Anticlericalism’s struggle over social reproduction labor: Galdós’s Electra (1901) and the Ubao affair

ABSTRACT

This article contends that the violent anticlericalism of Galdós’s Electra (1901) stems from the Church’s usurpation of the title character’s labor in the home. Electra’s domestic duties enable the hero, an electrical scientist, to perform his work – that is, until a priest coerces her into joining a convent. In this conflict, the authority priests and husbands share over women crumbles. Refracted in this story is the real-life polemic surrounding Adelaida Ubao, a woman whom the courts removed from a convent against her will, setting a legal precedent for the exception to familial authority as only available to husbands rather than the Church. My reading of Electra reveals that at stake in the debate over who has authority over women is the capture of their energies for the purposes of producing labor itself. The play stages this process through the lovers’ experiment with electrical conductivity and in the priest’s violent interruption of the electrical circuit they develop. His attempt to prevent their marriage effectively disrupts the circuit of labor production made possible by life-making work. This reading challenges analyses of anticlerical misogyny as unrelated to political economy and instead proposes an understanding of it as a struggle over social reproduction labor.

KEYWORDS:

• Anticlericalism
• electricity
• social reproduction theory
• family sovereignty
• Ubao affair

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers for their time and suggestions. Many thanks to Amanda Recupero for her revision advice, and to Eliana Hernández-Pachón, Heftzi Vázquez-Rodríguez and Carlo Águilar González for reading an early draft. A special thanks to Dr. Julia Chang for her feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For an overview of Spanish anticlericalism in the twentieth century, see Castro (2005). Anticlericals are not necessarily anti-religion, as Navarra Ordoño (2013) shows. Rather, they maintain that clergy should have no power over civil life, an opinion shared by Galdós.

2 Catena has described this case in detail in her article “Circunstancias temporales de la Electra de Galdós” (1975, 84–87). She reconstructs them based on newspaper archives and the accounts of contemporaneous journalists such as Soldevilla. See also Castro (2005, 209–210), Finkenthal (1980, 134–135), Ortiz-Armengol (2000, 385–386), Yáñez (1979, 640–646) and Díaz Larios (2002, 73–74) for their summaries of the Ubao affair.

3 For more on the political consequences of Electra, see Inman Fox (1966, 130–35), De la Cueva Merino (1997, 101–113), Botti (1997, 309–310) and Álvarez Junco (1985, 286).

4 Finkenthal notes that this violence and crime considered as options by the protagonist is new in Galdós’s oeuvre (1980, 137).

5 See Bhattacharya (2017) and Ferguson (2020).

6 See Vialette for a discussion of the dialectic between production and reproduction in philanthropy and Catholic charity directed at women workers in nineteenth-century Spain (2018, 195). Using Agamben’s concept of the “potentiality contained in an impotentiality” (198) Vialette demonstrates how improving female workers’ conditions perpetuated their roles as reproducers by giving women empowering tools but encouraging them not to use them (171). In my discussion of life-making labor as a fuel or potential, the concept of its potential relates to Pinkus’s suggestion (via Agamben’s formulation of potentiality) that fuels “are not yet rigidified forms of power” (2016, 1). The question raised is not whether to perform domestic labor versus participate in the public/productive sphere so much as how this labor functions inside a system of wealth accumulation. It should be noted that philanthropy and social services provided by the Catholic Church also fall within the purview of what can be defined as social reproduction labor.

7 For the nuances of the woman question in Galdós, see Aldaraca (1991), Labanyi (2000), Mercer (2012) and Tsuchiya (2011).

8 See Salomón Chéliz’s discussion of the antifeminist representation of women in the anticlerical press and its relationship to the polemic over women’s suffrage (2003).

9 This includes strands of Iberian feminist thought as Arkinstall (2014) shows. Belén de Sárraga de Ferrero and other anticlerical women such as Amalia Domingo Soler and Ángeles López de Ayala promoted a secular education to counter the obscurantism of the Catholic Church and its gender oppressions.

