Multiple Modernities : Carmen de Burgos, Author and Activist

This collection of essays confirms Carmen de Burgos’s pivotal place in Spanish feminist history by bringing together eminent international scholars who offer new readings of Burgos’s work. It includes the analyses of a number of lesser known texts, both fictional and non-fictional, which give us a more comprehensive examination of Burgos’s multi-pronged feminist approach. As an important precursor of Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe [The Second Sex] (1949), Burgos’s works, especially her essays, are essential feminist reading and complement other European and North American traditions. Gaining familiarity with the breadth and depth of her work serves not only to provide an understanding of Spanish first-wave feminism, but also enriches our appreciation of cultural studies, gender studies, subaltern studies, and travel literature.

This collection of essays confirms Carmen de Burgos’s pivotal place in Spanish feminist history by bringing together eminent international scholars who offer new readings of Burgos’s work. It includes the analyses of a number of lesser-known texts, both fictional and non-fictional, which give us a more comprehensive examination of Burgos’s multipronge feminist approach. Burgos’s works, especially her essays, are essential feminist reading and complement other European and North American traditions. Gaining familiarity with the breadth and depth of her work serves not only to provide an understanding of Spanish firstwave feminism, but also enriches our appreciation of cultural studies, gender studies, subaltern studies and travel literature. Looking at the entirety of her life and work, and the wide-ranging contributions in this volume, it is evident that Burgos embodied the tensions between tradition and modernity, depicting multiple representations of womanhood. Encouraging women to take ownership of their personal fashion, the design of their homes and the decorum of their families were steps towards recognizing a female population that was cognizant of its own desires.