In recent years there have been many initiatives aimed at recovering the memory of the silenced women of the Generation of '27. In her essay What I was writing (Carpenoctem), the journalist and writer Carmen Estirado does the same with the female members of the Generation of '98, even more unknown, if possible. An extraordinary group of pioneering writers in the fight for women's rights.
How did the idea of writing this book come about?
I firmly believe that it comes from my grandmother. I had an intuition when I was little that my grandmother, my grandmothers, gave me great advice, very authentic, very brave. That stuck with me. Later I began to see how reference writers who had been made invisible, such as the Sin Sombrero, have begun to be recovered. And I understood that there were more people, more writers than had been before.
Uniting the two ideas, I began to investigate the press of more than a hundred years ago. And I discovered that, on the covers, along with Machado or Valle-Inclán, there was also, for example, Carmen de Burgos. And it is that these women were really next to them. The Generation of '98, therefore, was not only made up of men. That's where that thread came from.
Have the women of 1998 suffered more marginalization and invisibility than those of 1927 or other later ones?
Although there have been recovery attempts, the further you go in time the more difficult it is to access the materials. The women of 1927, although they were later buried by the Franco regime, were able to enjoy, in the context of the Republic, a new range of freedoms, greater visibility compared to women at the end of the 19th century. Those of 98 opened the door so that those of 27 could be published more easily than at the beginning of the century, since then it was very frowned upon for a woman to go to a café, to a gathering or to share a text written by her. These women were essential for the creation of women's associations.
Are they precursors, therefore, of the feminist movement?
Yes, that is a key theme in the work of María Lejárraga Carta a las mujeres de España, where she tries to ward off fear of the word feminism. Carmen de Burgos, for her part, did a survey in the newspaper in which she asked her classmates for her opinion on the divorce. An important breeding ground was generated for the demands of women.
What do these women from '98 have in common? What is the guiding thread of your life and work?
They spoke of a new woman, of a woman who went to work, who no longer felt guilty and who could become happy if she didn't get married. This treatment of women as a new theme in literature, as an active subject, was something that united them all, both politically and artistically.
Let's start by talking about María Lejárraga, a pioneer woman in the fight for women's rights and deputy for the Second Republic. The title of her book refers to a photo in which her husband, also a writer Gregorio Martínez Sierra, was looking at what she was writing. He was looking at her over her shoulder…and, at the same time, admiringly.
Yes, the title of the book is a tribute to María Lejárraga. María signed practically all of her work under the name of Gregorio Martínez Sierra, who received all the success and remuneration for his work. She made it public in Mexico in 1953 when she published Gregorio and me: half a century of collaboration, six years after his death, when she was forced to be born again. Her pseudonym had died, and therefore he was unable to write. The dedication refers to him: “To the Shadow that perhaps will have come –as so many times when he had a body and eyes to look with– to lean over my shoulder to read what I was writing”.
I think that, as you said, behind that gesture of looking at her from behind there are many things. She was the artist, she was a genius that Gregorio recognized as such, but she was also her wife, and he told her when and how to take the next steps.
We are talking about the author of essential works such as Canción de luna (made into a film five times) or the libretto for El amor brujo by Falla. A legacy of hers, like most of her production, which saw the light signed by her husband and not by her, is it the height of invisibility?
There are letters in which Gregorio confesses his admiration for her; he gets excited by the words she is writing. There is such a big custom that women are below men that, sometimes, I think they didn't even realize it because they were normalized.
It was aberrational that he allowed her entire life to be the one who really wrote and not take that credit. That he is known as the feminist writer of the time and did not back down seems incredible to me. He could have recognized her work, but he chose not to, as was normal at the time.
Carmen de Burgos is another fascinating figure, considered the first female war correspondent, a pioneer in journalism and reporting. She is a writer still little known in our country.
For me it is a reference. I studied Journalism, and it is incredible that they never told me about this fundamental figure in the history of the press. It is an inadmissible absence.
Carmen de Burgos spends a very fine irony in all her work. In her novel El perseguidor de ella, she talks about a widow who inherits a large sum and goes on a trip to Europe. She is very happy, but there is always a man who is watching her. She then talks about the guilt of feeling happy without a man.
It is a very modern theme still today, it has not gone out of style. Carmen de Burgos does not start out as feminist as she ends up, she has a very marked personal evolution.
Sofía Casanova is another great unknown. She is the author of La mujer española en el extranjero, she is a pioneer in the world of reporting and correspondents. Complex character, difficult to fit into the feminist classifications of the time.
