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Walking on the periphery: gender and the discourse of modernization - the rights of women in early 20th century Spain
Journal of Social History, Fall, 2002 by Elizabeth Munson
Introduction
The Spanish feminist and Socialist legislator Margarita Nelken minced no words when she called walking the greatest symbol of what separated the contemporary, twentieth-century woman from her mother and her grandmother. Ambulation represented to Nelken an even greater emancipation than did women's access to paid employment. "This footing," she wrote in 1923, "this morning walk--elastic step, rhythmic body in loose, comfortable clothing--of the girls that walk for hygiene in these clear and warm days of early spring ... they have opened the windows of the sad room in which their grandmothers sat." (1) Unencumbered walking such as Nelken described suggested that by the 1930s women experienced and used space unselfconsciously, without the need to discipline their bodies.
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Unfortunately, in the early twentieth-century a woman alone was unable to walk as freely and easily as Nelken fantasized. Public opinion did not assume women's right to be on the streets. (2) Newspaper columns and cartoons, women's magazines, conduct manuals, urban directories, and tourism guides all suggest that when women walked they carried a great deal of ideological baggage with them. These sources convey the need to "legitimate" women's presence on the street and a sense of the struggle over what would comprise legitimate behavior and who would define it as such. Although reasons of health and hygiene constituted common defenses of women's presence in the street, arguments for her access became increasingly intertwined in Spain with the idea that women's public presence represented a crucial element in the fulfillment of Spain's ambition to "modernize" and "Europeanize." (3)
The question of how women would use space evolved as part of a broader discourse about Spanish modernization during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Feminism's interaction with other popular discourses on the regeneration of Spain, on the state of Spanish liberalism and the role of public opinion, and on the condition of the middle class, fostered a debate on women that grew enormously during the early twentieth century. (4) Although Spanish intellectuals focused on strengthening the nation by granting women economic and civil rights and opening some professions to them, much of the debate-- especially later--took place in terms of culture or lifestyle. This included a discussion about how women would and should use space in a modernizing nation. (5)
Critics debate whether women experienced the urban spaces of modernity differently than did men in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. While one group emphasizes women's restricted access to urban spaces, a second argues that the modern city offered women increased freedom (6) In Madrid, as elsewhere, changes in women'S relations to the city were occurring simultaneously and, in part, because of, physical changes in urban spaces. (7) This spatial reconfiguration entailed new possibilities, and women enjoyed a subjectivity that incorporated access to the activities and behaviors facilitated by an urban environment. Yet, representations of the social relations that occurred in these spaces suggest that urbanization also accommodated a desire to maintain gender difference. Although space created new possibilities for the performance of gender, the use of space continued to reinforce gender distinctions, even if in a modified form.
John Fiske offers a useful way of understanding these spatial relations when he explains that certain spaces are anomalous, located on the boundary-of public and private, partaking of both, and allowing the values of one to mingle with those of the other. (8) For my purposes, I understand this to mean that women increasingly participated in what we usually consider to be "public" spaces, such as the street, the library, the cafe, and the club, but that the private values associated with femininity shaped expectations of how women would use these spaces.
The middle-class women whom I discuss in this essay were expected to behave, for example, with a particular set of body languages that conveyed to contemporaries respectability and femininity. The process of interaction between space and gendered expectations of its use transformed both public and private. Women were expected to act feminine, but now one could be feminine while, for instance, playing soccer. The meaning of spaces did not remain static, and women could occupy an increasing number of spaces, but their presence carried particular social connotations not completely detached from their mothers' and grandmothers' eras. (9) Although modern, urban spaces were pliable enough to reflect historical changes, their concrete nature suggested that gender differences could not be eroded easily.
Gender and the City
The material conditions of spatial change existed in Madrid as they did in other cities such as Paris and St. Petersburg. (10) Madrid underwent the familiar litany of reconstruction involved in the making of a modern European city--the broadening of boulevards, public lighting, easier access to potable water, albeit on a smaller scale than in Paris. Perhaps consequently, there was also a less intense reaction to the city than in countries such as Great Britain. The many experimental, utopian communities built in Britain found only one counterpart in Spain, on the outskirts of Madrid, the suburban Ciudad Lineal. (11) Socioeconomic conditions, including the availability of public funds, a smaller urban population, and, perhaps, a lack of public will, all contributed to a slower rate of change, but by the turn-of-the-century Madrid was on its way to becoming a modern city, as city planners added, named, and renamed streets, as engineers created boulevards which would accommodate both those who strolled and those who drove automobiles, and as politicians had monuments erected.
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