Catherine Davies
Gender in the Political Discourse of Post-Liberation Spanish South America and Spain
The Spanish American Wars of Independence (the revolutionary civil conflicts against Spanish colonial rule), triggered by the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, lasted from about 1810 to 1826 and resulted in the collapse of the three-hundred-year-old Spanish Empire and the creation of fifteen republican nation-states whose territories stretched from San Francisco in the north to Patagonia in the south. In Spain, absolutism was replaced by a liberal constitutional monarchy. This was a remarkable constitutional transformation on a global scale. The gender order however was little changed and women, the largest social sector in both Spain and the Americas, were systematically denied political rights. This paper focuses on the ways in which gender shaped the political discourses of the immediate post-liberation period (late 1820s, 1830s) in both areas. It explores contemporary understandings of masculinity and femininity in a highly militarized Spanish America, where the cult of military masculinity was sufficiently powerful to encompass women, such as patriots Marshall Francisca Zubiaga de Gamarra and Colonel Juana Azurduy de Padilla, and in war-ravaged Spain where liberals opted for a contrastive model identifying the fragile constitutional monarchy with a young Queen Regent (María Cristina) and a baby princess (Isabel) in need of military protection.
Catherine Davies is Professor of Hispanic and Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham. She has published on the literature, history and culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain and Spanish America, with particular focus on gender and politics. Her books include: Latin American Women’s Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, ed. with A. Brooksbank Jones (1996); A Place in the Sun? Women’s Writing in Twentieth-century Cuba (1997); and an edition of the Cuban abolitionist novel Sab [1841] by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (2001). She is co-author with Claire Brewster and Hilary Owen of South American Independence: Gender, Politics, Text (2006).
