Women, while still significantly underrepresented as playwrights on Spanish stages, gained slightly more visibility during the second half of the nineteenth century. The model of Gómez de Avellaneda, whose powerful and well-written plays could not be ignored by the establishment (in spite of their continued refusal to recognize her merits publicly with membership in the Real Academia Española), opened pathways to other women who wanted to express themselves in the theatre. Dozens of now semi-forgotten women (we do not even know the birth and death dates of many of them) labored in the margins of the Spanish theatre scene. The best-known woman writer of the second half of the nineteenth century, Emilia Pardo Bazán, while gaining fame as a polemical prose stylist, also wrote several plays.

Many of the plays penned by women fit into traditional “women’s” categories such as religious dramas, children’s literature, or sentimental comedies, a characterization that makes them no less interesting. In fact, if one were to trace carefully the language, themes, and structures of these plays, one would be able to track more precisely the “domestic” concerns of late nineteenth-century Spanish bourgeois society (this is being done for the novel; the theatre remains largely unexplored territory). Life, love, honor, the place of women, the need for education, the role of constancy and forbearance, and the importance of religion and spirituality in women’s lives become the foci of many of these plays. Examples come from the work of Enriqueta Lozano de Vílchez, Adelaida Muñiz y Mas, and Rosario de Acuña.