Reversed mirrors? Clerical women, anticlerical women

Abstract

When the clerical / anticlerical conflict got relevance in the Spanish public sphere in the first third of the XXth Century, behaviour and representations of women who supported actively each one of the mentioned adversaries may sometimes have worked as inverted mirrors. Is it possible to say so? In order to answer this question, the present article compares the discourse and the action developed by women in favour of clericalism and laicism. It also analyses how those women were represented in clerical and anticlerical circles. This approach to the subject let us know better gender matters related to the mentioned conflict as well as possibilities and resistances that it generated to women's presence in the Spanish public sphere.