Federica Montseny Mané, the New Woman, and Gender: A Contribution to the History of Spanish Anarchism
Andrew H. Lee, New York University
This paper focuses on Federica Montseny Mañe (1905–1994) to examine the cultural history of Spanish anarchism. The young Montseny wrote several hundred articles and works of fiction, all published by La Revista Blanca (1923–1936). Anarchist culture is an outlier in most historical studies rather than a participant in the process of constructing the ideologies and myths that form “imagined communities.” I evaluate anarchism in its own terms and through its own sources, rather than seeing it as a primitive, mythic, or failed ideology. Examining Montseny’s contribution to anarchist culture before the Spanish Civil War illuminates Spanish anarchism’s participation in a global anarchist network.
Montseny’s writing reached an audience in Europe and the Americas. La victoria and El hijo de Clara, her first two novels, were at the center of a lively trans–Atlantic debate. I focus on these and Montseny’s novellas to examine her use of fictional exemplars to work out and theorize her ideal man and woman while making her own anarchist interventions in Spanish debates about the new woman, paternity, and gender roles.
I examine the ways gender converges with science in Montseny’s fiction and
journalism and mutually constitute key components of her anarchism. I also examine how gendered conceptions of humanity, based in contemporary understandings of science, led to her conception of an alternative maternalism. Montseny shared her contemporaries’ conviction that motherhood was the pinnacle of a woman’s life but her ideal mother was in the public sphere.