Liberalism and the origins of the social: Women, poverty, and the political meanings of philanthropy in nineteenth-century Spain (Madrid 1834--1843)

Traditional Narratives of nineteenth-century Spain still remain unproblematized from a sociocultural perspective. The idea of a static and backward society is still prevalent. These histories still minimize the liberal rupture of the mid-1830s and the epistemological legacies of the Spanish Enlightenment. From a critical feminist perspective, this thesis shows how a number of philanthropic societies were created from 1838 also out of the revolutionary impulse given to a new active gendered liberal public sphere in Madrid. They became central spaces for the theorization and implementation of liberal social reform in post-revolutionary Madrid. This liberal social reformism was based on the scientific principles of 'social economy', which were in turn grounded on an shared underlying moral order that organized and legitimated ascending liberal gendered social imaginaries. Liberal social reformists of the late 1830s and early 1840s imported contemporary modern industrial imaginaries and social stereotypes. 'Social economy' appeared as a scientific theory invested in preventing the evils of modern industrial societies. It created the bases of a liberal utopia that revolved around family morals, poverty (the worst social evil) and women (the pivotal moralizing subject). The analysis of this social economy and its projection of a gendered socio-moral ideal based on the self-sufficient and self-governed nuclear family allow me to explore some of the deepest contradictions and paradoxes of nineteenth-century liberal thought with respect to modern social categories related to work and poverty, on the one hand, and to liberalism, women and the public sphere, on the other. After mid-1841, progressivism explicitly appropriated the new ambivalent discourse of social reform as a project of social transformation and order; a project of social reform which was meant to be led by the so called 'middle class' families and that revolved around the ideal of 'education for all classes of both sexes'. However, the movement of progressivism from official politics after 1844 coincided with the eclipse of this philanthropic associationism as a symbol of an alternative liberal, respectable and antidemocratic but more socially inclusive political discourse.