Temma Kaplan

Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910-1918

Female consciousness, recognition of what a particular class, culture, and historical period expect from women, creates a sense of rights and obligations that provides motive force for actions different from those Marxist or feminist theory generally try to explain. Female consciousness centers upon the rights of gender, on social concerns, on survival. Those with female consciousness accept the gender system of their society; indeed, such consciousness emerges from the division of labor by sex, which assigns women the responsibility of preserving life. But, accepting this task, women with female consciousness demand the rights that their obligations entail. The collective drive to secure those rights that result from the division of labor sometimes has revolutionary consequences insofar as it politicizes the networks of everyday life.

Reversing the Shame and Gendering the Memory

T he first time I met Nieves Ayress she told me her story and incorporated me into a long line of witnesses stretching back more than a quarter of a century. A gifted organizer and dedicated feminist, her contemporary commitments to social change and justice continue the campaigns she has waged since she was a young woman in Chile. Held as a political prisoner for three years under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, she endured unspeakable bouts of torture that threatened to undermine her sexual and political identities. While in prison, she managed to recreate a sense of community and find confidants who willingly risked their own lives to publicize what was happening to her. Armed with her written statement, they spoke out as witnesses to the sexual torture she and others suffered. Ayress’s account provided concrete evidence about how state terrorism functioned in Chile, and it contributed to discrediting the dictatorship. As we began our first conversation, Ayress guided me around the community center she and her companion Vı́ctor Toro founded in 1984. Catering largely to a black, Latino, and Caribbean immigrant population, Vamos a la Peña del Bronx (the community meeting place), known simply as “la Peña,” hosts cultural events, political gatherings, and commemorations such as International Women’s Day, which attract women of all races and nationalities. La Peña runs support groups for people with AIDS and for women suffering from domestic violence. It feeds and clothes about five thousand people a year. Local residents, often led by women, march from La Peña to protest against rent hikes, waste incinerators, and the repression of the largely immigrant population that inhabits the neighborhood. The walls of the center—a huge, renovated garage just behind Lincoln

Red City, Blue Period. Social Movements in Picasso's Barcelona

In Red City, Blue Period, Kaplan combines the methods of anthropology and the new cultural history to examine the civic culture of Barcelona between 1888 and 1939. She analyzes the peculiar sense of solidarity the citizens forged and explains why shared experiences of civic culture and pageantry sometimes galvanized resistance to authoritarian national governments but could not always overcome local class and gender struggles. She sheds light on the process by which principles of regional freedom and economic equity developed and changed in a city long known for its commitment to human dignity and artistic achievement. Although scholars increasingly recognize the relationship between so-called high art and popular culture, little has been done to explain what opens the eyes of artists to folk figures and religious art. Kaplan shows how artists like Picasso and Joan Miro, playwright Santiago Russinyol, the cellist Pablo Casals, and the architect Antonio Gaudi, as well as anarchists and other political activists, both shaped and were influenced by the artistic and political culture of Barcelona.