Politics, affect, and the negotiations of gender in Concepción Arenal’s antislavery writings

Abstract

Concepcion Arenal, the proto-feminist writer and social reformer, best known for her works on women’s issues and on prison reform, was also a prominent voice in the nineteenth-century Spanish antislavery movement. She published a series of articles in El Abolicionista and other liberal periodicals denouncing slavery, and her poem, “La esclavitud de los negros,” won a competition sponsored by the Spanish Abolitionist Society (1866). The object of this chapter is to analyze the ways in which Arenal, through her antislavery writings, negotiated her relationship to a liberal public sphere dominated by men to make a strategic entry into social spaces that allowed women a certain degree of political agency. On the one hand, Arenal identified with “masculine” Enlightenment reason, particularly in her reliance on juridical discourse; yet her conscious appeal to “feminine” sensibility, through the adoption of religious and domestic discourse, allowed her to extend her influence in civil society. Such negotiations by Arenal and by other women abolitionists gradually led to the erosion of gendered distinctions between reason and passion, the public and the private, thus compelling us to rethink women’s role in the social movements of nineteenth-century Spain. Finally, the chapter will examine the ways in which gendered discourses in Arenal’s antislavery writings intersected with those of empire and colonialism.