Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233
Nerea Aresti, ‘The Gendered Identities of the “Lieutenant Nun”: Rethinking the Story of a Female Warrior in Early Modern Spain’
Gender & History, Vol.19 No.3 November 2007, pp. 401–418.
The Gendered Identities of the ‘Lieutenant
Nun’: Rethinking the Story of a Female
Warrior in Early Modern Spain
Nerea Aresti
Translated from Spanish by Rosemary Williams
Catalina de Erauso (1592–1650) is a famous, if not infamous, figure in Spanish history.
As a girl in 1603, she escaped from a convent in her native city to embark on a life
of military adventure in the service of the king of Spain. Under the names Alonso
Dı́az or Antonio de Erauso, or the nickname ‘Monja Alférez’ (‘Lieutenant Nun’), she
became the very model of a bloodthirsty, womanising conquistador and swashbuckling
swordsman. Nonetheless, the story of her life in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Spain and colonial Latin America is not an easy one to tell. This singular personage
withstands the violence of words: she was an individual with a complex identity forged
in a society very different from our own. Any attempt to examine the historical possibilities of her existence, and the actions – both her own and those of other people – that
marked her path through life presents significant challenges. It requires us to explore
the frontiers between men and women, femininity and masculinity, and thereby attempt
to map the identities that existed in a particular context. It also requires us to answer
the innumerable questions that surround our hero(ine), first and foremost the surprising
political and religious recognition that Erauso gained from the highest authorities of
her time. Moreover, the interest aroused by this story over the centuries will allow us to
trace the ways in which individuals in more recent times have responded to these same
questions.
Despite the difficulties of research spanning such a long period of time, it is
worth pursuing the personage of the Lieutenant Nun as a way of achieving my main
aim: to investigate the interaction of sex and gender in seventeenth-century Spain,
and to assess the extent to which that view still persisted two centuries later, in the
nineteenth century, when the story was re-invented several times. The inclusion of
another nineteenth-century fictional account written in English serves as an intriguing
basis for comparison.
The story of Catalina de Erauso reveals the consistently performative function of
gender in a society – that of Spain during the seventeenth century – that held a very
different view of biology from our own. Her autobiography and other contemporary
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documents provide us with access to a pre-modern world view in which gender is often
eclipsed by judgements based on social hierarchy. At that time, a woman’s existence
was much less determined by the mere fact of being a woman: female identity was not
yet completely dictated by sexual anatomy. Sex was a question of sociology rather than
ontology.1 As a direct consequence, exceptions to prevailing gender norms met with
more tolerance in privileged social circles. In other words, Catalina was an exceptional,
but not an inconceivable, personage. King Philip IV and Pope Urban VIII set the seal
on her strategy of social climbing by granting her a privilege that it was within their
power to grant: being a man.
In this article I show that the importance of gender in the construction of individual identity is shifting and relative. The figure of the Lieutenant Nun resurfaced in
the nineteenth century and attracted fresh interest from intellectuals and politicians.
Her story, forgotten for two centuries, became widely known, bringing with it new
ways of understanding the world – not to mention the character of Erauso him/herself.
This textual resurrection happened at precisely the time when normative conceptions
of gender were becoming central to the construction of male and female identity in
certain western countries. The ideological changes associated with the rise of liberal
politics and the industrial revolution carried to extremes the Enlightenment project of
gendering individuals, social relationships and even nature itself. This gendering of
physical and social reality came later, or rather happened differently, in traditionally
Catholic countries owing to the different paths they had taken through history. This
difference is reflected in the very divergent ways in which nineteenth-century British
and Spanish authors reinvented Erauso’s story. Thomas de Quincey’s passionate, girlish
dreamer contrasts strongly with the visions of Spanish authors such as Joaquı́n Marı́a
de Ferrer, who saw her as a person whose talents were wasted for lack of education,
or Antonio Sánchez Moguel, who attempted to turn her into a national heroine and
symbol of Spain’s colonisation of the Americas. This contrast may serve as a warning
of the complexity of nineteenth-century Spanish discourse on the subject of gender,
and the gulf that separates such discourse from the modern Anglo-American ideal of
domesticity. A comparative study of these new histories of Catalina de Erauso will
bring out the limits and peculiarities of the discourse of gender as it developed in
contemporaneous Spain, where pre-modern concepts resisted the passage of time with
extraordinary tenacity.
Catalina de Erauso was born in San Sebastián, northern Spain, in 1592,2 into
a family of some standing. Her parents, Captain Miguel de Erauso and Marı́a Pérez
de Galarraga, had inherited a substantial estate.3 The family’s wealth derived from
overseas trading, and from the military careers of certain male relatives. Whether for
personal reasons or out of financial necessity, the Erausos decided to place Catalina
and her three sisters at a very early age in a Dominican convent in the town. The four
sons all chose a military career, serving the King of Spain in the Americas.
Catalina was by no means resigned to her probable fate, for, as she said herself,
‘my inclination was to travel and see the world’. She therefore fled the convent in
1603, when she was still a novice but very close to taking her vows. A haircut and
some ingenious adjustments to her clothing – including ‘cut[ting] up a blue skirt’ in
order to fashion ‘a pair of breeches’ – gave her the appearance of an enterprising young
man who would appear trustworthy to anyone who crossed his path. After three years
of wandering from city to city in Spain, serving a variety of masters, the transformed
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Catalina set out for Peru, where she embarked on a military career, serving the Spanish
Crown in its endeavours to colonise and control the Americas.
It was in Chile, fighting the Araucano Indians, that Catalina de Erauso won her
promotion to lieutenant. At this juncture she was already known as Alonso Dı́az Ramı́rez
de Guzmán, a brave soldier in the colonial army, in the company commanded by Alonso
Moreno. The promotion related to a glorious exploit in the course of which he risked
his life to recover a royal standard that had been seized by the enemy.4 He was also
famous for his conduct in the battle of Purén in 1608, in which the company commander
was killed. Erauso took over command, hoping that this would be made permanent,
but his personal decision to hang an Araucano chief frustrated any hope of promotion,
since the governor had been hoping to take the chief alive. Alonso Dı́az had become
the very model of a pitiless and bloodthirsty conquistador. As the Chilean historian
Vı́ctor Rocha puts it, he was the incarnation of the masculine ideology of conquest and
conversion.5
A confirmed gambler, quick to anger and with a touchy sense of honour, Erauso
had more than one brush with the law. He engaged in innumerable duels and fights,
some of which ended in the death of his opponent; on more than one occasion he
ended up in prison, but always found some way to escape punishment for his crimes,
running rings round many a constable and corregidor. His favourite strategy was to
seek sanctuary in a church, out of reach of the civil authorities. Once, when in peril of
death from wounds sustained in one of these brawls, he confessed his biological sex to
a Franciscan friar, and later to the Bishop of Guamanga. The bishop was moved to tears
by Erauso’s story, saying, ‘I revere you as one of the most distinguished persons in this
world, and promise to assist you to the best of my ability and to promote your cause and
the service of God’.6 Erauso spent more than two years in a convent in Lima, where
she temporarily had to give up her masculine attire.7 The metropolitan Archbishop
of Lima received her with all honour. Her story won her popularity on both sides of
the Atlantic, and extant sources bear witness to the eager interest with which Erauso’s
exploits were followed.
