Women and the “social question” in Spanish social Catholicism: the meanings of the “woman worker”

Abstract

A distinctive feature of Catholic political culture at the end of the 19th Century was the Catholic Movement. Relaunched in the last decade of the Century, it took interest in the “social question”, for which Rerum Novarum offered Catholic principles and directions. This article analyses how, from the beginning of the last century, arose “the working woman” as one of the most urgent problems inside the more general social question. Social Catholic writers created in their books and articles the features of the “working woman”, and recreated, from a hyperrealistic focus, her life conditions. The aim was to arouse compassion of charitable women who were called to solve a new social reality, the female social question, guided by the renewed positions of social Catholic action.