Amalia Domingo Soler

Amalia Domingo Soler (Seville, 10 November 1835 – Barcelona, 29 April 1909) was a Spanish writer, novelist, and feminist, who also wrote poetry, essays, short stories, as well as an autobiography, Memorias de una mujer. She is known for her involvement in the Spanish spiritist movement.^[1] Her writings are characterized by poetic and delicate style. She is remembered for her book "Memories of Father Germano". She founded and edited a spiritist weekly, La Luz del Porvenir, characterized by its radical views and feminist orientation.^[2] She also served as the editor-in-chief of Luz y unión which succeeded La Luz del Porvenir in 1900.^[3]

The life of Amalia Domingo Soler

She is one of the most important figures of Spanish Spiritism of the 19th century. A tireless writer, she dedicated more than 30 years to the dissemination of the teachings codified by Kardec. We cannot consider a person's life without referring to their environment, without referring to the situation of the country and the moment in which they were born. She would be like a tree without roots. Amalia was born in Seville, on November 10, 1835. It has been barely two years since Ferdinand VII and his wife, the Regent Mª Cristina, died. She has no choice but to rely on the liberals if she wants to keep the throne for her daughter, the future Elizabeth II. Most of Amalia's life took place in a Spain in which absolutists, supporters of a class society, and liberals, supporters of a class society imposed by the French Revolution, fought. The interest of both will be in liquidating the opponent and not in reaching an understanding. It is a century in which women have not left the domain of men, either in the form of a father or in the form of a husband. A century in which a woman has very few outlets, she would almost say two: the convent and marriage. Amalia's life is an example of coherence but also of rebellion. She is coherent because she refuses to accept the convent, because in it she does not find God, and she also refuses to accept marriage, because she does not want to unite with anyone without love or out of pure interest. And that's where her rebellion comes from, because lacking material resources and with a serious eyesight problem, she will face the serious material problems that await her rather than accept any solution that is not in line with her own conscience and with her century. Let's not go any further. She is born into a broken family, since her father is absent, he has gone away from her, leaving her mother with an income that she thinks will be enough to support them both. Three days after her birth she began to suffer from an illness in her eyes that would last her entire life and that would cause her mother to dedicate herself solely and exclusively to caring for her and educating her. But she doesn't make him learn any trade, or study a career, because her eyes don't allow it. She learned to read at the age of five but she did not neglect her moral education which will be rigorous. The mistakes that she, like any girl, commits are severely punished by her mother and will be so strongly imposed on her soul that she will never be able to betray the teachings she received. They go everywhere together. Just by looking at each other they understand each other. Together they go to churches, but in them Amalia only perceives the luxury or beauty of the statues; She doesn't see God. She sees the artistic nature of the representation, the nobility of the material used, but God is not there. You will find this in nature, in the sea, not in wood, ebony, marble or ivory. The socio-cultural context in which Amalia lives, together with the illness and death of her mother, are two elements that will especially condition her life, at least until she left Seville. She is a cultured young woman, much more cultured than the rest of the women of her time, which, according to some friends of her mother, will make marriage difficult for her and they will also believe that it is the cause of her lack of veneration for women. sacred images. She is a young woman with the beauty of youth and the affections of youth. Like all women, she had to love and be loved. We have all received love poems and roses with thorns from her. She also received them. They live, mother and daughter, very closely with the income left by her father and which has been diminishing over time. A maid also lives with them that they will support until she becomes very old and returns to her family. Amalia's mother falls ill and fears that her resources will diminish so much that she will not be able to care for her and that she will have to die in a hospital. Today this seems the best to us, but at that time, beggars and those disinherited from the land, orphans and the needy died in hospitals. People who were minimally well-off and had families preferred to die in their beds, cared for and attended to by their loved ones. She is also concerned about being able to pay for a decent burial and niche. She fears it so much that she goes so far as to ask God for all the bitterness that He wants to send her rather than see her mother suffer because of misery. When her mother dies, in June 1860, Amalia is twenty-five years old. She is a spinster, without a family, without income from her work or from rents. She sells the furniture in the house and reduces all of her belongings to what fits in the room in which her mother died. She is so affected that it will take her three months to recover her memory.

What options does a single woman, with no income and almost blind, have in 1860?

