Women’s access to university in Spain: from grace to justice

Abstract

 This article analyzes how women’s access to university went from being a real privilege to an individual right. The present work is not based on a historical study of victimhood, nor of a feminist thought as a contemporary category that, as Posada would say, «it leaves the picture of our language«‑ but a study of legal science in which to analyze the initiative and the defense of gender equality from the aristocratic woman in the century of enlightenment, to middle-class women after the Restoration, and this is because women of lower status did not pose a risk. In this way, and despite the fact that the visibility of women has been contemporized in the right to vote through the republic of letters, the woman of enlightened reformism knew how to develop strategies of change from the areas that were her own philanthropy, education, «revolutions that turn the top down« despite the resistance of the ecclesiastical and university institution to alter the essential principles of the ancient Regime