Spanish Realist Literature - Feminist Movement and Arenal

Feminist Movement and Arenal

Concepción Arenal was a Spanish feminist writer and activist. She was also a pioneer and founder of the feminist movement in Spain. Concepción Arenal and her husband collaborated closely on the liberal newspaper Iberia until Fernando’s death in 1859. Penniless she was forced to sell all her possessions in Armaño and moved into the house of violinist and composer Jesús de Monasterio in Potes, Cantabria, where in 1859 she founded the feminist group Conference of Saint Vincent de Paul in order to help the poor. Two years later the Academy of Moral Sciences and Politics awarded her a prize for her work "Beneficence, philanthropy and charity". It was the first time the Academy gave the prize to a woman. She also attended political and literary debates, unheard of at the time for a woman.

In later years she published poetry books and essays such as “Letters to delinquents” (1865), “Ode against slavery” (1866), “Convicts, the people and the executioner” and “The execution of the death sentence” (1867). In 1868 she was named Inspector of Women’s Correctional Houses and in 1871 began fourteen years of collaboration with the Madrid-based magazine The Voice of Charity.

In 1872 she founded the Construction Beneficiary, a society dedicated to building cheap houses for workers. She also worked with the Red Cross helping the injured of the Carlist War, working in a hospital in Miranda de Ebro, later being named Secretary General of the Red Cross between 1871 and 1872. In 1877 she published Penitentiary Studies. Arenal’s achievements were extraordinary in a largely traditional Spain, focusing her work on those marginalised in society. She wrote not only extensively on the state of prisons for both men and women, but also on the role of women in society in works such as La Mujer del Porvenir (1869), The education of women, The current state of women in Spain, The work of women, The woman of the house (1883) and Domestic service. It is this work which made her known as the founder of the feminist movement in Spain.