4 - El ángel del hogar and the Bourgeois Ideal of Domesticity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2023
Summary
Parting from the premise that “the construction of women in terms of recognizable roles, images, models, and labels occurs in discourse in response to specific social imperatives,” we must begin our analysis of the nineteenth-century model of domesticity by surveying the circumstances that propitiated its production and circulation (Sunder Rajan 129). The debate on the character and ideal of women in the second half of the nineteenth century must be considered in light of the country's changing political and socio-economic landscape, which was responsible for reconfiguring traditional gender roles. Although the effects of industrialization in Spain in the mid-nineteenth century were too insignificant to occasion women's active involvement in the state's productive sector or to give rise to an organized feminist movement, as was the case in England, the force of such change was palpable enough to warrant acknowledgments in countless manuals on female formation:
[L]os autores de los manuales se daban cuenta de que las mujeres y jóvenes españolas, influidas en parte por el desarrollo en otros países, comenzaban a estar descontentas con su papel tradicional. Se alude frecuentemente a los nuevos conceptos de igualdad y emancipación así como a las consecuencias de adherirse a ellos, describiéndolas en términos apocalípticos: desorden, deuda, vicio, destrucción de la familia y—lo peor de todo—ostracismo social.
J. Manjarrés advierte que el sentido común y la moral condenarán a aquellas jóvenes que se toman la libertad de quejarse de la condición de su sexo y que, de esta forma, ‘no harán más que dar una prueba de su indiscreción y de su poco talento, no harán más que dar a conocer la crasa ignorancia en que se hallan sumidas acerca de sus obligaciones como mujeres.’
([T]he authors of the manuals realized that Spanish women and girls, influenced in part by development in other countries, began to be discontented with their traditional role. The new concepts of equality and emancipation are frequently alluded to, as are the consequences of following them. The latter are described in apocalyptic terms: disorder, debt, vice, destruction of the family and—worst of all—social ostracism.
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- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009