Reviewed by: Spanish Female Writers and the Freethinking Press 1879–1926 by Christine Arkinstall Maryellen Bieder Arkinstall, Christine. Spanish Female Writers and the Freethinking Press 1879–1926. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2014. x + 244 pp. Christine Arkinstall has produced an invaluable, groundbreaking study that marshals her wide-ranging research to challenge our prevailing cultural narrative of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish women’s intellectual and literary production. This is the third volume in her interrogation of the female gender and authorship in modern Spain; it started with Gender, Class, and Nation: Mercè Rodoreda and the Subjects of Modernism in 2004, and continued in 2009 with Histories, Cultures, and National Identities: Women Writing Spain, 1877–1984. Her latest title narrows her timespan and positions three little-known authors from Spain’s first-wave feminism at center stage: Amalia Domingo Soler (1835–1909), Ángeles López de Ayala (1856–1926), and Belén Sárraga (ca. 1873–1950). The feminist activities and ideas of the latter two women “anticipate the second wave of Spanish feminists” (17) who actively supported female suffrage. Taken together, the lives of all three dispute the current Madrid-centric construction of Spanish cultural practices, and reorient it to Barcelona, the principal setting of their free-thinking and spiritist activities, their periodicals and publications, and their political and social commitments. These “hermanas en ideas” (16), in López de Ayala’s felicitous phrase, belonged to “a sisterhood of female intellectuals and writers, highly influential in their day” (3) throughout not only Spain and Portugal, but also Latin America. Each of these women intersects in her own way with the period’s freethinking, feminist, and republican movements, in firm opposition to Madrid’s staid Restoration society. Each founded and edited a long-lived radical feminist periodical, while all three placed essays and fiction or poetry in Domingo Soler’s spiritist weekly, La Luz del Porvenir (1879–1894). Both López de Ayala and Sárraga suffered imprisonment for their attacks on the Church and the Restoration government. All shared a deep commitment to secular education, especially for women and the lower classes, with the goal of forming citizens for the future republic they envisioned. While Arkinstall highlights each woman’s association with a particular movement—“Domingo Soler’s spiritism, López de Ayala’s republic of ideas, and Sárraga’s federal republicanism”—she also argues for their collective “sociocultural and political ethos, committed to creating sovereign citizens and a nation built on equality” (196). At the same time, she identifies the intertwining ideological strands in their lives. Domingo Soler, “considered the greatest female figure in Hispanic spiritism,” published prolifically on anticlerical thought, freethinking, and feminism (17). López de Ayala, a freethinker, freemason, and feminist, founded and edited four major Barcelona republican periodicals between 1896 and 1920 (18–19). An anomaly among the sisters, Sárraga first studied medicine at the University of [End Page 462] Barcelona, and subsequently made her mark in Málaga and Valencia before traveling extensively throughout Latin America; she returned to Barcelona during the Second Spanish Republic, becoming a candidate in the 1933 elections. An adherent of freethinking federal republicanism, and feminism, Sárraga launched the periodical La Conciencia Libre which appeared erratically from 1896 to 1907. Although Arkinstall cannot prove that Domingo Soler became a freemason, the other two women joined female lodges, called logias de adopción; in contrast, they did not share Domingo Soler’s spiritism. Alongside the social agenda and political ideals of her three subjects, Arkinstall has located and analyzed their literary and autobiographical texts as well as their poetry, de rigueur for a woman entering the print arena in those decades. Of the three, Domingo Soler’s writings are “the best preserved and most readily available in print” (17–18). Besides her journalism, she penned short stories and an autobiography, Memorias de una mujer. Her extensive output has “survived, albeit marginally, into the present, reprinted in the mid-1980s and 1990s by minority presses in Spain” (193). Arkinstall signals the irony that such material is accessible today due not to the efforts of literary scholars, but to research undertaken by historians of Spanish and Catalan...
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Sep 1, 2023
Marcela A Di Blasi 
Open Access