Resumen de Love lessons: María Zambrano and Rosa Chacel in the footsteps of Diotima
This essay takes as its starting point the shared discipleship that linked María Zambrano and Rosa Chacel to the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, in order to analyse their implicit – but determined – distancing from their mentor with regard to their views on love and male–female relations. The analysis focuses on essays from the 1930s and 1940s in which the two young authors discuss the hegemonic theories of sexual difference that circulated in Europe during the interwar period and which were published in Ortega's Revista de Occidente. The essay will explore how Zambrano and Chacel's responses articulate the “woman question” in different ways that underpin twentieth-century feminist thinking. The essay also aims to show the centrality of these youthful texts to Zambrano and Chacel's thought, by examining how the ideas developed in them influenced their mature work.
