Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: From behind the Lines to Writing War’s Texts: Redrawing the Boundaries of War and Gender

1. Love of Nation and Women’s Citizenship in Rosario de Acuña’s Amor a la patria (1877)

2. Gender, Casticismo, and Imperial Nations in Spain’s fin de siècle: Blanca de los Ríos’s Sangre española (1899)

3. Charity, Patria, and Painting War’s Pain: Concepción Arenal’s Writings, 1869–79

4. The Monstrosity of War and Justpeace: Concepción Arenal’s Cuadros de la guerra and Ensayo sobre el Derecho de Gentes

5. Getting Intimate with Empire: Fin-de-Siècle Women Writing a Psychology of the Disaster

6. Disordering the Imperial Home: Blanca de los Ríos’s La niña de Sanabria (1907)

7. Purity of Blood in the National Family? Spain’s War in Morocco in Carmen de Burgos’s En la guerra (Episodios de Melilla) (1909)

8. Between Feminist Aspirations and Pacifist Ideals: Burgos’s Essays on World War I and Women in War

9. Denouncing War’s Broken Syntax: Burgos’s World War I Novellas

Conclusion: Transforming Moral Maps, Then and Now

Notes

References

Index

About the Author

Christine Arkinstall is a professor of Spanish at the University of Auckland.

Reviews

"Arkinstall makes a persuasive argument that Spanish women's preoccupation with war has been underappreciated. This study recognizes both the complexity of women's collaborative activities and their conflicting positions on the legitimacy of war. An added bonus is the book's illustrations, several of which depict women's war activities and help to solidify the argument regarding women's symbolic significance. A follow-up volume on twentieth-century wars in which women also play key physical and symbolic roles would be most welcome."--Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Stony Brook University, Bulletin of Spanish Studies
" Women on War in Spain's Long Nineteenth Century is a groundbreaking examination of how 'the boundaries of war and gender' were radically transformed by six Spanish women authors writing on war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This meticulously researched, incisively written book is a fundamental contribution to the field and to the historiography of Iberian feminisms."--Silvia Bermúdez, Professor of Literature and Iberian Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
" Women on War in Spain's Long Nineteenth Century is unrivalled in studies on war in relation to Spanish women writers, drawing on a wide panorama of sources to reveal women's unrecognized preoccupation with war. What readers will take away from this book is that Spanish women writers challenged the knotty problem of conventional gender roles and the modern thrust for women's rights embedded in their war stories and essays." --Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Emeritus Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature, Stony Brook University
"Christine Arkinstall charts the cultural representation of war by Spanish female writers by exploring the work of major recognized authors (Concepción Arenal, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Carmen de Burgos) and those that are lesser known today (Rosario de Acuña, Blanca de los Ríos, and Consuelo Alvarez Pool). This book is quite simply groundbreaking. Not only does Arkinstall encompass　the most significant texts produced by these authors, but brilliantly demonstrates the ways in which women's depictions of war challenge masculine conceptions of the private and domestic spheres, a masculine war canon, and, importantly, masculine valorizations of what and whose experiences count in times of war." --Alda Blanco, Emerita Professor of Spanish Literary and Cultural Studies, San Diego State University