ABSTRACT
Spain was one of the last Western European countries to admit women to its universities. In 1910, a royal order gave women access to university on the same terms as men; a year after the last state in Germany had done so. Also in Spain, this event was preceded by a number of women previously gaining degrees on an individual basis. However, one of the distinguishing features of the admission of women to higher education in Spain was that it happened in the absence of an organized women’s movement. Such a movement only emerged in 1918 with the foundation of the National Association of Spanish Women (Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Españolas), which was soon followed by other organizations in the 1920s. The organized women’s movement thus took shape decades after the development of similar movements in Britain and Germany. Nonetheless, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a ‘feminist awakening’ and the development of a ‘feminist consciousness’ in Spain. 1 This meant that there were a number of individual activists who called for women’s admission to higher education and the professions, and that debate about the issue was fostered under the auspices of other movements, notably the liberal ‘Krausist’ reform movement, the labour movement, and Catalan nationalism. A ‘woman question’, the cuestión femenina or cuestión de la mujer, emerged in this period in Spain, and educational reform, including women’s entry into higher education, was a key aspect of this question. Reforming female education became implicated in the larger struggles to obtain control over education that unfolded after the political-military ‘Glorious Revolution’ of September 1868, which led to the dethronement of Isabella II. Rosa María Capel Martínez has commented that approaches to female education were caught up in opposing cultural and political currents: the traditional, Catholic and conservative; the liberal, secular and bourgeois; and the revolutionary one. The education of girls and women served as an ideological battlefield in Spain. 2
