LA MUJER Y LA LECTURA

According to statistics, women read from 14 to 15% more than men; a revealing piece of information which shows women’s cultural advance in Spanish society. Philately enhances this fact with the stamp issue “Women and reading” with which it pays homage to the role played by women throughout history. At the beginning of 1900 Spain was a country of illiterates, specially women since 71% of them could not read or write. Until 1978 when the Constitution was approved, there was no sex equality and women worked in the household chores, taking care of the family and in the fields. However there have always existed women who were intellectuals, politicians, scientists and adventurous who had the courage to confront the times they lived. Some of them had to dress up as men to go to University and scientists and writers signed their works under pseudonyms or their husbands names and thus left for ever written down their political, artistic and literary thoughts.

In the first 30 years of the XX century primary education became equal between men and women and the number of women students increased considerably. Currently women students are higher in number than men at university. This philatelic issue is made up of two souvenir sheets with three stamps each which depict works of Fabio Hurtado, an artist from Madrid. In the vignette there appears a paragraph from El Quijote referring to women. Hurtado studied in the Arts University of Madrid. His works have been acknowledged in a great number of occasions and has showed them in many exhibitions in Spain and abroad. He was finalist in the Blanco y Negro de Pintura 1988 award, Espiral de las Artes ’94 award; 1st medal of the Salon de Otoño 1996; Medal of Honour of the BMW 1996 award.