Spanish Women and the Colonial Wars of the 1890s

Historians of Latin America may be surprised to find that D. J. Walker’s Spanish Women and the Colonial Wars of the 1890s is a study of women in Spain rather than women of Spanish descent in the colonies. Moreover, Walker’s background as a scholar of Spanish rather than of history means that the types of sources used and their employment also stand out from other works of history. Yet her project reveals new insights into how women’s actions in Spain informed the politics of war both in the 1890s and more broadly in historical investigation.Walker begins by scrutinizing the historical role of women as related to war in the popular discourse of the nineteenth century. Women initially appear as heroines who sacrifice their home, families, and happiness on the altar of nation when they cheerfully send their sons to war. Women’s actions that might appear at odds with such a notion, like those of the Lieutenant Nun, Catalina de Erauso, become, by the 1890s, representative of service on behalf of empire and are thus sanctified, as are those of Spain’s heroic mothers and wives.Although popular discourse may have portrayed the women of Spain in one way, their actions in the Americas and Europe did not reflect those ideas. In fact, social commentary lamented the role of women in the Paris Commune and left Spaniards deeply suspicious of women who desired to participate in public life, a notion perfectly in keeping with the Catholic Church and others advocating the maintenance of traditional standards regarding the place of women. Within such a context, women’s demonstrations against conscription proved especially troubling. Focusing her analysis on the 1896 women’s demonstration in Zaragoza, Walker notes that women who opposed their sons’ conscription broke with a number of deeply held convictions about women’s place in society as patriotic mothers and as a collectively submissive group. Consequently, the larger society would have to find some way to rationalize their activities. Support from anarchist and socialist quarters, among others, did little to bring women’s opposition position into the mainstream of Spanish society, although their cries were heard beyond their shores, as when Cubans desirous of independence sympathized with the poor mothers of Zaragoza. Recognition of their relative impotence would lead women and other marginalized groups like the working class to think about the nature of institutions and practices that constrained their existence, among them suffrage.Walker is correct to note that women’s lack of access in the public realm led to their marginalization. Suffrage practices, which were not particularly inclusive of any Spaniard, male and female alike, inhibited women’s ability to effect change. Additionally, the continuing influence of the Catholic Church and the Spanish legal code’s circumscription of women’s rights and position further blocked women’s advances. Educational practice was another area in which women had great strides to make in order to effect changes in their influence and standing. Such important issues as the institutionalization of women’s repression and the gradual shifts in those practices are deserving of more in-depth treatment than they are afforded in this work.What is perhaps most significant to scholars of Latin America (and others) is Walker’s treatment of “women’s voices.” She notes that “women marching in public places continue to embarrass and inconvenience those in power” (p. 66). Walker sees threads of continuity between women’s actions in Zaragoza and those in the Plaza de Mayo. The Zaragoza protests entered the realm of invalidity due to the presence of old women and girls, or those whose age precluded their having sons facing conscription. Conversely, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo are validated though biology, and consequently their activities affirm differences between the sexes. Thus those sorts of protests enter the realm of the acceptable and have greater impact. Such a notion could be tested in the numerous social moments of the last century in Latin America and might reveal new insights.Historians will note a lack of archival sources in favor of published primary sources (newspapers, theatrical works). Walker writes that women’s voices are largely missing from her analysis, a situation she views as stemming from women’s extremely high rates of illiteracy in Spain generally and especially among the demonstrators of Zaragoza. As a result, her sources are mostly published and mostly authored by men. It is undoubtedly difficult to uncover women’s voices, but as numerous historians of women and gender have shown, this can be accomplished through careful archival work.Spanish Women and the Colonial Wars of the 1890s will likely prove quite useful to students both for its relative brevity and its particularly excellent and lengthy appendix in which Walker provides a number of excerpts from the sources she cites in both the original Spanish and in English translation. The work’s insights into the nature of women’s protests will likewise be useful for scholars

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