Discussing Gender, Discussing Modernities in the Global Enlightenment: The Many Lives of a Spanish Defence of Women in Europe and America

This chapter discusses the ways in which the essay entitled Defensa de las mujeres (Defence of women, 1726), by Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (1676–1764), travelled around Europe and the Americas throughout the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth century. It examines translations in four different languages and the contexts in which they appeared and were disseminated, asking how, when, by whom and for what readership the essay was adapted, reviewed, reused or contested. The far-reaching and lasting impact of the Defensa de las mujeres raises significant theoretical and methodological questions. It endorses a multicentred understanding of Enlightenment discussions of gender. It also makes us wonder, as the text did in its own time, how modernity was framed (by the author, a cleric, and by his readers and critics) in relation to Catholicism and to national stereotypes. It stimulates reflection about what might be called “transtemporal translation”: the process by which texts written long ago are redefined and turned into symbolic contemporaries. Finally, the way in which Feijoo’s arguments were used in colonial Spanish and Portuguese America allows us to interpret cultural relations between peninsular and transatlantic territories of those empires in terms not of unilateral dissemination, but of active, critical discussion.