Constructions of femininity in eighteenth-century Spain by Elizabeth Lewis

Constructions of femininity in eighteenth-century Spain by Elizabeth Lewis

Spain’s eighteenth century was a crossroads between traditionalist views of the physical, intellectual, and emotional inferiority of women, and a new way of understanding femininity and its importance to society. In her groundbreaking book, Mujeres e Ilustración. La construcción de la feminidad en la España del siglo XVIII, Mónica Bolufer Peruga finds the “woman question” (la querella de las mujeres)—as expressed by both men and women, conservatives and liberals, in a variety of literary, political, medical, pedagogic, and journalistic texts—to be a central point of conflict of the eighteenth century in Spain. From the early intellectual debates, to pedagogical and medical texts about women, and finally to examples of women’s active participation in Spanish Enlightenment culture, Bolufer traces the debates over gendered definitions of femininity and of women’s proper place in society. A standard for feminist studies in the Hispanic Enlightenment since its publication in 1998, this new English translation, updated and accompanied by a bibliographic survey of important publications since (and many as a result of) the publication of Mujeres e Ilustración, reintroduces the book and the important subject of women, gender and the Spanish Enlightenment to Hispanist and non-Hispanist scholars of the eighteenth-century and beyond, especially in the UK and US.

Elizabeth Franklin Lewis is Professor of Spanish and Director of Undergraduate Research at the University of Mary Washington, USA, specializing in women and gender in Spain’s Enlightenment period. She is the author of Women Writers in the Spanish Enlightenment (Ashgate 2004) and co-editor with Catherine Jaffe of Eve’s Enlightenment: Women’s Experience in Spain and Spanish America, 1726-1839 (LSU Press 2009), and of Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment (2019) with Mónica Bolufer Peruga and Catherine Jaffe. Mónica Bolufer Peruga is Professor of Early Modern History at the European University Institute (Florence), specializing in eighteenth-century cultural, intellectual and gender history of the Spanish world in European and global context. Her books include Arte y artificio de la vida en común (Art and Artifice of Life in Common, 2019), La vida y la escritura en el siglo XVIII (Life and Writing in the Eighteenth Century, 2008) and, as co-editor, The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment (with Elizabeth Franklin Lewis and Catherine Jaffe, 2020), European Modernities and the Passionate South (with Xavier Andreu, 2023), and Gender and Cultural Mediation in the Long Eighteenth Century (with Laura Guinot-Ferri and Carolina Blutrach, 2024).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781805966050
ISBN 10	1805966057
Title	Constructions of femininity in eighteenth-century Spain
Author	Elizabeth Lewis
Series	Oxford University Studies In The Enlightenment
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Liverpool University Press
Year published	2026-06-28
Number of pages	368
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.