In 1624, Antonio de Erauso, as Catalina was then called, returned to Spain intending to present Philip IV with a record of her merits and a petition for reward in
the form of a pension and some recognition of her labours in royal service. She had an
audience with the king, in which she begged him to deign to reward her fifteen years of
service and deeds of valour. Philip acknowledged the value of her military career and
granted her request, allotting her a yearly pension and the right to continue wearing
male attire. She then travelled straight on to Rome in search of further legitimacy and
recognition. Towards the end of June 1626, Urban VIII, to whom she ‘confessed her
sex, and that she was a virgin’, also gave her leave to keep her male attire and, as she
herself records, ‘charged me to live honourably thereafter and abstain from causing any
offence to my fellows’.8 As in Madrid, so in Rome: she was received as an honoured
guest by noblemen and other pillars of society.
At some time between 1625 and 1630 she wrote, or caused to be written, her
autobiography, which offers a concise and sober narrative of the outstanding events of
her life.9 She returned to the Americas in 1630 and died there in 1650 in Quitlaxtla,
Mexico, where ‘she was followed to the grave by all the best people of the town, for
she was beloved by all. The priests and monks there gave her a sumptuous funeral and
an honourable grave’.10
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Catalina de Erauso was widely recognised as a man. Whereas her father’s will,
made in 1611, still treated her as a daughter, her mother’s, dated 1622, included her
among the sons.11 When she returned to San Sebastián in 1629, she signed a notarised
document in the name of Antonio de Erauso, renouncing her maternal and paternal
inheritance. Even the literary portrayal by Pérez de Montalbán rendered Erauso as a
Don Juan who turned out to be a true gentleman in the end – a hero willing to sacrifice
himself to save the honour of his beloved. One Erauso scholar, José Berruezo, has
asked, ‘what extraordinary change had come about in Doña Catalina’s nature to induce
the king and the pope to allow her to dress as a man, notaries to mention her in deeds as
“don Antonio” and for her to be treated as a man in her mother’s will?’12 The changes
in Catalina’s nature were less striking than the changes in society over the centuries
that separate us from her – changes that make it so hard for us to understand her story.
Erauso seems to have relied upon an extremely successful strategy of social climbing. By adopting a masculine appearance and identity she was able to escape from the
narrow limits imposed on women’s activities at the time and enjoy the sort of freedom
and social prerogatives reserved for men. Such social and professional advancement is
observable in other contemporaries of Erauso, such as Eleno de Céspedes, who turned
herself from a dressmaker to a tailor before eventually gaining a licence to practise
medicine. At one time, Céspedes joined Philip II’s army and had a successful military
career.13 Other examples of military transvestism are the ‘Lady of Arrientos’, who
served in the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella under the name of ‘the Knight Oliveros’,14 and Juliana de los Cobos, a soldier who also received a reward from the king
in 1538.15 Again, as Mary Elizabeth Perry has pointed out, the New World was a place
where a woman might find it relatively easy to drop her feminine name and identity
and start a new life as a man.16 Within certain hard-to-define limits, such a move was
also possible within the frontiers of Spain itself. By adopting a new appearance and a
new name, Erauso was able to conceal her origins and live for years in various Spanish
cities. But control mechanisms seem to have been weaker in the far-off New World,
and Erauso successfully manipulated dynamics in the Americas to her benefit.
Transvestism, symbolically linked to the exaltation of chastity and asceticism, is
a relatively common theme in Christian hagiography; at times, the ‘sexless’ dress of
pious individuals could acquire positive connotations in the religious mind.17 Generally
speaking, however, wearing the clothes of the opposite sex was illegal and subject to
prosecution, in both Spain and the American colonies.18 Those who wore the clothing
of the opposite sex undermined society’s ability to differentiate between gendered
identities: clothing was distinctive, a symbol that had to be respected, fundamental to
the definition of individual identity.19 Hence appearance – the adornment of the body
– had a profound moral and social significance.20 It followed that women who crossdressed were usurping a right to which they were not entitled and which admitted them
to forbidden spheres. And yet Erauso and her peers not only escaped punishment for
their criminal audacity, but were actually rewarded for the deeds they did under the
cover of their new identities. Why was this the case?
Much of the work on Catalina de Erauso has focused on investigating the more
obscure aspects of her life and verifying the details of her autobiography. The fact that
the Lieutenant Nun was recognised by the political and religious authorities of the time
passes unremarked, is simply noted as something odd or paradoxical or becomes a
pretext for passing moral or political judgement on her. In the last few years, various
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405
lines of argument have been advanced that contribute to a greater or lesser extent to
an explanation of this puzzle.21 Some authors have focused on the way Erauso helped
maintain the gender-based social hierarchy of the time,22 inscribing on her own body
the values of the society in which she lived; consequently she posed no threat to the established order.23 Although this respect for gender values undoubtedly helped Erauso’s
assimilation and categorisation as a man, it does not provide a sufficient explanation
for the attitude of the authorities towards her. Why did her feminine appearance not
constitute an obstacle when she was seeking recognition for her masculine merits? Why
was her transvestism not scrutinised, but was, rather, eclipsed by other considerations?
One reason for Erauso’s respect for certain gender norms does, however, appear
to be particularly important to our investigation: the fact that the Lieutenant Nun was
a virgin when her biological sex was finally revealed. Erauso may have transgressed
a good many of the strictures governing women’s lives, but she remained a virgin, as
was proved when, after her interview with the Bishop of Guamango, she was examined
by two matrons. She was found to be virgo intacta as on the day she was born, or so
she asserted in her autobiography. In the post-Tridentine world, virginity had become
a key element of female virtue. The idealisation of feminine purity and obedience
through the figure of Mary Immaculate is, in fact, a product of this period.24 Proof
of virginity was, of course, a sine qua non of Erauso’s acceptability to the Church
authorities. Where transvestism and a change of gender roles went along with sexual
activity, condemnation by the Inquisition was assured. This was what happened to
Eleno de Céspedes: she was tried for bigamy, found guilty and received the prescribed
punishment.25
A second line of argument to explain Erauso’s social acceptability stresses her
character as a hybrid or ‘monster’. By this argument, the real reason for her eventual
popularity and recognition was precisely the difficulty of categorising her in terms of
the binary oppositions that underpinned that particular society.26 Doubtless this hybrid
nature, impossible to assimilate into established categories, fed popular curiosity and
made Erauso famous, and much sought after in aristocratic circles. However, it does
not follow that the authorities of church and state were forced to submit to hypothetical
pressure arising from this popularity. Save her virginity, Erauso had broken all the
rules governing her sex and committed the crime of assuming masculine attire and a
masculine way of life. More plausible is the idea that king and pope were influenced in
their decisions by Erauso’s sterling work in the service of colonialism, and allegedly
evangelisation, in the Americas.27 All in all, however, none of these explanations seems
sufficient to account for the phenomenon. We need to look more closely at the precise
way in which the variables of sex and gender were articulated, in that particular historical
context, so as to construct identities and establish the ground rules for body politics.
