Girls in Spain (headquartered in Boston) and the Residencia de Señoritas (in Madrid). The two institutions exchanged university faculty through pensions, scholarships, and exchanges, modeling transatlantic intellectual alliance for students. This coalition exponentially grew the numbers of Spanish students in university desks and raised the percentages of Americans and Spaniards completing their higher educations in both countries. Under the visionary feminist leadership of María de Maeztu, several cohorts of students became a new, feminist intercontinental network serving as a motor of twentieth-century modernity.