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"Noticia de la vida y obras del Conde de Rumford" (1802) by María Lorenza de los Ríos, Marquesa de Fuerte-Híjar:Authorizing a Space for Female Charity Catherine M. Jaffe (bio) The eighteenth century witnessed a shift in the understanding of charity. According to Raymond Williams, while emphasis on the personal dimension of charity as a primary Christian virtue declined, attention to the psychological and social effects of the act of giving or receiving charity increased.1 This evolution in the concept of charity, a consequence of the growth of capitalism and industrialization, transformed the relation of women to charity as well. Scholars have lately turned their interest to how aristocratic and middle-class women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries negotiated a place for themselves in the public sphere by drawing upon their traditional association with charitable acts, particularly aid to women and children, to organize large-scale charitable efforts that transcended the domestic sphere yet allowed them to operate within the bounds of feminine decorum.2 As capitalism reorganized feudal class relations, the idea of charity began to lose its intimate, personal dimension that was often symbolically represented as a woman nursing a child; by contrast, charity was increasingly mediated through public institutions set up to deal with growing numbers of the poor displaced because of economic upheavals. The transformation of women's relation to charity occurred during a period of social, political, economic, scientific, and technological change that provoked unease with the potentially destabilizing effects of [End Page 91] the process of modernization. With changes in gender roles that emphasized women's domestic responsibilities of nurturing and educating their children came added scrutiny for women's suspicious encroachment into the public sphere through their work in charitable organizations. The present study discusses the cultural context of a translation produced in 1802 by a Spanish female intellectual and author who was a member of an aristocratic women's charitable organization. While scholars have known of this woman's work for some time, the source of the translation, its role in promoting a significant public, charitable experiment, and its connection to Enlightenment technological advances and to theories of charity in Spain have not been adequately studied. By setting the translation within the complex social reaction to change and modernization in Spain at the turn of the eighteenth century, I draw a parallel between criticism of women's perceived resistance to technological change and censure of women's movement into the public sphere through charitable work, and I argue that they arise from the same source: the projection of anxiety about the effects of modernization onto the feminine. María Lorenza de los Ríos y Loyo, the Marquesa de Fuerte-Híjar (1768?–1817?), was an active member and later the president of the Junta de Damas of the Sociedad Económica Matritense de Amigos del País.3 A native of Cádiz, the Marquesa was an enlightened aristocrat who hosted a tertulia or salon in Madrid that was attended by artistic and cultural figures of Madrid society, including Francisco de Goya and the writer Nicasio Álvarez de Cienfuegos. She is the author of two plays, El Eugenio and La sabia indiscreta, of an Elogio a la Reina, and of an address on women's education.4 In 1802, the Marquesa also translated a brief work entitled Noticia de la vida y obras del Conde de Rumford, traducida del francés, y presentada a la Sociedad Patriótica de Madrid.5 Count Rumford was an American inventor named Benjamin Thompson who devised a modern plan to improve soup kitchen stoves used to feed the poor while working for the Elector of Bavaria in the 1780s and 1790s. The Marquesa de Fuerte-Híjar's translation of the Noticia and her presentation of it to the Sociedad Económica may be seen as an act that asserted the authority of women's charitable efforts connected to the Junta de Damas. The Noticia appears in a very interesting historical and cultural context characterized by the efforts of the ilustrados, enlightened reformers including the Marquesa's husband (then president of the Sociedad Económica), to modernize Spain; the...
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