At that time, biological sex was not assumed to be the ‘neutral’ basis, the unalterable substantive core, which defined gender.28 It was not until centuries later that
biology was set up as an ineluctable authority and fount of all truth; in fact, the word
‘biology’ was not coined until about 1800.29 This does not mean that there were no
previous appeals to nature to explain the differences between the sexes. Although the influence of the Aristotelian concept of woman had somewhat dwindled in many spheres
of thought by around 1600,30 it always fostered what we can now call a ‘biological’
approach that tended to stress the natural differences between the sexes. But theories
regarding sexual differentiation were not based on the idea that men and women were
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different in essence – ‘opposite and incommensurable’, as Thomas Laqueur later put
it. On the contrary, there was a tendency, especially among apostles of Hippocrates
and Galen, to think of both sexes as one and the same thing, a single sex that found its
most elevated expression in man, while woman was an imperfect and defective version.
In this view, the female body was unstable and deficient, but might change towards
the masculine form under the influence of extreme physical effort. A sudden rise in
temperature could also cause an extrusion of the male sexual organs that lurked within
the female body.31
This play of reversals finds another expression in the way that Catalina de Erauso
was characterised by her contemporaries. In Pérez de Montalbán’s play, first performed
in Madrid in 1626, the Erauso character, Guzmán, is accused by a soldier of lacking
courage because he has no moustache, and Guzmán retorts: ‘because courage resides
most of all in the centre, I have thrust my moustaches inwards, and that is enough’. Here
again, the idea that the characteristics of the sexes can merge seamlessly is expressed
as a possible transition from ‘outside’ to ‘inside’ (or vice versa). After a fight, in which
Guzmán gives proof of the courage – and, by implication, the virility – that has been
unfairly called in question, his opponent exclaims, ‘that beardless boy has shown that
he must have a bearded heart’.32
The Counter-Reformation in Spain fostered an intolerant attitude towards any
gender deviations, increased control over women and encouraged their sequestration,
symbolised by the convent.33 The conviction that women were inferior, which had
very strong and ancient roots, became radicalised in the post-Tridentine context. This
prejudice was not, of course, universal: the defenders of feminine virtue, though in a
minority, faced up to the majority who were intent on drawing attention to women’s
vices and shortcomings. The seventeenth-century querelle des femmes, in Spain as
elsewhere, drew on a long polemical tradition of alternate disparaging and eulogising
of womankind.
The terms of this dialectical battle over womankind shed some light on the Erauso
case. First, a woman’s reputation depended more on her actions and moral choices
than on her anatomical and biological limitations – even if, as was likewise affirmed,
women were by nature weaker and more inclined to sin. The arguments used by the more
gallant type of male to defend the moral, intellectual, political and military excellence of
women were predominantly historical and biblical, rather than biological or scientific
as they would be centuries later. On the other hand, there was evidently some difficulty
in pronouncing a collective judgement, since, while feminine weakness made women
more inclined to sin, they themselves were, in the last instance, solely responsible
for either espousing virtue or going bad. Contemporary treatises suggest criteria for
distinguishing between good and bad women.34 The bipolar opposition of Eve and Mary
represented, in Catholic societies at least, an acknowledgement that human beings had
free will, which they could exercise in either following the word of God or turning
away from it. This idea must have made it harder to make sweeping judgements on
womankind.35
Faced with affirmations that, for example, the worst of men was better than the
best of women, that Woman represented all of mankind’s enemies rolled into one,36 the
defenders of womankind complained that their opponents took the bad qualities of some
women as a pretext for defaming all of them. The arguments used by Marı́a de Zayas y
Sotomayor, one of the protagonists in this debate and a contemporary of Erauso, were
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407
often adduced by ‘gallants’ or ‘woman-worshippers’. While acknowledging that ‘there
are many women who, by their vices and errors, have given men good reasons for the
very low esteem in which they now hold them’, Marı́a argues that ‘that is no reason why
they should lump all women together and measure them all by the same yardstick’,
because ‘in a machine so wide and extensive as this world, there must perforce be
good women and bad, just as there are men after the same manner’. Honourable and
virtuous men are bound to admit that ‘there are, and always have been, in past ages
and at present, many women who are good, holy, virtuous, studious, valiant, firm
and constant’.37 Piety, virtue, courage, firmness, constancy and intelligence were just
some items in a single value code that could be used to judge both women and men.
These values, universally prized, were typically thought to reach their loftiest grade of
perfection in men, but some women could accede to the highest levels of excellence.
Examples of celebrated women belonging to the privileged classes did not constitute proof that all women were ‘excellent’, but that some could become so, and thus
draw near to an ideal of perfection that misogynists declared to be out of all women’s
reach. In fact, the notion of feminine excellence was actually compatible with an assertion of their inferiority to men. This was not a contradiction (though it would become
one later), but instead a world view that was not yet entirely gendered, in which being
a woman might not be the key criterion for determining the value of a human being
who happened to have been born female. Other dimensions of an individual woman’s
existence, particularly her social position and her piety, could do more to determine
her identity and place in the world.38 I shall now investigate how all of these questions
are reflected in Erauso’s story.
The notion that women were inferior was shared by Erauso and the intellectuals of
her time. In Juan Pérez de Montalbán’s dramatised life of the Lieutenant Nun, published
during her lifetime in 1625, Don Guzmán (as Erauso is called in the play), realising that
Don Diego has discovered her biological sex, exclaims: ‘I was born, Don Diego, but
how can my tongue tell you that I was born a woman? May my valour pardon such a
grave offence! Indeed I was born a woman, of an ancient and noble lineage . . . but as for
letting it be known that I am a woman, Don Diego, I would die sooner than permit it’.39
To be revealed as a woman was considered an offence, and a public admission to this
effect would have been personally degrading. But while saying this, Erauso/Guzmán
also refers to another token of identity, to which he attaches the greatest importance.
Similarly, in real life, Erauso used her distinguished ancestry as a key argument
in her self-introductory letters to the king and pope in 1624. Her petition to Philip IV
asked for a reward for her fifteen years’ service to the Crown:
In the wars of the kingdom of Castile and against the Indians of Peru, having gone to those parts in
men’s costume, for the particular skill she had in the profession of arms . . .
She beseeches Your Majesty to graciously reward her services and long travels and valorous deeds,
showing thereby your own graciousness towards her; both by reason of her deserts and because
of the singularity and wonder of her discourse, bearing in mind that she is the daughter of noble
parents, hidalgos and leading citizens of the town of San Sebastián, and still more for the security
and unusual purity in which she has lived and continues to live.40
The autobiographical and personal elements that Erauso considered deserving of recognition and likely to attract royal favour were her loyalty and services to the Crown,
her military exploits, her ancestry and her virginity, preserved thanks to her virtuous
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lifestyle. She did not see why the adoption of masculine attire and masculine conduct should prove an insuperable obstacle to such recognition, and the king’s response
showed that she was right. Erauso also explained the change of gender as being due
to a personal inclination towards the career of arms. The letter reveals the relative importance of social status and sex in a society that was strongly hierarchical but only
partially gendered. It shows the central importance of virginity in the ideal that had
been imposed on women, but – and this is an essential proviso – virginity was seen as
a superior state for both sexes. Erauso’s petition reveals the more frankly performative
and cultural aspect of the concept of gender.
