{
  "id": "feijoo-defensa-de-las-mugeres",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Feijoo's Defensa de las mugeres (Teatro critico, discourse XVI, 1726)",
  "summary": "The longest discourse of the first tome of the Teatro critico argued that women are equal to men in understanding, and its author later said in print that this equality was its primary and almost total subject. Two pamphlets answered it within five months of publication. Read here in the 1863 collected edition, with the author's own 1730 reply and the dated chronology of the paper war it started.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "ideas",
    "enlightenment",
    "spain",
    "women",
    "philosophy",
    "education",
    "books",
    "controversy"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "feijoo-mapa-intelectual-1728"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "feijoo-espanoles-americanos"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "concepcion-arenal"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "clara-campoamor"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "sor-juana-ines-de-la-cruz"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "maria-zambrano"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What is Feijoo's Defensa de las mujeres?",
    "Did anyone argue for women's intellectual equality in eighteenth-century Spain?",
    "How was the Defensa de las mujeres received when it was published?",
    "What did Feijoo actually claim about women and men?",
    "What are the limits of Feijoo's argument about women?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The text used here is not a printing the author saw. It is discourse XVI as reprinted in the nineteenth-century Biblioteca de Autores Españoles - \"Obras escogidas del Padre Fray Benito Jerónimo Feijoo y Montenegro... con una noticia de su vida y juicio crítico de sus escritos por Don Vicente de la Fuente\", Madrid, M. Rivadeneyra, 1863 - with modernised spelling throughout, its head-title reading \"Defensa de las mujeres\" where the eighteenth-century sheets read \"mugeres\". No eighteenth-century printing of the first tome was reachable here, and the object's tier follows the weakest source it cites rather than the age of the text.",
      "sources": [
        "feijoo-obras-escogidas-bae-1863"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The discourse opens by naming its own difficulty and its target. \"En grave empeño me pongo. No es ya sólo un vulgo ignorante con quien entro en la contienda: defender á todas las mujeres, viene á ser lo mismo que ofender á casi todos los hombres, pues raro hay que no se interese en la precedencia de su sexo con desestimacion del otro.\" The common opinion fills them with moral defects and physical imperfections, \"pero donde más fuerza hace, es en la limitacion de sus entendimientos\", and it is on that head - \"su aptitud para todo género de ciencias y conocimientos sublimes\" - that he announces he will discourse at greatest length.",
      "sources": [
        "feijoo-obras-escogidas-bae-1863"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Two standard moves are refused in the same section. Against the tally of women's vices he concedes the vices and reassigns the cause - he does not deny the vices of many, but asks how, if the genealogy of those disorders were cleared up, it would be found to have its first origin in the obstinate impulse of individuals of his own sex, and concludes \"Quien quisiere hacer buenas á todas las mujeres, convierta á todos los hombres\" - and he treats the invectives of sacred writers as directed at the perverse, in the way physicians of the body declaim against fruits that are good in themselves and made harmful by abuse. Against the commonplace that la Cava lost Spain and Eve the world he answers that \"el primer ejemplo absolutamente es falso\": it was count don Julian who brought the Moors, his daughter having done no more than tell her father of her injury.",
      "sources": [
        "feijoo-obras-escogidas-bae-1863"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "Where the discourse stops is as much a part of it as where it goes, and it stops short of a verdict on public life. Having claimed advantages on the women's side that balance or perhaps exceed the men's, Feijoo asks who shall pronounce sentence in the suit and declines to: if he had the authority he would perhaps rule \"que las calidades en que exceden las mujeres, conducen para hacerlas mejores en sí mismas; las prendas en que exceden los hombres, los constituyen mejores, esto es, más útiles para el público. Pero, como yo no hago oficio de juez, sino de abogado, se quedará el pleito por ahora indeciso.\"",
      "sources": [
        "feijoo-obras-escogidas-bae-1863"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The objection that his praise proves nothing because the qualities he assigns to women belong to both sexes is met by making the symmetry work both ways. He confesses it, \"pero en la misma forma que son comunes á ambos sexos las buenas calidades de los hombres\", and proposes that the question be settled by naming, for each sex, the perfections much more frequently found in its individuals. He grants that there are docile, candid and bashful men, and that in several individuals of his own sex the qualities that ennoble the other are observed; but that \"en ninguna manera inclina á nuestro favor la balanza, porque hacen igual peso por la otra parte las perfecciones de que se jactan los hombres, comunicadas á muchas mujeres\".",
