The Timely Rise of a Teenage Reformer: Youth Revolt, Feminism and the Struggle for a ‘New Sexual Morality’ at the Dawn of the Spanish Second Republic

ABSTRACT The contributions of propagandist and writer Hildegart (1914–1933) to Spanish cultural life are overshadowed by accounts of her unusual upbringing and violent death. This article examines the conditions that enabled the teenager to become a prominent voice for feminism and sexual reform on the eve of Spain's Second Republic (1931–1939). It situates her claim to authority at the intersection of three overlapping contexts: the symbolic politics of youth in interwar Europe; the Spanish networks of social reform and left‐wing political activism that gave her a public platform and an audience; and the transnational circulation of ideas about eugenics and sexuality that gave her something distinctive to say. Through analysis of two of Hildegart's best‐known publications, it demonstrates that both works were substantially constructed from material lifted without citation from a single English‐language volume. Hildegart's strategic repackaging of this material illuminates how she fashioned a recognisably modern, secular and internationalist feminist politics from the resources available to her, distinguishing herself from Spanish feminist contemporaries and challenging the hegemony of the self‐appointed ‘modern moralists’ who dominated Spanish debates about eugenics, birth control and women's emancipation.