It is this nexus of views on gender and sex in seventeenth-century Spain that
explains the way Catalina de Erauso was treated by the highest civil and religious
authorities. Only if sex was perceived as not being defined exclusively and ineluctably
in terms of biology is it possible to understand why her transvestism was condoned and
her exploits rewarded and, still more, why she was considered worthy to be treated as a
man. Her status as a ‘hybrid’ or ‘monster’, or her espousing of certain dominant, that is,
masculine values, are not sufficient in themselves to explain this recognition. Moreover,
if we can be confident that Erauso did not represent a threat to the established order, and
that she actively contributed to maintaining the prevailing social hierarchy of gender,
it is precisely because of the nature of contemporary concepts of gender, sex and the
body. The esteem in which Erauso was held by the highest authorities was based on her
actions – her heroic service to her country – and her moral choices rather than on her
biological sex. To put it another way, the Lieutenant Nun was judged according to a
single code of values that were widely thought to be positive and typically masculine:
courage, strength, loyalty and continence. Making appropriate use of her free will, she
had elected to follow the path of virtue. In a society that was strongly misogynist, but
only partially organised along lines of sexual difference, Erauso was universally treated
not as a representative of her sex but as an exception to it. And as such, she was granted
the privilege of masculinity.
For nearly two centuries, Catalina de Erauso was forgotten until, in 1829, Joaquı́n
Marı́a de Ferrer drew fresh attention to the story through what was to become a popular
edition of her autobiography that included additional documentation. If society had
changed profoundly since the mid-seventeenth century, so had the meaning of what it
meant to be, or act as, a man or woman. Internationally, the epistemological watershed
of the Enlightenment had, as Mónica Bolufer points out, cast into oblivion the terms
of the classic querelle – the debate between the defenders of Woman’s superiority or
excellence and of her inferiority; it also helped reinforce the idea of equality between
the sexes.41 Already at the beginning of the Enlightenment, the querelle des femmes was
dismissed as a sterile debate.42 The new rationalism brought about a secularisation of
old ideas about the ‘neutrality’ of the soul and the equal entitlement to grace of all human
beings, an idea that had mitigated the effects of entrenched, belligerent misogyny. The
Enlightenment faith in education also structured debates about the nature of women.
In this context, women played an active part in resisting absolutism, and helped create
sources of ‘public opinion’ that were critical and dissident.43 The salons, in which
women acquired a degree of prominence, symbolised this feminine participation in an
alternative sphere outside the court.44
Sexual difference, however, was a kind of particularism that refused to yield to
eighteenth-century universalism, leading to a progressive mismatch between the general
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409
principles of liberty and equality, and zeal for preserving sexual inequality.45 The
early Enlightenment defence of equality was to be gradually abandoned. The changing
political attitudes of the French revolutionaries, faced with the phenomenon of women’s
involvement in the political process, clearly exposed this divergence between the ideas
of the Revolution and the aspirations of republican women. Contrasting with the relative
toleration of such involvement in the early stages, by 1792 all women were excluded
from the newborn concept of citizenship. The consolidation of Jacobin power acted as a
catalyst for gendered exclusion. Ignoring protests, the Convention banned all women’s
clubs and popular societies and, in 1793, women were denied the right to vote. The
guillotining of Olympe de Gouges, author of Declaration of the Rights of Woman and
the Female Citizen, in November of that year for alleged treason symbolised the death
of a dream of universal citizenship that would embrace the female half of the human
race.
In the context of the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas became
the cornerstone of a new discourse that attempted to reconcile revolutionary principles
with the subjection of women that was necessary to a bourgeoisie intent upon creating
the foundations for a new ‘sexual order’. Jean le Rond d’Alembert wrote a letter to
Rousseau reproaching him for treating women ‘like those vanquished but still feared
peoples who are disarmed by their conquerors’.46 As Ludmilla Jordanova has pointed
out, Rousseau’s view of women proved extremely powerful and persistent, and his
radically dualist thinking placed gender, along with other dichotomies, in a political
context.47 Rousseau gave a conclusive answer to the ‘galant defenders of the fair sex’,
asserting that it was impossible to compare women with men using a common code
of values and faculties: ‘women have most value as woman and least as men’, he
declared; ‘whenever they exercise their own rights, they have the advantage; whenever
they attempt to usurp our own, they remain beneath us’.48 The new discourse assumed
that there was no such thing as a single universal, whether ethical or social; on the
contrary, every facet of life was subject to the feminine/masculine dichotomy. The new
age had embarked on a total classification of the world along gendered lines. In reality,
that world – actually two complementary but dissimilar worlds, each with its own code
and its own laws, of which neither was inferior or superior to the other – was a perverse
fantasy that concealed and underpinned a power relation that was simply indefensible
on the basis of a theory of universal human rights.
Men and women no longer occupied different rungs of the ladder of human perfectibility. ‘A perfect woman and a perfect man should no more resemble each other
in mind than in face,’ declared Rousseau.49 Men should be active and strong; women,
passive and weak. The virtues of each sex were the defects of the other. The gendering
of the public and private spheres became radicalised, guaranteeing the exclusion of
women from public and political life. Rousseau’s discourse built up an ideal feminine
nature, the contrary of the masculine model, and this ideal became so well entrenched
that feminists were effectively forced to resort to it as the unavoidable starting point for
the construction of a new political subject. The concept of ‘woman’ acquired unprecedented force, and femininity ostensibly pervaded the identity of all human beings born
as women, as well as their bodies, minds and social existence. The concept of ‘woman’
did not, of course, originate in the eighteenth century,50 but the repercussions of the
changes just described on the construction of both feminine and masculine identity
were quite extraordinary.
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To define feminine nature was a creative act combining old and new ingredients.
Whatever the materials used, the architects would be scientific experts able to ‘discover’
the truth by unveiling the mysteries of nature, illuminating every nook and cranny of the
feminine body. The female body would speak for all women and their acts and would
become the ontological basis of femininity. Sex would cease to be an elusive and elastic
concept and would become instead an immutable category that would determine each
and every one of the functional and social dimensions of women’s existence. ‘Always
follow the indications of nature’, said Rousseau. ‘Everything which characterises the
sexes ought to be respected because it is laid down by nature’.51 The conviction that
nature would justify sexist prejudice was firmly based on a ‘science’ that was both
submissive and malleable. As Cynthia Eagle Russett has pointed out, the time was fast
approaching when a very modest foundation of reliable empirical fact would support
a formidable load of theory.52
The new gender discourse offered a solution to the contradiction inherent in denying women civil and political rights, by (as it were) re-negotiating the terms of the
‘sexual contract’.53 The new terms, based on the idea of complementarity and a double
standard of virtue, also demanded the conferment of a certain dignity on femininity
and the role of women – a recognition designed to push them into accepting an alleged
‘essence’ that was inseparable from domesticity. In the early nineteenth century, it
was embodied in the new image of the middle-class ‘angel in the house’. In British
and American society, where an up-and-coming middle class felt able to impose its
own world view, the angel in the house turned into an ideal that was supposed to be
common to all women, although it remained beyond the reach of most. Some time in
the 1830s or 1840s (or so it is generally believed), the ideology according to which
men and women were complementary but occupied separate spheres, and the figure of
the angel in the house, became ‘“common sense” for ordinary middle-class women’.54
Years earlier, Olympe de Gouges had, with great insight, perceived the nature of the
change that was taking place before her very eyes and was to culminate a century later:
‘since the Revolution this sex, once despicable and respected, has become respectable
and despised’.55
In 1847, Thomas de Quincey published a romanticised version of the story of
the Lieutenant Nun that faithfully mirrors the changes described here. His Catalina de
Erauso is scarcely recognisable: she becomes a passionate young noblewoman dreaming of a life outside convent walls. The ‘glad tumultuous ocean which she beheld
daily from the nunnery gardens’ and ‘those golden tales, streaming upwards even into
the sanctuaries of convents’, are to blame for her romantic dreams.56 The more disquieting, transgressive elements of the story are absent from de Quincey’s version.
