Retrieving feminine experience: Women's education in twentieth-century Spain based on three school life histories

Abstract

This article describes the research carried out in Cantabria, Spain, aimed at reconstructing the history of women's education in Spain during the twentieth century, based on the school life histories of three women from the same family. The work is developed in two stages. The first one required drawing up the schooling accounts and placing them in their social and historical context. In the second stage, we carried out a critical and comparative analysis of the accounts based on six intergenerational dilemmas: the creation and development of the graded school, the change in the model of childhood, the feminization of the curriculum, the role of religion in the women's lives, the access to the labour market, and lastly the influence of the teaching staff. We have sought to develop a first person account by means of retrieving the women's own experiences.