Really very few: the cloister of a convent or the prison of marriage of convenience. He refuses both. The first because she feels that it is a lost life and that it distances her from sacred family ties. The second, because she does not want to deceive or deceive herself, thereby following the education that her mother had instilled in her. So she prefers freedom with all the consequences of it. She finally decides to accept a pension from her father's relatives, in exchange for being the family seamstress. The pension will last six months, during which she continues living in the same room in which her mother died. Once the pension is over and without resources, she will begin an itinerary through several cities and with several friends of her mother. This itinerary will lead Amalia to the need to look for work in Madrid, where she hopes to work as a seamstress, and for her poetry to be more valued and remunerated than it had been until now. At the beginning of the 1870s, Amalia delved into the study of Spiritism. In a short time, her poetry will be published in El Criterio and other spiritist magazines of the time, although she does not stop sewing to obtain sufficient income for her personal maintenance. We are at the moment when, thanks to visits to Dr. Joaquín Hysern's office, she learns about the existence of the Spiritist doctrine and how it answers the questions that worried her so much about the reason for the apparent inequality between people. since no theory or religion had responded rationally to these questions. She continues to frequent the evangelical chapel on Calatrava Street, where she goes together with her friend Engracia de ella, and where she had managed to be esteemed and known. She continues to hear the sermons of the evangelists who sometimes manage to convince her with her arguments, although other times she is the one who mentally refutes them. She gets a spiritist family to give her The Book of Spirits, although she can only read it for 30 minutes in the morning, resting every 20 lines. One morning, when she was fixing a tunic (she sews for 15 minutes and not in a row), she unexpectedly regains her vision, opening up a new life for her. She finds a job as a seamstress and feels happier than she would be if she had inherited a large fortune. With the copies of “El Criterio” she reads Fernández Colavida and Lagier y Pomares. Since she cannot subscribe to the magazine, she sends poems in exchange for the subscription. She will do the same with as many spiritist magazines as she knows. She will ask to be introduced to the Spanish Spiritualist Society and will begin to frequent its meetings. So much so that on the 5th anniversary of Allan Kardec's death (03-31-1874) she speaks for the first time in public and reads a poem titled “In memory of A. Kardec”. From that moment on he always counts on her. Her work day is endless. She sews in a French lady's sewing workshop and there, between fabrics, threads and needles, she composes the poems that she must keep in her memory or that the owner's niece writes on paper by dictation. She usually gets up at four and writes until six to go to work. When she returns she starts writing again until eleven or twelve. We should not be surprised, then, that her eyes begin to resent again. She faces a dilemma. On the one hand, the directors of the magazines in which she collaborates insist on the need for her to continue writing, since her articles are highly commented on and valued as they are written in a plain and accessible language that everyone understands. On the other hand, she feels the need to earn her own living and not be a burden to others or to Spiritualism. She must continue sewing because it is the only way to support herself. Continuing with her eyesight problems, oculists recommend sea baths. As she is known throughout Spain, a spiritualist family from Alicante sends her the money to make the trip and invites her to their house. Her day begins at four in the morning, at which time she takes a bath, and the rest of the day she dedicates to writing. She visits the spiritualists of Jijona and there she falls ill with fever. Thus, a trip that she thought would last a month turns into a stay of four months after which she recovers and returns to Madrid.

Amalia in Barcelona

Her arrival in Barcelona meant for Amalia the opportunity to fully dedicate herself to Spiritism. Overcoming great difficulties, she made the light of truth shine, bringing knowledge and charity wherever it was most needed. Discovering the last years of her life, we conclude this installment of four articles, dedicated to our always beloved Amalia. We meet her return to Madrid after recovering from fever. She returns to the French lady's sewing workshop and returns to live with her sister-friend-landlady, to whom she had previously rented a room with a desk where she could write and prepare her articles and collaborations. with magazines. Now the domestic situation has changed: her old room is occupied. Since she doesn't want to be separated from her sister, they decide to share the room and even the bed. She has no place to write and she does it at the kitchen table, without privacy, with continuous interruptions and being continually harassed by the Spirits who incessantly push her to write. It is very difficult for her to combine her work as a seamstress with her collaborations in magazines. In May 1876 she received a visit from two Catalan spiritualists with the proposal from Luis Llach, then president of La Buena Nueva de Gracia, that she move to Barcelona and dedicate herself entirely to writing. In principle she rejects the offer because she wants to live off her own work but the arguments she puts forward are forceful since in Barcelona she will find work and better pay, with which she will have more time to dedicate to writing. she. This convinces her, as well as the possibility that her sister's landlady along with her family will also move to Gracia. Upon arrival in Barcelona, Amalia and Luis Llach have an interview in which they both explain her intentions. Amalia that of being independent, looking for work and writing, and Llach that of the lack of writers and disseminators of spiritualism and the excess of dressmakers and seamstresses; Furthermore, it is one thing what Amalia desires and quite another what her ill-fated eyes allow her to do. In a short time she will stop seeing and that is why she is preparing a room for him in her house, with her family, with the only obligation that she dedicates all of her time to writing. Soon L. Llach's predictions come true and Amalia accepts the hospitality of the entire family. He encounters the same problems that any emigrant faces: the abandonment of his loved ones, the lack of knowledge of the language, aggravated by his vision problem and by the natural adaptation to the dynamics of a family he does not know. Everyone has a job, everyone knows what they have to do, Luis and his son go out to work, his daughter goes to school and his wife takes care of the house. The sight of her makes her feel clumsy and thinks she is more of a nuisance than a help. Her only way out is her articles and she sets to work on them frantically.

