Concepción Arenal

Concepción Arenal Ponte (Ferrol, 31 January 1820 – Vigo, 4 February 1893) was a Spanish feminist writer and activist. Born in Ferrol, Galicia, she excelled in literature and was the first woman to attend university in Spain. She was also a pioneer and founder of the feminist movement in Spain.

Her father, Ángel del Arenal, was a liberal military officer who was often imprisoned for his ideology and opposition to the regime of Ferdinand VII. He fell ill in prison and died in 1829, when Concepción was aged 8. She moved to Armaño (Cantabria) with her mother, and then to Madrid in 1834, to attend the school of the Count of Tepa. Against her mother’s wishes in 1841 she entered the Faculty of Law of the Central University (now the Complutense University of Madrid), becoming the first woman in Spain to attend University, where she was forced to wear masculine attire. She also attended political and literary debates, unheard of at the time for a woman

She graduated and in 1848 she married lawyer and writer Fernando García Carrasco. They had three children: a daughter that died shortly after birth, and two sons, Fernando (b. 1850) and Ramón (b. 1852). In her later years, her health being a permanent cause of concern, Concepción Arenal lived with her son Fernando and Fernando's second wife, Ernestina Winter.

Concepción Arenal and her husband collaborated closely on the liberal newspaper Iberia until Fernando’s death in 1859. Penniless she was forced to sell all her possessions in Armaño and moved into the house of violinist and composer Jesús de Monasterio in Potes, Cantabria, where in 1859 she founded the feminist group Conference of Saint Vincent de Paul in order to help the poor. Two years later the Academy of Moral Sciences and Politics awarded her a prize for her work La beneficencia, la filantropía y la caridad [Beneficence, philanthropy and charity]. It was the first time the Academy gave the prize to a woman.

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