Three feminist classics in Catalan, Galician and Spanish: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf and Betty Friedan

Abstract

This article is a preliminary step in the examination of the reception of three classic Anglo-Saxon feminist authors whose work was translated in Spain during and after the Francoist dictatorship and has continued to be translated up to the present day. By following the process of publication of the translations into Catalan, Galician and Spanish of three of their most outstanding works (The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman), the aim is to demonstrate their importance in a social and cultural context which was in great need of such feminist writings. In the hope of stimulating further research in the field of feminist historiography in Translation Studies, this study shows how three “symbolic mothers” of Western feminist thinking reached these three cultures of the Iberian Peninsula.