Hildegart Rodríguez

Hildegart writes to Havelock Ellis, the father of sexology. She asks him to be her intellectual father. She needs a male mentor who will endorse her in an intellectual world which belongs to men. That father must see a reformist leader in her, with a change project that will inspire a better Spain. Since birth, Hildegart was destined to be the most modern of modern women. She was educated to be a precocious and attentive social observer.

Hildegart wants to go far. She wants to regenerate the world she lives in and wants a sexual reform. That is her mission. To fulfil that mission, she has gone beyond the intellectual and geographical borders of Madrid, beyond the patriotic intellectual circles where she isn’t taken very seriously. Her ringlets are more disruptive than her controversial sexual revolution.

Hildegart thinks that old men cannot regenerate the homeland. The Republic must belong to the young and she must become the leader of a new, so far utopian, Spain. She reads, she studies, she wants to be ready to lead a sexual revolution. This was her life project.

Healthy, strong and engaged, in a few weeks she will die, killed by her own mother. She knew nothing whilst she wrote to her teacher and strove to overcome obstacles, hoping to work with some authority. The political reform that she so believed in would fail. Her writing and her projects disappeared quickly after her assassination. In a few years the modern women who speaks to us in each ‘cartavivas’ entry will disappear too. Hildegart’s life came to an end. The war in Spain and Europe would, on the other hand, start soon.