Redaccion
The construction of the expansion and remodeling of the center of Bilbao – with which the local bourgeoisie tried to emulate London and Paris at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century – increased social differences, reflecting power struggles and internal tensions in this industrial city.
This is one of the conclusions of the thesis ‘The reception of hygienist discourses. Urbanism, gender, and class in Bilbao (XIX-XX)’, with which Marina Segovia Vara obtained her doctorate from the University of La Rioja.
Developed in the Department of Human Sciences – within the framework of the 681D Humanities Doctorate Program (Royal Decree 99/2011) – the thesis was supervised by Olaya Fernández Guerrero and achieved the rating of outstanding ‘cum laude’.
Marina Segovia Vara’s doctoral thesis arose from a deep personal interest in studying sociability in working-class neighborhoods in general, and working-class women in particular.
The starting hypothesis is that, in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, the main European cities, immersed in a rapid process of modernization, witnessed profound changes in models of masculinity and femininity.
«Bilbao was not immune to the social anxieties and panics that the new leisure models, the labor movement, and changes in gender relations produced throughout Europe,» says Dr. Marina Segovia.
With a keen eye on their European neighbors, the bourgeoisie of Bilbao «tried to emulate the urbanization model of cities like London and Paris. This project culminated in the construction of the Achúcarro, Alzola, and Hoffmeyer expansions,» she adds.
In the case of Bilbao, «the construction of the expansion and the remodeling of the city center increased social differences, reflecting power struggles and internal tensions in the industrial city,» she explains.
As in other industrial centers, the opening of large avenues, the restructuring of working-class neighborhoods, and the pedestrianization of the most central streets facilitated the control of urban space by the authorities.
If the testimonies of travelers and visitors show «a clean and elegant city far from the reality of proletarian suburbs; the incidence of cholera epidemics and high infant mortality rates in the Bilbao la Vieja area speak, in fact, of two geographically close yet very distant realities,» highlights the doctor.
The concern for hygiene and public health was linked to population growth, population density, and the emergence of a series of tensions and conflicts encompassed under the broad term of the «social issue» and, with it, the «women’s issue.»
Regarding the growing concern about the presence of women in public spaces, «it is not because they had been confined to their homes until then.»
On the contrary, markets, squares, and laundries have always been spaces of female sociability, and the succession of subsistence riots that characterized the Old Regime cannot be explained without the participation of women.
The novelty lies in the contradiction that the increasing role of women in the city represented, not only as workers but as active participants in cultural and political life, contradicted the new values surrounding female domesticity. At the same time, the development of the urban city offered women new job and leisure opportunities.
MICROHISTORY
One of the focuses of Marina Segovia’s doctoral research has been the inclusion of microhistory through the reconstruction of the life stories of working-class women from Bilbao.
«Their lives were set in the suburbs near the mineral mines, the brothels, female correctional facilities, and hospitals, all of them, in some way, spaces of confinement,» says Marina Segovia.
MAGDALENA AGIRRE OR IGNACIA OTAEGUI
Thus, the thesis includes names like Magdalena de Agirre, who fiercely battled with the Bilbao City Council to restore her honor after being publicly arrested and imprisoned in the galley house for theft, a crime she denied committing.
Ignacia de Otaegui, a frequent presence in court for engaging in clandestine prostitution, prosecuted more than a dozen times and even caught red-handed while accompanying several pairs of men and women to her brothel.
The profits that prostitution brought them were greater than the financial losses incurred through periodic fines – explains the doctor – and some of the most solvent brothel owners, those who paid the first-class fee, wrote documents in which they not only used and demonstrated knowledge of the hygienist language employed by doctors and social reformers but also criticized the prostitutes who practiced clandestinely as a clear defense of their class interests.
In this context, figures like the doctor or the engineer replaced the Church as a reference of authority, thus culminating a process of city and body organization whose roots can be traced back to the enlightened progress project.
The testimonies of the wards are very different, in a clear situation of defenselessness against the brothel owners that was tried to be legally addressed. However, some of these young women, far from adopting a passive attitude towards the authorities, rebelled against forced gynecological inspections and the intrusion of doctors and police into their privacy.
While it is true that, lacking memoirs of the lower classes, the bourgeois hegemonic vision is reproduced, paying attention to the disputes that many of these women had with the authorities is a good antidote to avoid a partial view.
In conclusion, in her doctoral thesis, Marina Segovia Vara has noted how the toughening of hygienist regulations, the interest aroused by medical literature, and hygienist publications are evidence of the profound transformations that affected not only the physiognomy but also the social and cultural dynamics of Bilbao, representative of a broader urban transformation process.
