PhD Defence by Mónica Monmeneu González
This thesis examines how women built and exercised cultural authority across the transatlantic space during the first half of the twentieth century. The argument proceeds through two case studies, the Lyceum Clubs of Madrid (1926) and Havana (1929). Both were branches of the International Association of Lyceum Clubs, and both became principal sites for the exhibition and consecration of modern art by women in their respective cities.
The following text recovers the cultural labor that women performed within these spaces of respectable sociability and traces its operation across exhibition programs, cultural leadership, and the cultivation of critics and donors. Middle-class women, formally excluded from academies and salons, used the clubs to carve out positions of consecrating power inside the cultural field. The transatlantic axis between Madrid and Havana was a significant relationship, structured by the afterlife of empire and its intellectual ramifications throughout the century. The thesis tracks how members, exhibitions, and ideas moved between the two clubs. It examines what each side wanted from the other, how the terms of exchange shifted over the period, and how the figure of the modern woman was articulated differently on each shore. By arguing that women’s cultural authority in the period was structured and consequential this thesis helps reshape how we think about the history of Atlantic modernism.
The research is supported by archival work and a methodological framework that is both comparative and asymmetrical, drawing on the entangled histories and colonial inheritances of the Atlantic world. Six chapters and an epilogue carry the argument from the founding of the international network through the active life of the Madrid and Havana clubs and into their divergent trajectories after the Spanish Civil War.
Register