Erauso’s amorous adventures are turned into innocent fraternal frolics, subsequently
misinterpreted because Catalina finds herself ‘shrinking effeminately from the momentary shock’ of brutally undeceiving other people.57 The author fully accepts Erauso’s
declaration to the pope that after many years, ‘in this respect – viz. all which concerned
her sexual honour – even then she was as pure as a child’.58 Even her transvestism
ceases to be seen as a transgression of gender conventions and instead becomes a bold
strategy for avoiding the danger of recognition as she flees the convent. Thus the ‘one
needle, two skeins of thread, and a bad pair of scissors’ with which Catalina alters
her clothes into masculine garments are presented as the instruments she uses to elude
‘that awful Inquisition which brooded over the convents of Spain’. The character is
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not completely unheroic, but is romanticised and ‘domesticated’, and finally corseted
within the limits of the dominant definition of femininity in nineteenth-century Britain.
In the context of these definitions, so well suited to a British middle-class world
view, de Quincey’s work is a savage attack on a backward and misogynistic Spain in
which ‘supernumerary daughters were [a] very nuisance’. Catalina’s father decides to
put her in a convent to free himself of this hereditary nuisance: he ‘wrapped the new little
daughter, odious to his paternal eyes, in a pocket handkerchief, and then, wrapping up
his own throat with a great deal more care, he bolted off to the neighbouring convent’.59
In the convent, a community of ‘poor nuns, who were never to have any babies of their
own, and were languishing for some amusement, perfectly doted on this prospect of a
wee pet’. The maternal feelings attributed to the nuns again correspond to a view of
the female sex in which celibacy is seen not as sublime, as in the Catholic tradition,
but as being inferior to motherhood, which has now become the ineluctable destiny of
all women.
In de Quincey’s text, Spain’s supposed backwardness is reflected not only in the
way it treats its women, but also through the stereotyping of Spaniards as men who are
reluctant to do any work and have an outdated sense of honour. Hence the Victorian
ideal of masculinity, based on hard work and austerity – the complement to the feminine
ideal of domesticity – serves as a counterpoint to the Spanish gentleman: ‘surely I need
not interrupt myself by any parenthesis to inform the base British reader, who makes it
his glory to work hard, that the peculiar point of honour for the Spanish gentleman lay
in precisely those two qualities of pride and laziness . . .They boasted that no member
of their house . . . had done a day’s work since the Flood. In the ark they admitted that
Noah kept them tightly to work’.60 De Quincey’s mockery sprung from a conviction
that Spain was very far from reaching the level of modernity and development to be
seen in British and American society. The gender models then accepted in Spanish
society constituted proof of this seeming backwardness.
De Quincey’s domesticated Catalina de Erauso fits perfectly into the context to
which she belongs. But was nineteenth-century Spain really so remote from modern
gender ideas as de Quincey’s novel suggests? How much real difference is there between
the way Spanish society re-created the story of the Lieutenant Nun and the way de
Quincey portrays her? A reading of the earliest versions of the story written in Spain
reinforces the idea that pre-modern concepts still retained considerable vitality, and
that the concept of gender reflected in de Quincey’s work did not really find favour in
Spain until the twentieth century. Although Mexican reworkings of the story do exist,
I shall refer solely to the Spanish versions, principally two, published in 1829 and
1892 respectively. The reason why I am focusing on the Spanish and British treatments
is that I am chiefly interested in bringing out the contrast between two European
countries: one traditionally Catholic, in which the development of nineteenth-century
liberalism and bourgeois thinking were greatly impeded; the other Protestant, in which
the secularisation of thought and the development of liberal trends flourished throughout
that same century.
I have already mentioned Joaquı́n Marı́a de Ferrer’s edition of the work, published
in 1829. A liberal and a member of the Progressive Party, Ferrer embellished his
edition with a highly significant preface that gives us some notion of the complexity of
gender concepts in nineteenth-century Spain, which we may compare with de Quincey’s
portrayal. Ferrer examined Catalina de Erauso in the light of his own preoccupations
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and ideology. One fundamental idea pervades the text: the importance of education for
the social and political regeneration of the country he had left behind. ‘Legislators!’
he proclaims, ‘education ought to be the gravest of your preoccupations, since it is the
first interest of society and the sole foundation of the laws’.61 These pages are pervaded
by a typically Enlightened faith in education as the way to develop human potential
(Ferrer has been described as ‘a belated product of the Enlightenment’),62 together with
a belief in sexual equality:
I should have been pleased if my heroine had merited that name by reason of her virtues; if she had
made a correct and noble use of the great qualities with which nature had endowed her; if she had
used her keen intelligence, the blessed qualities thanks to which, in the varied scenes of her life, she
showed the full extent of her abilities, and so adorned her sex through the superiority of her reason;
if her bold and manly spirit, free from any stain of crime, renouncing the sad celebrity of the bully,
the swashbuckler and the thug, had been employed solely on the field of honour, adding fresh lustre
to the glories of her native land. But unfortunately, Doña Catalina de Erauso is very far from being
a model to be imitated . . . and she cannot claim that admiration, that near-worship which grateful
generations accord only to the useful employment of talents, the just and beneficial use of strength,
the heroism of virtue.63
Ferrer’s view of women is very different from Rousseau’s. Ferrer acknowledges that
women may possess a number of positive qualities and abilities, measured by a single
yardstick that assumes that these attributes can attain perfection only in men: reason,
bold and manly spirit, honour, patriotism, talent, strength, heroism and virtue. But
based on the role that he attributes to education in modelling behaviour and developing
human abilities, Ferrer arrives at a negative assessment of the Lieutenant Nun. He
complains that she wasted ‘the energy of her intellectual faculties’ because she had
‘no other school than ranches and gambling dens’. He wonders what she might have
achieved if she had turned her abilities and inclinations in a more productive direction:
‘who knows whether . . . if her mind had been cultivated by education, she might not
have been, if directed by piety, a Saint Teresa de Jesús; if inclined to eloquence and
politics, an Aspasia; if borne up by patriotic fervour, a Portia; if devoted to literature,
a Madame de Staël?’64
Ferrer would have liked to include Erauso in the list of famous women who had
shone by their own light in the most varied areas of intellectual and political life.
This takes us very far from the consideration of Erauso as a man that we find in the
eighteenth-century drama by Pérez de Montalbán. As Velasco aptly points out, Ferrer’s
understanding of biological sex and sexuality had been updated to an extent.65 His
confidence in science emerges clearly, and his writing foreshadows Erauso’s transformation from a monstrous hybrid into a pathological case. However, it is important to
point out that his view of gender does not correspond to the domestic ideology described earlier. His emphasis on the capacity of education to mould human nature puts
him a very long way from any views in which the natural boundaries of the sexes are
precisely delineated by biology. His use of a single code of virtues likewise cuts him
off from a differentiated definition of feminine nature and its attributes.
