In Defense of Women’s Progress and Freethinking: Amalia Domingo Soler, Eugenia Estopa, and Dolores Navas

In nineteenth-century Spain, hundreds of female freethinkers were actively contributing to the press. Among them, two writers from the southern regions, Eugenia N. Estopa (1859–?), in Gibraltar, and Dolores Navas (?–?), in Córdoba, published in a weekly spiritist periodical written by women for their female readership. Amalia Domingo Soler (1835–1909), based in Barcelona, founded, edited, and wrote articles in La Luz del Porvenir, which was active between 1879 and 1899 with approximately a thousand issues that reached their readers, not only in Spain, but also in Latin America. These writers paved the way for liberal reforms through strategic feminism and spiritism and reframed the role of women, contributing in radical ways to changes in access to education and in political and cultural agency.