Consolidating her role as an editor

There is a lot of correspondence that she receives and to which she responds personally. The spiritualists, aware of her hardship, help her by giving her stamps, paper, envelopes, ink, a writing pad, etc. Everything is smoothed out. At the end of August 1877, an article was published in El Diario de Barcelona in which atrocities were said about Spiritism. L.Llach encourages her to answer in the terms she considers appropriate. Shortly after, she was consecrated as a defender of Spiritism thanks to the controversy held with D. Vicente de Manterola. This will not be the only controversy he maintains; he will repeat it again, a few years later, with a Piarist, Father Sallarés, and with a Jesuit, Father Fita, and which will be collected in a book entitled Impressions and comments on the sermons of a Piarist and a Jesuit. Coinciding with the controversy with D. Vicente de Manterola, L. Llach and the spiritist editor Juan Torrents proposed the creation of a spiritist weekly directed by her, for women and in which only women write. It will be La Luz del Porvenir and Cándida Sanz, Matilde Fernandez, Encarnación del Riego, etc. will write in it. The list would be endless. Her collaborators send her articles from all Spanish-speaking countries and she maintains a relationship of loving friendship with them. Some letters that remain from this correspondence are a good reflection. With this she becomes a pioneer defender of women's rights, demanding for us the right to education, the free exercise of all professions, equal rights and salaries, independence, dignity. Some of these rights are still being claimed. With respect to education, she defended the need to change the female educational system, because until then women's education was very superficial, designed to develop in a domestic environment and not designed to be able to develop in a professional environment. The first issue of La Luz del Porvenir is suspended by judicial means for 42 weeks. He is not afraid and releases The Echo of Truth, with the same characteristics and the same collaborators. It will continue to be published until an amnesty makes the publication of La Luz del Porvenir possible again. This weekly will be published until 1900, the year in which Amalia decides to stop publishing it due to the serious financial problems that the magazine is going through. Amalia's work does not end with the publication of the weekly but is enhanced with actions in other fields, meeting the needs of the most disadvantaged, collecting aid for those affected by the floods in Murcia, visiting prisoners in the prisons of Barcelona, visiting hospitals to give comfort with his presence and his words to as many people as need it. She, along with other spiritualists (Luis Vives y Vives), founded the Society of Civil Burials given the difficulty that lay people and non-Catholics encounter in burying her relatives in a dignified and economical manner.

An example of love and faith in the future

In the midst of all this maelstrom Amalia feels sad, unhappy and deeply melancholy. She tells it to her friends and one of them, Eudaldo Pagés, an unconscious medium, enters a trance and gives her the first communication on behalf of Father Germán. From that moment on, with no specific day or fixed time, he will help her with her most important writings and with the necessary explanations to make her task easier. A collaboration begins between Amalia-Eudaldo-Father Germán that will give birth to many good writings, not only the novel of the same name, but will also help her illustrate practical cases, stories of common lives collected through press clippings sent to her from all over Latin America. and Spain and that are explained through the Law of Cause and Effect. Even today they move us to reflect and learn. Her work is so great that the magazine “El Buen Sentido” of Lérida promotes a popular subscription that helps Amalia cover her expenses in the form of a perpetual pension. This pension will last from July 1881 to December 1884. The people who participate through donations in this pension are the readers of the magazines, spiritualists, who do not have much income either. At first the donations are numerous, then as the days go by they decrease. Once this pension is over, she will continue living with the help of Luis Llach, who considers her another member of her family and who will not abandon her until her death. She participated as vice president in the World Spiritist Congress that was held in Barcelona. We are in 1888. Amalia is getting older. Her environment changes. The people who have helped her have grown old with her or have passed away. This is the case of Luis Llach's wife who disembodies and causes him to remarry a woman who does not share his ideal. Later it will be Luis himself who disembodies and causes her economic situation to stagger to unsuspected extremes. So much so that she is forced to sell her books to try to cope with the situation. Eduardo also grows old and sick. He moves to the center of La Buena Nueva to live with Amalia to always be at her disposal. He also dies. Yes, it is true that the spiritual world has arranged another medium, María, to help her in her work, but Amalia distrusts her despite the assurances that Father Germán gives her about this second medium. So at the end of her days, old and sick, she finds herself alone, economically and emotionally, of course she is surrounded by women who love her and care for her, but the two men who have helped her the most in her work have disappeared from her environment. Amalia is sick, she doesn't leave the house. All the women take turns taking care of her, they don't abandon her, they don't leave her alone for even a second. Despite our care, she left us on April 29, 1909 due to bronchopneumonia. From that moment until today there has not been a woman, our compatriot, who has known how to show such great dedication to the dissemination of our doctrine, such great courage, with a language that is plain and understandable to all readers, and with such a great international impact.

Publications

• Un ramo de amapolas y una lluvia de perlas, o sea, un milagro de la Virgen de la Misericordia, 1868
• Memorias del Padre Germán, 1900
• Memorias de la insigne cantora del espiritismo, 1912
• Te perdono!: Memorias de un espíritu, 1944
• Sus más hermosos escritos, 1952
• Réplica a la escuela materialista
• El Espiritismo
• Ramos de Violetas
• Memorias de una mujer
• Hechos que prueban
• Réplicas de Amalia
• La Luz del Camino
• Cuentos Espiritistas
• Las Grandes Virtudes

References

External links

• Media related to Amalia Domingo Soler at Wikimedia Commons