Resumen de Católicas, activistas y patriotas: Una prosopografía de las mujeres politizadas de derechas entre 1900-1950
This PhD thesis is a prosopography of ten of the most outstanding Spanish Catholic women of the first half of the twentieth century, in the fields of activism and intellectual production. The main persons featured in this research are Francisca Bohigas, Natividad Domínguez, María de Echarri, Dolores de Gortázar, María López de Sagredo, Teresa Luzzatti, Isabel de Maqua, Elena Sánchez de Arrojo, the viscountess of San Enrique and Carmen Velacoracho. Gender has been the main category of historical analysis, as, in their novels or journalistic publications, these women carefully defined what it meant to be a woman or a man, their appropriate virtues, characteristics and behavior, where the acceptable margins of action for each sex lied and how they should (or had to) participate in the public sphere. Their main goal was influencing the society and make prevail their vision, first in their own political culture and then in the society as a whole.
The PhD thesis has five main goals. In the first place, a biographical reconstruction of lives and thoughts of the ten above-mentioned women. The intention is to write a history of the Spanish Catholic women’s movement, putting people at the center of the story. I intend to show the plurality of the interpretations these influential women of conservative and Catholic political cultures made of the reality. In general, the biographized women coincided in their identification of the dangers threatening the society, but all had different strategies aimed at transforming Spain and protecting it from the problems, existing or potential, that they understood were plaguing it. In the second place, I want to contribute to the debate about the feminization/remasculinization of religion in Spain, and, through the opinions of the ten biographies, outline certain approaches referring to the first third of the twentieth century. In third place, and linked to the previous goal, I intend to analyze the conceptions about masculinity and femininity shared by the women belonging to Catholics political cultures. In the fourth place, I try to establish the conceptual differences that exist between terms such as official gender model or gender ideal. Finally, the fifth objective is inserting the Spanish Catholic women's movement of the first decades of the twentieth century in the international context
