The emergence of the desiring woman in Spain: medical discourses on sexuality and their reception by left-leaning female intellectuals and/or politicians, 1900-1936

Abstract

According to recent research, the modernization of gender discourse that was carried out in Spain at the beginning of the Twentieth-Century preserved traditional female identity, which essentially defined women as mothers. I argue that the modernization of gender system required the creation and implementation of our current sexual paradigm. Although, motherhood, not sexual desire, was the most pervasive social imposition upon women, this does not exclude the decisive importance of a regulatory model based upon erotic desire. The new sexual paradigm is repeatedly offered by numerous and influential figures within intellectual, artistic, and scientific discourse. This new system was in part the reaction of masculine authority to the process of women's emancipation. My analysis is focused on medical discourse, which was the privileged route for legitimization at the time, and its reception by those to whom it was specially intended, that is, women whose ideas or public activities could satisfy feminist goals.