Those Americans who were educated in Spain from the Residencia de Señoritas

The philosopher Jacques Derrida says that there would be no desire for an archive without the possibility of forgetting. An archive is made up of papers, letters, junk. An archive is memory, heart, voices from times past. Whoever listens to these voices can learn their stories and tell them. This is what the writer and university professor Cristina Oñoro (Madrid, 45 years old) has done in En el jardín de las americanas , an essay about the members of the Instituto Internacional and the Residencia de Señoritas that recalls the bonds of friendship that their students and teachers forged —in addition to sharing buildings, the garden and the library— and the effort that led them to unite: so that women could have the education they dreamed of and desired.

It was the illustrious Marie Curie who took her to the archives of the Residencia de Señoritas. Cristina Oñoro was doing research for her previous book, Las que faltaban , and wanted to know about the Polish scientist's time at the institution located on Calle Fortuny in Madrid, currently the headquarters of the José Ortega y Gasset-Gregorio Marañón Foundation. And there she came across the story of “the Americans.” Immersed with apnea of ​​wonder in the archives of the Residencia de Señoritas and in those of other American and British organizations and universities such as Smith College, Harvard and Cambridge, Cristina Oñoro has followed the lives of the directors, teachers and students of the International Institute.

“The archive is a very powerful metaphor for talking about the past, also from a feminist perspective, as it offers the possibility of finding sources that allow us to rewrite a history in which women are absent,” says Oñoro. “I had the feeling of falling in love with the archive of the Residencia de Señoritas, with everything that we still have to tell, as well as the building and the garden that evocatively gives the book its title. And when I left the Ortega-Marañón Foundation that morning, where I had been consulting its documents, I retraced the path I had taken and entered the International Institute, which is located on the next street, and I began to be interested in that transatlantic story of friendship, which begins with Alice Gulick .”

Alice Gordon Gulick is the first of the Americans. A Protestant missionary from Boston who, aged 24 and newly married, embarks for Spain. It is 1871 and since the Constitution of 1869, following the revolution of La Gloriosa , there has been freedom of worship, the right of association and educational freedom in Spain. In addition to her commitment to her religious beliefs, Alice Gulick has another: the education of women. She herself had studied at one of the first institutions in the United States to offer university education to women, the Mount Holyoke Seminary, which Oñoro also visited.

The first years in Spain were not easy. Alice Gulick created a girls' boarding school in Santander and in San Sebastián, where a park in Intxaurrondo bears her name today, and thirty years later, in 1903, she established the International Institute in Madrid, on the streets of Fortuny and Miguel Ángel. She did not live to see its inauguration, as she died that same year in a London hospital. In her essay, Cristina Oñoro follows in Gulick's footsteps. She does so from the Civil Cemetery of Madrid, where her grave is not far from those of Francisco Giner de los Ríos and Gumersindo de Azcárate, two of the intellectuals linked to the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, under whose influence the Residencia de Señoritas was created in 1915, to the Protestant cemetery of Cazoña, in Santander. Willie is buried there, the son Alice Gulick lost when he was a month old, and whose name the writer finds in the Burial Registry Book of the Protestant cemetery, kept in the archives of the Cantabrian capital. Once again, another archive that preserves the memory, the heart and the voices of the past. A year later, the missionary's steps will eventually lead Oñoro even further, to Gulick's birthplace in Auburndale, Massachusetts.

“I wanted to take up the baton from other researchers, such as Pilar Piñón, who is the current director of the International Institute and wrote a doctoral thesis on academic exchanges with the United States, and also from Carmen de Zulueta , whose books on the International Institute and the Residencia de Señoritas are now out of print, but are a reference. Carmen de Zulueta was a very important Hispanist, a student of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and the Instituto-Escuela, who had to go into exile in the United States,” explains Oñoro.

Following the death of Alice Gulick, the pedagogue Susan Huntington was offered the role of director of the International Institute. Huntington had a hard time accepting the proposal because she had to leave her position as dean at the University of Puerto Rico, but she finally did. A splendid period began. In 1912, the International Institute had one hundred and twenty-five students and offered teaching, high school and conservatory studies, as well as music classes and language courses. Among the first students were the daughter of the writer Carmen de Burgos Colombine and that of Joaquín Sorolla . The possibility of the painter giving classes there was even considered, but it was ruled out due to the cost that would have been involved in conditioning the space. Philosophers such as José Ortega y Gasset gave lectures at the institution and there was also a talented teacher named María de Maeztu . She would later be chosen to direct the Residencia de Señoritas, so the ties of friendship with the International Institute were already established from the beginning.

The proximity of the students and teachers of the two neighbouring institutions and their shared goal of providing higher education for women led them to collaborate on an ongoing basis. So much so that when the Residencia de Señoritas needed new spaces, it was the Instituto Internacional that provided them, through an agreement with the Junta para la Ampliación de Estudios signed by Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Caroline Bourland, an American professor who had just arrived in Madrid from Smith College. One of the most notable directors of the Instituto Internacional, the chemist Mary Louise Foster, would also come from this university. María de Maeztu would name the new laboratories of the Residencia de Señoritas after her.

“Many of the debates on divorce or on women’s access to education were forged in the Residencia de Señoritas and in the Instituto Internacional. Before being in the Casa de las Siete Chimeneas, today the headquarters of the Ministry of Culture, the first meeting place of the Lyceum Club was in the building of the Instituto Internacional. And in the Lyceum Club there were debates that later reached the Cortes, such as the one on voting, between Victoria Kent and Clara Campoamor ”, recalls Oñoro. And it all began by sharing a garden, but not just any garden, but one full of trees of knowledge.