Las Mujeres en Espana

La Pe...Spanish stereotype or no? I know that I skipped this entry a few weeks ago, but I did so because I was unsure of what I was reading. I finally settled on an academic book that I found in an English bookstore in Madrid called Constructing Spanish Womanhood, Female Identity in Modern Spain. It is made up of several chapters by individual writers who explore how women have developed their identity in Spain throughout the changes in politics. I took a class last spring called Gender and Communications that explored how women are represented and viewed in social, political, and professional venues in the United States, and I felt that to gain a perspective on how women define themselves in another country and another culture would be an interesting contrast. Spain differs from the United States in everything in general. For example, it is the norm here for children to continue living with their parents until they are in their late twenties, or until they get married. Very few young people move out of their parents homes to go to university because most of the big universities are in the city. The school systems work differently here as well, but that’s an entirely different subject. Women’s roles in Spain have been limited to “wife, mother, and guardian of the home…is evident in all areas of Spanish life” (21). The way women define themselves in Spain has a great deal to do with the Catholic Church and religion, and also depends heavily on whether she is married or not. Mary Nash writes, “Political conservatism, the weight of the Roman Catholic Church as a pervasive political institution, and economic underdevelopment have often been argued as the key explanatory factors to the situation of women in contemporary Spain” (25). Maria Argentina, our friend’s mother who I wrote about for my person, is a prime example. She moved from her pueblo when she was 16 to work. She never went to school, and when she married she became a wife and a mother of two. Their family was devastated three years ago when her husband died, but her children still live with her and she works every night in the taberna, keeping everything just as her husband left it. She explained last night now the reason they were closed every Sunday was because her husband always said it was the day for family. So it is today. One area that interests me most that the book did not really cover was the role of women in sports here. In the United States, it is fully accepted for women to play sports, and our women’s soccer team is the best in the world. I was shocked that in a country where futbol is life, the only way women can play soccer is with organized teams, and they are rare at that. Everything is more relaxed, the level is lower, and the ages range from 16 to 27 on the team I play with. However, upon the suggestion (made by a Spanish man who coaches the B team) that the US had better female soccer players, one of the girls exhibited every Spanish female stereotype we have been taught, from the rolling eyes to the tossing hair to the rapid-fire speech claiming that no one does anything better than Spanish women. It was an interesting moment for me, as I have experienced very few instances of stereotypes here.