Dirty Work: Prostitutes, Washerwomen, and Moral Crisis in Modern Spain

Dirty Work: Prostitutes, Washerwomen, and Moral Crisis in Modern Spain

About the talk...

This talk explores the symbolic entanglement of two figures that haunted the bourgeois imagination in late 19th- and early 20th-century Spain: the prostitute and the washerwoman. While the former has received substantial scholarly attention, the latter has been less studied – this even though she was similarly construed as being immoral, sexually transgressive, and a threat to public order and decency. In this paper, I argue that the association of the two emerged in part due to the material similarities of their labour. Both washerwomen and prostitutes occupied public space in ways deemed improper for women and that rendered their bodies hypervisible and subject to frequent eroticization. Drawing on print and popular culture—including postcards, satirical sketches, and popular song lyrics—I examine the scopophilic representations of washerwomen that circulated widely during this period as well as the ways in which this symbolic overlap manifested in legal records and was subsequently incorporated into an expanding state disciplinary apparatus attuned to bourgeois moral interests.

About the speaker...

Renee Congdon is a PhD candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese department at Princeton University and a Graduate Fellow of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, where she focuses on Spanish culture, literature, and film from the late 19th century to the present day. Her research interests include popular culture, gendered and domestic labor, food studies, and rural studies, with a particular emphasis on addressing how literary and cultural objects can illuminate legacies of popular resistance on the peripheries of the Spanish state. Her recent publications include a piece on sensory detail as narrative technique in Carmen Laforet’s Nada (Albatros Ediciones, 2022) and a chapter on Ainhoa Rodríguez’s 2021 film Destello bravío and its radical engagement with extinctionist discourses about “empty” Spain (Vernon Press, 2025). Her doctoral thesis brings together her interests in popular culture and gendered and domestic labor, analyzing the fraught sociocultural legacies of the proletariat washerwoman in the Spanish popular imaginary from the late 19th century to the present day.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Northrop Frye Centre