Women Writers and Women’s RightsThe Denunciation of Women’s Conditions in the Texts of Mary Leman Grimstone and Gertrudis Gómez De Avellaneda

Abstract

Through the analysis of the prose of two nineteenth-century women writers: the English Mary Leman Grimstone and the Cuban-Spanish Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, the present dissertation aims at unveiling the relationship between women’s writings and the struggle for the recognition of women’s rights in two different geopolitical locations. To do so, it weaves a Feminist Planetary Web between each writer and her context, as well as among both writers, finding points of connection and disconnection. It shows how women appropriated the pen in different geographical locations, exposing a particular female voice that denounced not only the oppression suffered by women, but also by other marginalized subjects, like the members of religious minorities and slaves. For each writer this dissertation analyses three novels and some of their articles, finding macro-arguments present transversally in their work, like their critiques to the institution of marriage, the importance of proper education for women, the advocacy for religious tolerance, and the narrative construction of different male and female paradigms. Among the common arguments between both writers, this dissertation exposes their similar critiques to the institution of marriage. Both Grimstone’s and Gómez de Avellaneda’s literary works show how the nuptial bond, which was sold as women’s best and only option in life, was in fact a cage in which women were no better than slaves or perpetual servants. This appreciation of marriage is present in both authors even though the legal regimes that regulated marriage in England and Spain were, at least in theory, different. Hence, their writings stand as living proof that notwithstanding the specifics of each legal system, the ideological consequences for women, who were left at the mercy of their husbands, were remarkably similar. Grimstone and Gómez de Avellaneda also coincided in highlighting the importance of women’s right to access a proper education, which was not an end in itself, but the means for women to develop their God-given reason and to obtain the right to aspire, to ambition outside the circumscribed and limited role society had assigned them: that of wife and mother. Aside from these commonalities, this dissertation also analyses how Grimstone and Gómez de Avellaneda negotiated their position in the literary public realm, showing how it was precisely in this point, that is, in the strategies they used and the aesthetics they adopted, that readers and critics can find noteworthy differences between them.