Ignacio Lopez de Ayala and the Paradoxical Nature of Women's Rights Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Ensayo Critico‪)‬

Human rights and the nature and extent of their applicability to women were much debated issues throughout Europe and the Americas in the eighteenth century (Chernock, Clark, Desan, Knott, Pani, Zagarri). In Spain, as elsewhere, both women's natural rights and their civil rights were the subject of widespread debate as part of a wider enquiry by educated men and women seeking to understand the nature, and to influence the behavior and status, of women in society (Bolufer, Kitts Debate, Smith). Rights labeled as "natural" or "unalienable", such as the three cited in the opening to the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", were most famously defended for women in Spain by Leandro Fernandez de Moratin whose plays discussed the most appropriate forms of education for women and explored the question of who decides whether and whom they should marry. Debate on women's civil rights, that is to say of the rights, duties and obligations consequent on the recognition of women as citizens of the state and members of society, formed a central part of European discussion in periodical and other types of publications that considered women's role as the educators of future generations and as a key influence in the making of a civilized society (Bolufer Mujeres, Kitts Debate, Mander, Moran, Sebastiani, Smith, Tomaselli). On the one hand, the fact that such debate took place should be of no surprise to anyone familiar with the century that was to draw to a close with the publication of such fundamental texts as Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791), and in Spain would find the enshrinement of many of its principles at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the liberal Constitution of Cadiz (1812). On the other hand, the facts that Wollstonecraft should have found it necessary to publish a gender-specific justification for the recognition of women's rights as late as 1791 or that even during the drafting of the so-called liberal Constitution of 1812, women were not permitted to be spectators, let alone receive the rights of citizenship, (Bolufer Mujeres 370), demonstrate the extent to which even the most basic of natural rights of "the rights of humanity" as Wollstonecraft calls them (196), were repeatedly being denied to women even amongst some of the period's foremost enlightened thinkers. (1)