A Feminine and Feminist Story of Transmission

The point of departure of this chapter is the ground recently gained by the task of recovering the presence of female figures in all areas of knowledge: the main aim of this chapter is to construct an intelligible narrative of how this current situation has been reached. The key concept on which the authors À. Lorena Fuster and Fina Birulés focus is that of the transmission of the past. By using tools that they have previously elaborated for the study of female philosophical thought, they show that women were not absent from the canon of the various disciplines, nevertheless, their names have not been transmitted. They point out that in general, when the canon includes women, it is as an exception to the norm; in this case ‘the way of telling history does not change, but rather … this simply adds an appendix of excellent women to the usual way of transmitting the past’. The authors also claim that women of the past were aware of their non-central position, and that to overcome this limitation they found original channels to become visible and to transmit their knowledge. To discover their valuable legacy, and in general to reconstruct lines of continuity and transmission of female thought and gesture, the authors urge historians to turn to the archives. They finally show that, by giving a political meaning to the female tradition of lacemaking, the women dealt with in this volume, taken as a collective entity, created the conditions for transmission among generations, both practical and theoretical, allowing us to include them in history.