10 Weeks defines the family under capitalism as “a privatised system of social reproduction” (2021).

11 Electra and its aftermath are perhaps most famous for precipitating the resignation of the conservative government; the new cabinet would be popularly known as “el ministerio Electra”. The Electra protests opened up the twentieth century’s first cycle of anticlerical actions and these events, along with the case of Adelaida Ubao and the marriage of María Cristina Hapsburgo Lorena to Carlos de Borbón (the son of a Carlist general) are said to have contributed to Marcelo Azcárraga Palmero’s resignation. Electra’s outsized popularity in its own time is worth noting: an unprecedented twenty thousand copies of the play were sold in its first month onstage (Mérimée 1901, 195). Its first run lasted nearly one hundred nights and it went on to be staged throughout the Peninsula, European capitals and Buenos Aires, with translations in Portuguese, German, Dutch and English (Ortiz-Armengol 2000, 390). Catena notes that support for Electra and Galdós led to the foundation of two literary magazines with the same title as the play, as well as a series of commercial products, including cigarillos and mantecados. The restaurant Lhardy even produced a dish called “Electra” (1975, 100).

12 Inman Fox points out that the liberal newspapers had “declared open war on jesuitism and their columns were filled with titles such as “El jesuita es el enemigo” and “Odio al jesuita” (1966, 132). The priest who was accused of manipulating Adelaida Ubao, Fernando Cermeño, was in fact a Jesuit (Catena 1975, 84). While in Electra there is no explicit reference to Pantoja belonging to that order, Galdós did take explicit aim at the Jesuits in his columns, criticizing them particularly for their manipulation of women. See Catena (1975, 91–93).

13 Maeztu’s phrase is the recollection of fellow audience member Pío Baroja (as quoted in Inman Fox 1966, 132).

14 I am indebted to Delgado Ruiz’s work (1993). His analysis, however, frames anticlerical misogyny as a kind of battle of the sexes, one that purports to provide an analysis outside of class struggles. This assumes that patriarchy and capitalism are dual systems of oppression. This article assumes that these systems are mutually constitutive.

15 As Labanyi points out, Antonio Cánovas formulated a “contradictory view of the family as indissoluble and yet legally based on contract (the marriage contract ratified by the State through the Civil Registry)” (2000, 44). This is unlike the Krausism of the nineteenth century, which rejected the idea of marriage as a contract in favor of a “natural subordination” of the family to the greater good (42–43). Civil marriage, introduced in 1870, was dissolved under the restoration, and marriage was an institution governed by the Church until the Second Republic. For an overview of the legal standing of women in early twentieth-century Spain, see Scanlon (1976).

16 The court’s affirmation of the meaning of “tomar estado” was reproduced in El Imparcial:

Considerando que elegir estado y tomar estado son dos conceptos tan claros que basta enunciarlos para ver que todo el mundo los entiende y relaciona de igual manera, atribuyendo al primero la significación de fijar el modo de vivir que una persona ha de tener en lo sucesivo con carácter de permanente, ya sea en el estado de matrimonio ó ya sea en el estado de perfección religiosa… (“Una esclava del Corazón del Jesús” 1900)

17 After almost a year of court dates and newspaper controversy, and only a few months shy of her twenty-fifth birthday, Adelaida Ubao was escorted from the convent on 24 February 1901, contravening her right to emancipation from her family. As she left, El Imparcial reports she refused to board her aunt’s coach, declaring “Como salgo de esta casa contra mi voluntad y sólo por imperio de la ley, iré en el del juzgado” (“Su restitución al hogar” 1901).

18 In 1952, the Franco regime modified Article 321 of the Civil Code to resignify “tomar estado” and recover the ecclesiastical meaning (“Ley de 20 de diciembre” 1952).

19 For a perspective on Galdós’s knowledge of physics and science and the way he uses this to structure the play, see Rueda (2019).

20 Social reproduction’s necessity to economic production under capitalism is an argument made by many Marxist feminists including Davis (1981), Vogel (1983) and Federici (2012).

21 In Lebovitz’s book Beyond Capital (2003) he elaborates on what he says is Marx’s missing book on wage labor, which remained unexplored in Capital. In Marx’s theorization of the wage, he assumed standards of necessity as constant. In reality, workers adjust their needs in consonance with what they are able to provide for themselves with their wages, a dynamic exploited by capital.

 

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Kelly Camille Moore

Kelly Camille Moore is a PhD Candidate in Romance Studies at Cornell University. Her research explores conflicts with the Church and their impact on social reproduction. Email: [email protected]