Maria José Atienza-18August de 2024-magazine Omnes

Historian Inmaculada Alva calls for a history “in which men and women have the role that corresponds to them”, in the face of certain feminist currents that basically take men as their model.

The University of Navarra’s postgraduate headquarters was the setting for the end of the first year of the Master’s degree in Christianity and Contemporary Culture.
This degree, launched two years ago by the university, is a comprehensive and interesting journey through history, philosophy, theology and thought.

Women were the central theme of the last session of this course, given by historian Inmaculada Alva, who spoke to Omnes about women, feminism, society and culture.

There’s no denying that women’s rights have advanced in recent years, but there’s also a certain disenchantment with this “equalization in misfortune”.

These political and social advances took off in the second half of the 20th century.
I think we’ve gained a lot, not from masculinization, but from feminism.
Or rather, with feminisms.
I like to use the plural because it seems to me that there is such a variety that none of them can claim the hegemony of saying “I am the real feminism”.

In fact, when we talk about the “situation of women in the past”, we’re referring to a specific situation: that of bourgeois women in the 19th century.
Bourgeois because in other environments, women have always worked outside the home or in family businesses.
The bourgeois idea we’re referring to was that of the “devoted mother”, the “obedient daughter”, submissive to the man and with no aspirations other than marriage and little else.
Indeed, there were certainly many women who were happy with the life they had: looking after their home, their husband…, but there was another reality, that of many other women who wanted to develop their own dreams, live their lives differently, even marry someone else or make work and family compatible.
And this was something that wasn’t possible, because in this 19th century bourgeois conception, the role of women was to develop in the home, with the children.
It’s true that women are more likely than men to create a home.
But women are much more capable.

For many women, marriage – the bourgeois way of life developed in the 19th century and lived in the 20th – can become a trap, even a tomb.
This is what Simone de Beauvoir, for example, denounced.
I don’t agree at all with a lot of what de Beauvoir said, but when she talks about the trap of marriage, in a certain sense, I think she’s right.

From the second half of the 20th century onwards, women began to change this idea, and feminisms were born.
Just as I like to talk about feminisms in the plural, I prefer to talk about women in the plural.
Women participate more actively in society, in politics, in their professions, because they also have a lot to say.
In that sense, I think we’ve won.

Can we make these advances a reality?

-Progress has been made in the conception of the family as a task that does not fall to women alone.
A co-responsible family model is now commonplace, in which both mother and father are responsible for upbringing, care and love.
Together, they create the family.
And there’s no single way: every family, every marriage will have to figure out how to make a family, but it’s up to the two of them.

Another idea born with feminism that I find interesting is the awareness of such things as women’s guiltlessness in cases of harassment, violence, etc. In other words, that guilt phrase: why would she wear that skirt?
In other words, this guilt-tripping phrase: why would she wear that skirt?
why would she go into that apartment?
But that’s not the case.
It’s true that women have to be aware of their responsibility, they have to be responsible for their sexuality.
But it’s the fault of those who don’t control themselves.

As we saw above, not everything is positive.
Do you think we’ve lost something along the way?

The answer to this question depends on the type of feminism we’re talking about: we could say that there is a hegemonic feminism.
This is the kind that appears in the media or in certain policies, and in which we have lost harmony.
The role of women in the home has been devalued, not in the bourgeois sense we were talking about, but because the home is a space for personal fulfillment.
With this kind of hegemonic feminism, it’s thought that devotion to the family degrades women, or that if they don’t work outside the home, they’re inferior.
What is being proposed is a masculinization of women.
Fundamentally, this kind of hegemonic feminism, in my opinion, is not true feminism because the model it adopts is the masculine model.
They have masculinized women.

I think women work more collaboratively than hierarchically, but today, if you want to get ahead in the corporate world, you either behave like a man, or you don’t get ahead, and it’s the task of feminism to have the ambition to change society so that other, more collaborative ways of working are also imposed, so that women are also more balanced.

We’re witnessing certain feminist “rewritings” of history. Does this make sense, and isn’t it unfair to the women who were the real pioneers?

My job is to write women’s history.
What I find is that, sometimes, this rewriting of history using current categories is not only unfair but false.
You have to go to the documents.

When the cinema, for example, presents women like Isabelle of Castile playing roles that aren’t real, it’s not so much that they weren’t possible at the time, but that they weren’t possible at the time.

It’s the real stories that need to be sought out and made visible.

It’s important to tell a story in which men and women take their rightful place.

I’m thinking of María de Molina, Queen of Castile, three times regent, having to preserve the kingdom of Castile to ensure the rights of her son and then her grandson.
And she succeeded.
Or I’m thinking of Margaret of Austria, sovereign of the Netherlands, who managed to ensure that her reign was a period of relative peace.
We have to talk about these women because they are real and the documents exist.

When you go down into historical reality, you find thousands of women doing things.
Until the 19th century, for example, the notion of work was known.
The workshop, or whatever it was, was run by the husband and wife.
That’s why there were so many “widows” running their husbands’ businesses.
I was lucky enough to have in my hands sales documents from a woman, a widow, who had a store in Manila and wrote to her sales intermediaries in Europe, Mexico.
However, I saw a film in which Urraca’s way of speaking was quite masculine, even rude.
Urraca may have had a lot of character, but she didn’t talk like that, and she didn’t need to in order to assert herself.

Have women achieved everything, or is there still a challenge ahead?

It’s always very difficult for me to answer these questions.
It’s like being asked what your favorite book is.
I think there are a number of challenges, which also depend on the contexts of today’s women, which are very different.
Believe it or not, I think that deep down, society is still very masculinized, sometimes because of these hegemonic feminisms that don’t take the real woman into account.
The challenge for women today is to develop in this society everything that women, by nature, bring to it: empathy, collaboration, dialogue and communication.

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