While Ferrer’s preface is far removed from Rousseau’s ideas, the domestic ideal of
the British middle classes and any radically gendered world view, later texts also reflect
a striking persistence of pre-modern views on sex and gender in Spanish society. One
example is an article written in 1892 by Antonio Sánchez Moguel for a special number
of the review, La Ilustración Española y Americana. This special issue celebrated the
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quadricentenary of the ‘discovery’ of America, which happened to coincide with the
tricentenary of Catalina de Erauso’s birth: her portrait was used for the frontispiece.
Indeed, the mere fact that Erauso was chosen to symbolise the colonisation of America
gives some indication of Sánchez Moguel’s attitude towards her.
Antonio Sánchez Moguel, who founded the History Section of the Madrid
Atheneum, wrote a laudatory article for the occasion in honour of ‘one of the most
extraordinary and original characters in the period of Spanish domination of the New
World, who ought to be remembered as part of these celebrations of the Fourth Centenary of the discovery of America’.66 In his profoundly nationalistic article, he protests
against versions of Erauso’s life that degrade the true story by portraying her as a
mere ‘swashbuckler or commonplace thug’. In opposition to such falsified portrayals, Sánchez Moguel stresses three aspects of this impressive figure: her ancestry (her
parents were hidalgos and eminent personages); her ‘virtue and purity’ and her extraordinary gifts as a soldier – ‘courage, strength, discipline, heroism’. All this makes
Erauso an exceptional heroine, ‘unique in her own century and in the annals of Spain’,
comparable only to Joan of Arc. The author also criticises the readiness of certain critics of Erauso’s life to attribute her flight from the convent to a fight with another nun:
‘faith and patriotism, these were the noble sentiments that aroused the manly energies
of that extraordinary woman’.67
Sánchez Moguel, like Ferrer, defended the capacity of women to tackle not only
art and letters but also, as the former declared (quoting the great eighteenth-century
essayist Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro), ‘all kinds of sciences and sublime
knowledge’.68 Sánchez Moguel did not assume the existence of a feminine nature that
was essentially different and imposed by biology. Though he was writing towards the
end of the nineteenth century, he was no more inclined to make the discursive leap
towards the comprehensive gendering of the world and of humanity. On the other hand,
the set of virtues he attributed to Erauso, and his vehement defence of her in terms
that might equally have been used of a male soldier, are very significant. All of the
arguments Sánchez Moguel that deploys to laud Erauso – her social rank, her virginity,
her typically masculine abilities, her exceptional nature and her manly energy – have
clear pre-modern overtones and are far removed from the concept of gender that we
find in Thomas de Quincey.
The history of Catalina de Erauso and her subsequent re-creations reveals various
ways in which gender categorisation and sexual difference have operated in diverse
historical contexts; how they have been articulated using different vectors or elements of
social differentiation;69 and the different kinds of impact they have had on the formation
of identities and power relationships. I have examined the discursive environment that
made it possible for Erauso to be recognised and feted by kings and popes as a military
hero without necessarily constituting a challenge to the gender order of the time. Erauso
loses some of her transgressive character when we begin to talk in terms of exceptions
and privileges, in a society in which the ‘natural’ substrate of gender was weaker
and less stable than it is now, and could be made to yield to the force of actions and
behaviour.
The case of the Lieutenant Nun also sheds light on the specific process of modernising gender discourse in contemporary Spain. The writings of Sánchez Moguel and
Ferrer echo fundamental aspects of conventional religious rhetoric on the subject of
sex and gender. Certainly these writings do not represent the total discursive output on
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the subject: that output is complex, an uneven amalgam of pre-modern elements and
incipient modernising rhetoric. Nevertheless, the way these authors treated Erauso is
revealing, as it points to particular characteristics of the evolution of gender ideals in
modern Spanish society.70 More specifically, it points to the striking vitality of certain Catholic attitudes that dominated pre-industrial societies. We must not forget how
strongly the Spanish Catholic Church opposed liberalism and all modernising trends
throughout the nineteenth century. On the other hand, these authors also reveal the
virtual inability of the Spanish bourgeoisie to impose its own world view, which it did
much less successfully than did its counterparts in other western countries.71
The notion that the nineteenth-century Spanish bourgeoisie shared with other
western middle classes an idea of sexual difference based on the middle-class idea of
domesticity and the incommensurability of the sexes is problematic, and the present
study calls such an assumption into question.72 The Spanish ‘angel in the house’, as
defined by Severo Catalina and Sinués de Marco, had little in common with the AngloAmerican model described by Coventry Patmore and John Ruskin: the label was the
same, but the political significance of the concept, and its ideological descent, were
quite different. Despite the undeniably logical connections between the two feminine
ideals, the Spanish middle class and the liberal bourgeoisie pursued some very tortuous
paths in a vain attempt to impose their values on society as a whole. Moreover, a good
many members of these emerging classes constructed their identity from outmoded
ideological materials rather than from an original view of the world and women’s place
in it. The general acceptance of new paradigms, and the abandonment of attitudes
inherited from the past, was an exceptionally tardy and contradictory process in Spain
that was not fully completed until the early twentieth century. Not until then did new
ideological coordinates finally drive out concepts inherited from the ancien régime,
forcing them to yield to ideas such as total gender differentiation between men and
women, and the existence of an ethical nature that was inherent in the female sex as a
whole.
Notes
This article stems from a research project entitled ‘The Historical Construction of Identity and Difference in the
Basque Country: Gender, Class and Nationality (1876–1976)’, financed by the Spanish Dirección General de
Investigación Cientı́fica y Técnica (DIGICYT), code BHA2002-03880, 2002–2005.
1. These distinctions are made by Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
2. Erauso’s autobiography was originally published as Historia de la Monja Alferez, doña Catalina de Erauso, escrita por ella misma, é ilustrada con notas y documentos por D. Joaquin Maria de Ferrer (Parı́s:
Julio Didot, 1829). Her birth date is given as 1585, but the baptism certificate discovered by Joaquı́n
Marı́a de Ferrer centuries later in the parish of San Vicente de Donostia (i.e., the San Vicente district
of San Sebastián) is dated 1592. See the version of the autobiography referred to throughout this article: Catalina de Erauso, Historia de la Monja Alférez (Bilbao: Editorial Amigos del Paı́s Vasco, 1988),
pp. v-li, 129.
3. José Ignacio Tellechea Idı́goras, Doña Catalina de Erauso: La Monja Alférez, IV Centenario de Su
Nacimiento (San Sebastian: Caja de Ahorros Guipuzcoana, 1992), p. 55.
4. Translator’s note: the English language, unlike Spanish, does not permit gender-neutral third-person references. To avoid the irritating use of he/she, him/her, his/her, the reader is asked to assume that references
to Catalina in her masculine guise as ‘he’ subsume a notional ‘she’ and vice versa.
