Students in class at the Institut de Cultura i Biblioteca Popular de la Dona.
La Biblioteca Popular de la Dona (the “Women’s Popular Library”) was founded in Barcelona in 1909 and was the first public library created exclusively for women in Europe. Also known as the Biblioteca Francesca Bonnemaison, both the library and its founder were leaders in the fight for women’s education. While other institutions located around Europe would later follow in its footsteps—such as the famed Fawcett Library in London—this institution predated other similar projects by nearly two decades.
The Library was so well-received by the local community that within its first year, it not only had to move from its first location at the Santa Anna cloister to a larger space at Casa de la Misericordia, it also evolved from being simply a library to an official educational facility: the Institute of Culture.
In an era when a woman’s education (if she was educated at all) was usually geared towards honing her skills as a society hostess and mistress of an efficiently run household, enrolling as a student at the Institute offered a woman the opportunity to absorb scientific, artistic, commercial and other practical knowledge, giving her the tools she would need to enter the labor market during this the newly industrialized era.
Institut de Cultura i Biblioteca Popular de la Dona. Image by Andrés Fabert courtesy of Memòria Digital de Catalunya.
Today, the Women’s Popular Library and Cultural Center continues to promote women’s rights, and advocate both for women’s equality and their active participation in the private sector and the political process. On the second floor of the library is the Fons Especial Dones i Feminismes (Women and Feminism Special Fund), a wealth of documentation on subjects examined from a feminist perspective. These subjects include religion, sociology, philosophy, language, health, sexuality, art, history, literature, as well as subjects pertaining specifically to the struggles that women have faced throughout history, such as prostitution, domestic abuse and sexism.
Their facility also houses the Office of Equality and Civil Rights of the Barcelona Provincial Council and includes spaces for theater productions and other events.
Portrait of Francesca Bonnemaison when she was living in exile in Switzerland, May 14, 1939. Image courtesy of Ajuntament de Barcelona
Who was Francesca Bonnemaison?
Francesca Bonnemaison Farriols was born in Barcelona in 1872 to a family of successful textile vendors whose store was located on Rambla de Catalunya. When her parents passed away, they left her a significant inheritance, which she used to create the Popular Women’s Library.
Making science, art, manual skills and physical education accessible to women was the central goal of the Library from its inception, but the additional step to transform it into an Institute came when Bonnemaison realized that women would have no chance to make their way in the rapidly changing world without additional knowledge and skills. The addition of commercial and industrial studies would allow the Institute’s female students to fight for independence and equality.
Francesca died in 1949, but her legacy continues to live on many decades later, albeit in a world that still has yet to see women reach full economic and social equality. The Women’s Institute of Popular Culture was rechristened with the name of its founder in 1976.
The Institute’s Beginnings
Bonnemaison’s Institute offered classes in subjects that had not been considered usual or necessary for females to study. She created workshops that taught skills such as calculation, typing, grammar and shorthand note taking, art—including modernism, or art nouveau, the aesthetic that helped to define this period in art history—as well as other practical abilities such as physical education, cooking and pattern making.
Beginning in 1914, the Institute started offering a preparatory or high school-level degree in general culture. In 1918, it became the first school to offer drafting courses specifically for women, or the art of preparing technical drawings, engineering schematics and architectural plans. The course was taught by Leonor Ferrer, the head of the blueprint division at the Spanish General Telephone Company and the first female draftswoman in Spanish history.
In 1921, it had amassed enough resources to offer haute cuisine cooking courses in a specialized space, which proved to be extremely popular. The Institute’s reputation, prestige, and membership would continue to grow, so that by 1922 it was forced to move yet again into a still larger space—its current location on the street of Sant Pere Més Baix. By 1930, its members numbered approximately 8,000.
Institut de Cultura i Biblioteca Popular de la Dona. Image by Andrés Fabert courtesy of Memòria Digital de Catalunya.
The Spanish Civil War and Beyond
During the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime, the Institute was occupied by the female section of the fascist Falange. Until 1936, it continued to serve only students who were enrolled at the Institute, but after that it was opened for use as a research facility and cultural center by any and all female citizens. In 1941, the Falange officially transferred the Library’s ownership to the Diputació de Barcelona, but with the caveat that it should continue to specifically serve the women of the city.
However, nearly 30 years later in 1963, the Diputació decided to open the Institute’s resources to the general public, regardless of age or gender.
In the 1990s, one of the leaders of the local feminist movement named Isabel Segura started the push for the reclamation of the space a women’s cultural center. Over 80 organizations signed a manifesto in support of the idea, but it wasn’t until 2003 that that the Popular Library was officially rededicated to its original purpose: that of a space devoted to the education of women and the promotion of women’s rights. The Diputació de Barcelona signed an agreement with the Associació Promotora del Centre de Cultura de Dones (the Women’s Cultural Center Promotion Association), guaranteeing the Library the city’s financial support, as well as its members’ right to utilize the space for events related specifically to their mission statement.
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Biblioteca Francesca Bonnemaison photo by Vicente Zambrano González courtesy of Ajuntament de Barcelona (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
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Detail of the door of the Biblioteca Francesca Bonnemaison. Photo by Enfo (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons.
La Bonne
In 2012, the Library sank into deep financial trouble when budget cuts resulted in the withdrawal of all financial support from the Barcelona government. It was also forced to battle for the continued use of its facilities when the Diputació de Barcelona balked at renewing the 2003 agreement that protected the historic space.
However, the Library received so much local support that it survived, and eventually rebranded itself as “La Bonne.”
The new statutes define the goals for this new era of the Library as follows:
- To consolidate itself as a feminist space for meeting, exchanging and creating, aimed at society as a whole.
- To continue the commitment to the mixed and heterogeneous La Bonne community from an intersectional, anti-racist and anti-colonial perspective.
- To implement a circular network for the promotion of women's culture: training, production, dissemination, recording and archiving.
- To become a meeting point for women in the world of culture and the different branches of feminism that exist in Barcelona.
Between 2017 and 2019, La Bonne launched a social media campaign under the hashtags #LaBonneNoEsToca (don’t touch La Bonne) and #LaBonnePerLesDones (La Bonne for women) when the agreement for the use of the space was once again up for renewal—and once again, La Bonne received pushback from the Diputació de Barcelona. In March 2019, this campaign helped to collect over 5,000 signatures and the support of 96 different entities against the reclamation of large portions of La Bonne by the local government. The members complain that the government has repeatedly attempted to use space for events that have nothing to do with the original mission and values of La Bonne.
Today, La Bonne is still fighting for the official renewal of the agreement.