Carmen de Burgos Seguí, if known at all by posterity, is mainly remembered as an author of popular novellas and, to a lesser extent, as a feminist. This study in the interdisciplinary field of law and literature aims to contribute to a reading of Burgos as a champion of first wave feminism and argues that her feminist fiction can only usefully be analysed in conjunction with her feminist essays, in particular La mujer moderna y sus derechos (1927a). As I shall demonstrate, the events narrated in the novellas discussed encapsulate many of the ideas presented in Burgos's theoretical works. I suggest that Burgos's narratives of legal critique were used as a means of political propaganda, in which she introduced the question of women's rights into the public domain. To this end, this introduction first contextualises Burgos's feminism and then gives an overview of her life and work. This is further contextualised by an overview of the publishing developments of which Burgos took advantage, as well as a concise discussion of melodrama as a genre. Finally this introduction also supplies an account of Spanish law relevant to this study, a discussion of the functions of law and legal subjectivity.

FIRST WAVE FEMINISM

The intellectual origins of feminism can be traced back to the Enlightenment when, for the first time in history, divine omnipotence was rejected and replaced by the power of reason. By 1789 there was a considerable amount of literature demanding equal education, equal rights to work and equal political rights for women, ‘justifying these claims on the grounds that all human beings were equally endowed with reason’ (Evans 1977: 15). In 1792 Olympe de Gouges’ Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman were published, both basing their demand for rights on the fact that women are equally intelligent beings and thus, they argued, male dominance is arbitrary (Evans 1977: 16).