      "sources": [
        "feijoo-obras-escogidas-bae-1863"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "Four years later the author restated the thesis of the discourse in one line, in the course of complaining that his most prominent opponent had not engaged it. Answering Salvador Joseph Mañer's Anti-Teatro, he writes that he nearly passed the discourse over because Mañer had in substance done the same: \"Cosa admirable es, que siendo el asunto primario, y aun casi total de mi Defensa de las mugeres su igualdad en entendimiento con los hombres, la qual probé con varios argumentos largamente, á ninguno de ellos tocó con la pluma el Sr. Mañer, ni hizo mas que entretenerse en los arrabales del Discurso.\" Of the objections he does answer, number 3 \"se pone á probar mui despacio, que los hombres tienen mas vigor, ó fuerza corporal, que las mugeres\" - time admirably well spent, Feijoo answers, since nobody denies it.",
      "sources": [
        "feijoo-ilustracion-apologetica-1773"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The reaction is datable, and it was fast. The chronological list of Feijoo's writings and of the pieces published against them, printed by his nineteenth-century editor from an anonymous biographer's series, gives the first tome of the Teatro critico as published on 3 September 1726; an anonymous paper, \"Contra-defensa crítica á favor de los hombres, contra la nueva Defensa de las mujeres, que es uno de los discursos del Teatro\", on 17 December of the same year; and a second anonymous piece, \"Estrado crítico en defensa de las mujeres, contra el Teatro crítico\", on 16 February 1727 - an attack on the discourse from the side it defended. Mañer's Antiteatro crítico followed on 7 June 1729 and Feijoo's Ilustración apologética on 10 January 1730.",
      "sources": [
        "de-la-fuente-1863-noticia-de-feijoo"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "What the discourse is not should be recorded next to what it is. The pages read here argue capacity and nothing institutional: no passage among them proposes that women be admitted to universities, to the professions or to public office, and the section that comes closest to a conclusion leaves open the ruling that men are \"más útiles para el público\". The argument is that the received opinion of women's understanding is false, made by a Benedictine writing under licence in 1726; the inference from it to civil rights is not in these pages and is not attributed to him here.",
      "sources": [
        "feijoo-obras-escogidas-bae-1863"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "The Defensa de las mujeres is usually met in English as a line in a survey - an early modern friar who said women were as clever as men - with neither the argument nor its limits shown. This object quotes the claim, the two rhetorical moves the author refuses, and the passage in which he declines to give sentence and leaves men possibly \"more useful to the public\" - a limit no celebratory account prints. It then supplies the two things such accounts omit entirely: the author's own statement, four years later and in print, that intellectual equality was the primary and almost total subject of the piece, and a dated chronology showing the first printed answer arriving fifteen weeks after publication, including one attack mounted from the women's side against the Teatro itself.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-17",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/feijoo-defensa-de-las-mugeres",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/feijoo-defensa-de-las-mugeres.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Feijoo's Defensa de las mugeres (Teatro critico, discourse XVI, 1726)",
    "description": "The longest discourse of the first tome of the Teatro critico argued that women are equal to men in understanding, and its author later said in print that this equality was its primary and almost total subject. Two pamphlets answered it within five months of publication. Read here in the 1863 collected edition, with the author's own 1730 reply and the dated chronology of the paper war it started.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/feijoo-defensa-de-las-mugeres",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-17",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Ilustracion apologetica al primero, y segundo tomo del Teatro critico, donde se notan mas de quatrocientos descuidos al Autor del Anti-Teatro",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=ugIBAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA62"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Defensa de las mujeres, in Obras escogidas del Padre Fray Benito Jeronimo Feijoo y Montenegro (Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, desde la formacion del lenguaje hasta nuestros dias)",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=MUlrvNftWQgC&pg=PA50"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Noticia de la vida y juicio critico de los escritos del Padre Feijoo, the editor's preliminary matter to Obras escogidas del Padre Feijoo",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=MUlrvNftWQgC&pg=PR10"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Feijoo's Defensa de las mugeres (Teatro critico, discourse XVI, 1726)"
  }
}