5. Vı́ctor Rocha, ‘El poder del cuerpo y sus gestos. Travestismo e identidad de género en América
Colonial: El caso de Catalina de Erauso’, Cyber Humanitas: Revista de la Facultad de Filosofı́a y
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7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
415
Humanidades, Universidad de Chile 27 (2003), <http://www.cyberhumanitatis.uchile.cl/CDA/texto
simple2/0,1255,SCID%253D7513%2526ISID%253D347,00.html>
Luis Castresana, Obras Selectas, vol. 4: Catalina de Erauso, la Monja Alférez (Bilbao: Biblioteca de la
Gran Enciclopedia Vasca, 1970), p. 169.
For the power wielded by female members of the social elite in Peruvian convents, see Kathryn Burns,
Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Perú (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1999).
Erauso, Historia de la Monja Alférez, p. 116.
We know about this autobiography only from later copies, leading to conjectures as to its veracity and real
authorship. Even the identity of Catalina de Erauso with the Lieutenant Nun has been called into question,
but documents relating to key moments in her life have been found that put the story on a more solid
foundation. See José Berruezo, Catalina de Erauso, la Monja Alférez (San Sebastian: Caja de Ahorros
Municipal, 1975), p. 37.
Cited in Berruezo, Catalina de Erauso, p. 40.
Castresana, Catalina de Erauso, p. 79.
Castresana, Catalina de Erauso, p. 39.
Elena/o de Céspedes was born female in 1545 of mixed parentage (one of her parents was a freed African
slave). The story of this alleged hermaphrodite living in sixteenth-century Andalusia exhibits some unexpected articulations of gender, race and social status. See Israel Burshatin, ‘Interrogating Hermaphroditism
in Sixteenth-Century Spain’, in Robert McKee Irwin and Silvia Molloy (eds), Hispanisms and Homosexualities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 3–18; Israel Burshatin, ‘Written on the Body:
Slave or Hermaphrodite in Sixteenth-Century Spain’, in Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson (eds),
Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 420–56.
Domingo Miras, La Monja Alférez (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 1992), p. 13.
Sherry Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2000), p. 34. See also Sherry Velasco, Male Delivery: Reproduction, Effeminacy,
and Pregnant Men in Early Modern Spain (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006).
Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1990), pp. 133–4.
Frédérique Villemur, ‘Saints et Travesties du Moyen Age’, Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 10 (1999),
pp. 55–89.
In Erauso’s time, the colonial authorities of Spanish America identified ‘wearing the clothing of the opposite
sex’ with the adoption of ‘passive sexual roles’ and with sodomy; they tended to attribute such practices
to native peoples in contrast to Europeans. They were systematically prosecuted and punished by the
Inquisition and other agencies. See Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, ‘La lucha por la masculinidad del Machi:
Polı́ticas coloniales de género, sexualidad y poder en el sur de Chile’, Revista de Historia Indı́gena 6 (2003),
pp. 29–64, esp. p. 41.
Isabel Cruz de Amenábar, El traje: Transformaciones de una segunda piel. Arte y sociedad en Chile,
1650–1820 (Santiago: Universidad Católica de Chile, 1996), pp. 27–83, esp. pp. 27–8.
Rocha, ‘El poder del cuerpo’. Catalina de Erauso not only dressed as a man but also flattened her breasts,
according to a letter from the traveller Pedro del Valle to his friend Mario Schipano in 1626. See Bernardo
Estornés Lasa (ed.), Historia de la Monja Alférez (Doña Catalina de Erauso) escrita por ella misma (San
Sebastian: Euskaltzaleak, 1934), p. 7.
The publication in 1996 of a new English edition of the autobiography reawakened interest in Erauso in
academic circles. See Catalina de Erauso, Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New
World, tr. Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
Erauso, Lieutenant Nun, p. xli.
Mary Elizabeth Perry, ‘From Convent to Battlefield: Cross-Dressing and Gendering the Self in the New
World of Imperial Spain’, in Blackmore and Hutcheson (eds), Queer Iberia, pp. 394–419, esp. pp. 411–13.
Mary Elizabeth Perry, Ni espada rota ni mujer que trota: Mujer y desorden social en la Sevilla del Siglo de
Oro (Barcelona: Editorial Crı́tica, 1993), pp. 45–51.
In 1588, Céspedes was sentenced to 200 lashes in public followed by confinement in a hospital, with forced
labour, for ten years, ‘because being married she deceived another woman and married her’. Burshatin,
‘Interrogating Hermaphroditism’, p. 15.
Stephanie Merrim has argued that it was precisely because Catalina de Erauso was ‘monstrous’ that she
successfully transformed herself from an anomaly into a cultural icon. Sherry Velasco takes this idea further,
stressing her hybrid nature, which made her impossible to assimilate into a system of binary oppositions.
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28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
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35.
36.
37.
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39.
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See Stephanie Merrim, ‘Catalina de Erauso: From Anomaly to Icon’, in Francisco Javier Cevallos-Candau,
Jeffrey A. Cole, Nina M. Scott and Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz (eds), Coded Encounters: Writing, Gender,
and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 177–205;
Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun, p. 25.
Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun, p. 46.
According to Michel Foucault, ‘nothing in man – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as the
basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men’. See Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History’, in Michel Foucault, Donald F. Bouchard (ed.) and Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (trs),
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1977), pp. 139–64, esp. p. 153.
Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989), p. 4. See also Lorraine Code (ed.), Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories (London
and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 47; Bonnie Bullough and Vern L. Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex, and
Gender (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 90.
Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical
Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 1.
Burshatin, ‘Written on the Body’, p. 447.
Juan Pérez de Montalbán, ‘La Monja Alférez: Comedia’, in Erauso, Historia de la Monja Alférez, pp. 185,
192.
On confinement in convents and women’s relations with the Catholic Church in modern Spain, see Marı́a
José Arana, La clausura de las mujeres: Una lectura teológica de un proceso histórico (Bilbao: Ediciones
Mensajero, 1992); Allyson M. Poska and Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, ‘Redefining Expectations: Women and the
Church in Early Modern Spain’, in Susan E. Dinan and Debra Meyers (eds), Women and Religion in Old
and New Worlds (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 21–42.
Perry, Ni espada rota, p. 15.
In this connection, I believe it is no coincidence that both contemporary treatises and subsequent research
tend to be structured around the ‘estates’ of women, their occupations and position in society. The wellknown treatise La perfecta casada (‘The Perfect Married Wife’, 1583), which was still in use well into the
twentieth century as a manual of good conduct for women, was actually intended as a guide for women who
had chosen the married state, dignifying it with regard to other more highly esteemed alternatives: ‘while
the degree and perfection of the married state is less than that of chastity or virginity . . . owing to the need
for it in this world, for the perpetuation of mankind . . . it was always highly honoured and privileged by
the Holy Spirit in Holy Writ’; ‘the good of her soul lies in being perfect in her estate’ (emphasis added).
See Fray Luis de Granada, Santa Teresa de Jesús, Fray Luis de León, Escritores mı́sticos españoles, (ed.)
José Gaos (1949; repr. Barcelona: Océano, 1998), pp. 266, 271. There is an English translation (albeit not
an altogether reliable one) in Fray Luis de León, A Bilingual Edition of Fray Luis De León’s La Perfecta
Casada: The Role of Married Women in Sixteenth-Century Spain, ed. and tr. John A. Jones and Javier San
José Lara (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999).
Baltasar Gracián, El Criticón (1657), cited by Marı́a Antonia Bel Bravo, La historia de las mujeres desde
los textos (Barcelona: Ariel, 2000), p. 61.
