TEXTUAL AND FLESH WOMEN: PRODUCING USEFUL KNOWLEDGE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN

As it is well known, the most pervasive topic during the long eighteenth-century was that knowledge needed to be “useful.” Scholars have thoroughly investigated how the rhetoric of usefulness served to different purposes, from legitimating and securing royal funds, to backing careers, to supporting a thriving market of scientific objects, lectures, and spectacles. More recently, Mary Terrall has argued that “useful” defined science with values of masculinity. Useful opposed to frivolous, flighty, and whimsical, adjectives recurrently applied to women, and specially on how women approached science .

This paper argues that, in addition, an important current of opinion backed up a womanly way of making useful knowledge. Women’s supposed sensibilities and domesticity were seen as assets in domestic economy, still a hardly explored subject today although it was a most cherished one in the late 18^th century. The paper shows how a number of Spanish women socially and politically influent embodied the women represented in best sellers such as Spectacle de la Nature as well as in domestic economy treatises such as Parmentier’s. In particular, the paper looks at the practices, discourses, and modes of representation of the Junta de damas de honor y merito (the Ladies’ of Honour and Merit Committee), the female branch of the Madrid economic society that flourished in the 1790s.