Introduction: Social reform, Gender and Sexuality: recent historical approaches to the origins of the welfare state in Spain

Abstract

The articles in this special issue have been conceived as contributions to broadening knowledge on the origins of the welfare state and social citizenship in Spain from the late nineteenth century to 1936. 1 Drawing on new theoretical approaches and different fields of historical study, our aim is to highlight and explore aspects of this process that have been insufficiently analyzed to date. Specifically, the authors pay attention to cultural breaches and conceptual frameworks that underlay this process and generated new individual and social identities and behaviours. The contributions to this special issue are two-pronged. On the one hand, they question the widespread belief that welfare states arose as a result of socioeconomic transformations or undertakings by one political – ideological current or another. An alternative explanation is developed through their exploration of the crisis experienced by the classical liberal model of society and the new notions of the social as causal factors in shaping social reform policy. On the other hand, some of the articles will specifically focus on the pivotal role played by these mediations: discourses on gender and sexuality as constitutive elements of emerging visions of the social and society in the construction of social reform projects. As Marie Walin puts it, “the dark side of social reform” produced subjects whose exclusion from the category of social citizenship was articulated around notions of gender and sexuality that were open or subtly grounded in historical hierarchies. Finally, given that hygiene and eugenics were embedded in social reform from the outset, their specific function in the process under analysis will be disentangled.