Marı́a de Zayas y Sotomayor, ‘Estragos que causa el vicio’ (1647), in Alicia Recondo Goicoechea (ed.),
Tres novelas amorosas y ejemplares, y tres desengaños amorosos (Madrid: Castalia, 1989), pp. 313–60.
A scene in which Erauso figures prominently will serve to illustrate this idea. The action takes place in
Rome, 1626: ‘one evening, while she was conversing with three cardinals, one of them said to her that she
had no defects other than being a Spaniard. “Subject to Your Eminence’s correction”, answered Catalina,
“it seems to me that that is the only good thing about me”’. Castresana, Catalina de Erauso, p. 193.
Montalbán, ‘La Monja Alférez’, p. 247.
Document relating to the merits and services of Doña Catalina de Erauso, Archivo de Indias, Seville,
pp. 135–6.
Mónica Bolufer, Mujeres e Ilustración: La construcción de la feminidad en la Ilustración española (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 1998), p. 32.
Bolufer, Mujeres e Ilustración, p. 64.
On the contradictory impact of political action by women participants in the French Revolution, see Joan
Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1996).
Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1988), p. 23. See also Dena Goodman, ‘Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and
Philosophic Ambitions’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1989), pp. 329–50.
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45. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, p. 106. See also Keith Michael Baker, ‘Defining the Public Sphere
in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas
and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 181–211.
46. As cited in Bolufer, Mujeres e Ilustración, p. 75.
47. Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and
Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 27. Rousseau’s influence extended
to Spain, although after the death of the Bourbon King Carlos III in 1788, the outbreak of the French
Revolution and the fears that it aroused brought about censorship of revolutionary ideas. See Mary Seidman
Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1997); Cristina Molina Petit, Dialéctica feminista de la Ilustración (Barcelona: Anthropos,
1994).
48. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilio, o de la educación (1762; repr. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2001), p. 543;
the original French, with an English translation, is available on <http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/pedagogies/
rousseau/contents2.html> (citation <http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/pedagogies/rousseau/em fr bk5.html>,
§ 1275).
49. Rousseau, Emilio, p. 534; online edition, Book 5, § 1253.
50. As Denise Riley has pointed out, we must resist the temptation to do with the concept of ‘women’ what
Foucault so ingeniously did with the concept of ‘homosexuals’. Despite this warning, Riley herself brings out
the historicity of the concept of ‘women’ and the strength it has acquired as a category in modern societies.
See Denise Riley, ‘Am I that Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1988), pp. 3, 8, 14.
51. Rousseau, Emilio, p. 543; online edition, § 1273.
52. Russett, Sexual Science, p. 11, where the author examines the construction of femininity by the Victorian
scientific community.
53. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
54. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class,
1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 75.
55. Cited (in a slightly different translation) in Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of
Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), p. 178.
56. Thomas de Quincey, The Spanish Military Nun, in Thomas de Quincey, Collected Writings, vol. 13, (ed.)
David Masson (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1890), p. 164.
57. de Quincey, Spanish Military Nun, p. 213.
58. de Quincey, Spanish Military Nun, p. 165.
59. de Quincey, Spanish Military Nun, p. 161.
60. de Quincey, Spanish Military Nun, p. 160.
61. Erauso, Historia de la Monja Alférez, foreword by Joaquı́n Marı́a de Ferrer (1829), p. xii.
62. Berruezo, Catalina de Erauso, p. 32.
63. Erauso, Historia de la Monja Alférez, Ferrer’s foreword, pp. vii, viii.
64. Erauso, Historia de la Monja Alférez, Ferrer’s foreword, pp. xv, xvi.
65. Sherry Velasco’s interesting study of Catalina is predicated on the Anglo-American model: she declares
that in the 1820s, the ‘angel in the house’ idea was already inextricably linked with liberal ideology. Hence
she thinks that Ferrer’s writing reflects a view of Erauso as a negative example of the consequences of
neglecting women’s education. Translating the paragraph ‘Who knows . . . if her mind had been cultivated
by education’, Velasco adds the adjective proper (‘a proper education’), thus directly gendering Ferrer’s
proposition in a way the original did not. Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun, pp. 88–9.
66. Antonio Sánchez Moguel, ‘El Alférez Doña Catalina de Erauso’, La Ilustración Española y Americana 36
(8 July 1892). Reprinted in Tellechea, La Monja Alférez, p. 230.
67. Tellechea, La Monja Alférez, p. 234.
68. Rafael Salillas, Gumersindo de Azcárate and Antonio Sánchez Moguel, Doña Concepción Arenal en la
ciencia jurı́dica, sociológica y en la literatura (Madrid: Librerı́a de Victoriano Suárez, 1894), p. 4. In some
ways Sánchez Moguel’s pronouncements on gender recall those of Karl Kraus.
69. Following Judith Butler, I have tried not so much to analyse the parallel evolution of these variables as
to understand the power of their complexity and their ‘inter-articulations’. See Judith Butler, Bodies that
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 18–19.
70. On this evolution see Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff (eds), Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Catherine
Jagoe, Alda Blanco and Cristina Enrı́quez de Salamanca, La mujer en los discursos de género: Textos
y contextos en el siglo XIX (Barcelona: Icaria, 1998); Aurora G. Morcillo, True Catholic Womanhood:
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Gender & History
Gender Ideology in Franco’s Spain (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), pp. 8–27; Mary
Nash, ‘Identidad cultural de género, discurso de la domesticidad y la definición del trabajo de las mujeres en
la España del siglo XIX’, in Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (eds), Historia de las mujeres en Occidente,
vol. 4: El Siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus, 1993), pp. 585–97; Lou Charnon-Deutsch and Jo Labanyi, Culture
and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Miren Llona, Entre señorita
y garçonne: Historia oral de las mujeres bilbainas de clase media (1919–1939) (Málaga: Universidad
de Málaga, 2002); José Javier Dı́az Freire, ‘Cuerpos en conflicto: La construcción de la identidad y la
diferencia en el Paı́s Vasco a finales del siglo XIX’, in Mary Nash and Diana Marre (eds), El desafı́o de la
diferencia: Representaciones culturales e identidades de género, raza y clase (Bilbao: Universidad del Paı́s
Vasco, 2003), pp. 61–94; Nerea Aresti, Médicos, donjuanes y mujeres modernas: Los ideales de feminidad
y masculinidad en el primer tercio del siglo XX (Bilbao: Universidad del Paı́s Vasco, 2001).
71. This unequal development in different countries has important implications for the methodology of gender
history. See Nerea Aresti, ‘La categorı́a de género en la obra de Joan W. Scott y los debates historiográficos
actuales’, in Cristina Borderı́as (ed.), Joan Scott y las polı́ticas de la historia (Barcelona: Editorial Icaria,
2006), pp. 223–32.
72. Studies of this subject have tended to identify the typically middle-class ideal of domesticity with the ‘angel
in the house’ in nineteenth-century Spain. My research has led me to situate the major turning point in
conceptions of gender at the time of the First World War. See Nerea Aresti, ‘El ángel del hogar y sus
demonios: Ciencia, religión y género en la España del siglo XIX’, Historia Contemporánea 21 (2000),
pp. 363–94; Aresti, Médicos, donjuanes.
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