Lilí Álvarez

Rome, 1905 - Madrid, 1998

Elia Maria González-Álvarez y López-Chicheri, Lilí Álvarez, ‘the señorita’, sportswoman, Wimbledon champion, theologian, writer and member of the Seminar on Sociological Studies of Women founded by María Campo Alange, was a woman with a strong personality. Her childhood and youth were nomadic. She travelled and fulfilled her sporting commitments. She always lived in very select environments, in hotels in Europe or as a guest of the great British houses. After a brief and failed marriage, she settled in Madrid, very close to the Prado Museum. She did not tolerate the construction of the female body as sick or sinful and understood physical activity as a means of emancipation.

Hello...

I was a true ambassador for Spain.

Lilí Álvarez's father was her first teacher and playmate. He introduced her to sport and competition. In doing so, he instilled in her a great deal of self-confidence. In the interwar period, the whole of Europe was the stage for her life. She was a modern cosmopolitan. She tried her hand at skiing, ice skating, car racing and tennis, a sport in which she excelled from a very early age. She did not go to school, but her intellectual curiosity was also nurtured.

Sport lifts us up. It has the mysterious power to balance and harmonise our individuality.

Lilí Álvarez's most important contribution to Spanish feminist thought took place at the beginning of her intellectual life and was linked to the body. She did not believe that the human body was separate from the soul. On the contrary, it is one with it. And if the soul is divine, so is the body. It is not a place of sin. Sport and health are our obligation to the body, which we must care for in the same way that we care for the spirit. From this perspective, she exalted the female body and defended the comfort of sportswear and streetwear. She was also, indisputably, a precursor to the figure of the influencer.

The entire life of our private selves, of each and every one of us, needs to be based on health and its requirements.

The construction of the female body as incomplete or incorrect has fatal consequences in history, culture, and society. Lilí Álvarez sees this clearly. She declares herself opposed to the mechanisms of repression, central to modern psychoanalysis, because they disconnect women from their bodies and their potential. She goes against essential femininity and denounces men's fear of women's emancipation. She insists on the importance of physical health as central to the existence of everyone, men and women alike.