Married or single. The stigma of marriage for women

Debate

On the occasion of the publication of the books ‘Como anillo al cuello’ and ‘Solteronas’.

Participants

Purificación Mascarell. Writer and lecturer in Comparative Literature Theory and Cultural Studies at the UV.

Manuel Jiménez. Writer, director and scriptwriter of documentaries.

Presents

Cristina Garcia Pascual. Head of Aula de Narrativas Initiatives

Like a ring around the neck

Purificació Mascarell

An original journey through the most significant representations of the institution of marriage in women's literature.

For millions of women, the small ring that adorns their ring finger, which traditionally symbolises love, has been more than a ring, it has been a vital ring: the subjugation imposed by marriage in the form of sexual slavery, captivity in the home, alienation as mother-wives and all kinds of macho violence, in the mind and on the skin.

Although silence has erased most of the testimonies, many women writers have wanted to tell the story of this oppression in their novels. George Sand, Mercè Rodoreda, Louisa May Alcott, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Edith Wharton, Elena Fortún and Alice Walker have narrated the abuses within the institution of marriage.

In this essay committed to art and dignity, Purificació Mascarell traces a constellation of rebellious female authors in the face of patriarchal power. In the hand of thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Emma Goldman, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett, who affirmed that the personal is political, Como anillo al cuello travels through literature and feminism in search of the reverse side of romantic love. A rescue of the female voices that have dared to question the destiny reserved for women: to marry and remain silent.

Solteronas

Manuel Jiménez Núñez

An essential book to discover the hidden voices and stories of women who defied the stigma of spinsterhood.

Not so long ago, women who did not marry were stigmatised as weird, neurotic, bitter, unattractive or outright failures. They carried a heavy burden on their shoulders that was, at best, pitiful.

Marriage has been the norm for centuries, marking a woman's coming of age and, generally, her means of subsistence. And in the specific case of our country in a much more pronounced way, because we dragged forty years of dictatorship in which certain ideas of femininity, as well as masculinity, were a fundamental part of the ideological programme: women occupied a central role in the construction of the regime after the war, but with the eminent function of being the mother of the family.

Through the personal experience of twenty women who had never married, literary works, journalistic and audiovisual documents, and halfway between evocation and sociology, Manuel Jiménez Núñez seeks to reclaim the memory and make the female archetype of the ‘spinster’ known to new generations.

Carmen Martín Gaite said that one of the conclusions she had reached, after much study and reflection, was that spinsters who do not go to school are not the only ones who have a good life, and that they do not go to school. 

Free admission, limited seating

Leaflet