Las desheredadas

Almost two decades ago, Ángeles Caso began a unique project with Las Olvidadas: the reconstruction of a feminine cultural genealogy made up of all the women who broke with what society tried to impose on them and dared to live against the current, to create and think about a better world. , although they only received the contempt of critics and the canon in return. Las desheredadas addresses the 18th and 19th centuries, a crucial era in the history of the West, the seed of what we live in today. It is the time of painters like Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun or Adélaïde Labille-Guiard; of the enlightened Lady Mary Montagu or the Duchess of Osuna; of scientists such as the Marquise de Châtelet and Ada Lovelace; of betrayed revolutionaries like Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft; of writers like Mary Shelley, the Brontës or Emilia Pardo Bazán; of the first feminists such as Flora Tristan, Concepción Arenal or Rosario de Acuña; of the impressionists like Berthe Morisot or Camille Claudel... They dedicated themselves to the arts, to thought, they fought for freedom and the rights of the most disadvantaged, but the enlightened and liberal bourgeoisie ended up imposing the official story. And there was no room for them in it. From that rejection, feminism would be born, which then began its unstoppable career. Ángeles Caso fuses literary genres and gives us an exciting, vindictive and deeply rigorous work about the heroines who dared to raise their voices and their heads. This book illuminates for a moment the lives of some of them so that they allow us to feel the desire to illuminate those of the others.