Women teachers in the Southeast of Madrid in the 19th century through the documents kept in the Regional Archive of Madrid, the Municipal Archive of Arganda del Rey and the Municipal Historical Archive of Chinchón

Abstract

During the Enlightenment, marked by gender differences, the crown promoted  education to encourage the development of science and research. However, it was not until the second half of the 19th century, with the Moyano Law (1857), that public primary education for girls became compulsory. Thanks to a succession of new educational policies, the incorporation and permanence of girls in school progressively took place, as well as the entry of women into the teaching profession. All these changes are reflected in documents about female teachers and written by female teachers in the 19th century, preserved in municipal archives. In this work, we have designed a documentary corpus consisting of 38 documents written or signed by female teachers from Arganda del Rey, Chinchón, Fuentidueña del Tajo, San Martin de la Vega and Valdaracete, municipalities that make up the southeast of the Community of Madrid. These documents inform us about the circumstances and the activity of the  rural teachers, among them we find receipts for purchases made, letters or requests from the teachers to the town hall, appointment files, lists of expenses and income of the girls’ school, lists of pupils and, above all, to a greater extent,  inventories of school material. Our objective is to know the daily practice of the teachers through the inventoried school material, as well as to know their inner-history and graphic uses reflected in the documents they wrote.