She was a woman who triumphed in poetry from a very young age, when she was barely fifteen years old, and published her first verses in El Faro de Vigo. Carmen de Burgos pays homage to her at her gathering and Pérez Galdós sponsors her, something completely unusual at the time.
Casanova was a recognized woman in the artistic world of the time: she was invited to give lectures at the main prestigious intellectual forums. But she, of course, she was a woman and, therefore, she had to get married. She goes to live in Poland and covers five wars as a correspondent.
I don't know if, to this day, there is any journalist who has written about so many conflicts. She gives a voice to women living through war. Although she had a conservative ideology, her position was pacifist and very feminist.
Maria de Maeztu. A rebellious woman who thought that what would change the world is the education of women. She directed the Residencia de Señoritas de Madrid and presided over the Lyceum Club, the first secular and cultural organization in Spain for feminist purposes. One ahead of her time?
Many things fall in love with María de Maeztu. One of them is that she is responsible for advances that we enjoy today and do not know about, such as the schoolyard. Before, in schools, there was no place for recreation and leisure. She began meeting with people from the world of education to drive change. She believed that she had to study in a different way, with less weight for exams, and create a patio, a place for leisure and recreation, something that, at that time, was crazy.
Although she could also have written, she decided that her place was education, giving tools to other women so they could do what they wanted, study, write or whatever.
And she created that wonderful place, the Lyceum Club, where women could stay and sleep so they could study in Madrid if they were from abroad. It was a center where talks and conferences were given that marked the course of Spain.
Behind the famous Baroja brothers, Pío and Ricardo (writer and painter), was Carmen, the shadow sister. A brilliant and exceptional being. She is an anthropologist and creator of the theater company El mirlo blanco. In her work, Memories of a Woman from the Generation of '98, she is included in her own right in this group of artists.
Carmen Baroja has a very sharp lucidity and puts the topic on the table: "I also wanted to write, I also wanted to draw like my brothers, but they didn't let me." She manages to accompany her brother Ricardo's artistic scholarship in Paris, and there she exploits all her creativity. She starts doing goldsmithing and she becomes very good in that discipline.
She defends the minor arts, many of them linked to women and without any type of recognition, such as lace. In her book El lace en España, she reviews the history of this art that is so appreciated in the world and so underestimated in Spain, because it was made by women.
It can be said of Belén de Sárraga that she was the voice of the oppressed. She fought all her life against injustices in different parts of Latin America. A character of great caliber.
Yes. It makes me angry that there is no audiovisual record, because Belén de Sárraga must have been an amazing woman. At the International Congress of Freethinkers (Geneva, 1902) she defended the female question, an aspect that was being overlooked among other debates.
At 34 years old, she is already the director of a newspaper in Montevideo. She has a political vision focused on ending injustices. For defending her ideas, she suffered harassment and reprisals, she was imprisoned, and many times her publications were banned and even burned.
Lastly, we talked about Regina de Lamo, a woman who made cooperativism her raison d'être and defended the creation of a workers' bank. Absolutely modern ideas more than a hundred years later.
She studied economics on her own, she was a woman with very modern thinking. Regina de Lamo believed that cooperatives could be the first access for women to the world of work, but, for this, the differences between men and women had to be ended. She doesn't talk about a "glass ceiling", but almost.
The creation of the first workers' bank is very important, because until then the woman had no access to an account, much less to ask for a loan. For the first time, the possibility of a woman going to a bank and being endorsed is being considered. She was highly respected in her time.
What trace remains in the Spain of 2023 of these women of the Generation of '98?
The writers of the Generation of '98 planted the idea of many rights that were approved years later. Carmen de Burgos revolutionized Spanish society when, at the beginning of the 20th century, she opened the melon of divorce in El Diario Universal, a historical taboo here. And she did it through a fun survey of readers and intellectuals of the time that she was publishing little by little.
Miguel de Unamuno, for example, answers: "The same thing happens to me with divorce as with adultery novels: very rarely do they interest me." However, despite the sarcasm of some of her classmates, the result of Carmen's survey was forceful: 1,462 votes in favor compared to 320 against. More articles and thirty more years were needed, but in 1932 the Republic enshrined that right in an egalitarian way and for both sexes.
Something similar occurs with the right to vote for women, an issue that was debated daily in the rooms created by the women of 1998, such as the Residencia de Señoritas or the Lyceum. Or with other important struggles that affect us daily. María de Maeztu, as we said before, was behind the idea of incorporating a patio in every school in Spain. And Regina de Lamo was already talking about the need to create a "tribe" in the workplace through cooperatives in which women had the same role, voice and vote as men.
