Concepción Arenal
Spanish Feminist & Nurse Influencer
Thank you to Dr. Olga Jarrín Montaner of the Latino Nurses Network who wrote about Concepción Arenal in NurseManifest in 2015. Her CHAO Lab at Rutgers University was recently award a three-year $2.6 million dollar grant.
Concepción Arenal was born in Ferrol, Spain in 1820 (the same year as Florence Nightingale). When she was a child, her father was imprisoned for his ideology and opposition to the regime of Ferdinand VII and died from an illness in prison when she was eight. She went on to become the first woman to attend university in Spain by wearing masculine clothes in order to attend law school in 1841. After marrying and starting a family, her husband died unexpectedly which left her raising two children in poverty. Later, to help the poor, she founded the feminist group for which the Academy of Moral Sciences and Politics awarded her La beneficencia, la filantropía y la caridad (Beneficence, philanthropy and charity) prize, becoming the first woman to receive the prize.
During the Carlist Wars (1833–1874), Arenal critiqued the cruelty of war and became an advocate for the work of the Red Cross by publishing articles in her journal La Voz de la Caridad (The Voice of Charity) to defend the need for nurses and physicians to stay safe while caring for wounded soldiers. Her humanitarian beliefs fueled her work — she created a society dedicated to building cheap houses for workers, worked with the Red Cross in a hospital in Miranda de Ebro, and later served for two years as Secretary General of the Red Cross. Though not trained as a nurse (as professional nurse training did not exist then), she is considered a driving force of professionalized nursing care and is considered the first visiting nurse in Spain.
In the 1850s, Spanish law regulated all the health professions existing in the country — except nursing as it was considered household chores performed by low-skilled people and predominantly provided by religious orders. But Arenal argued that:
“in order to carry out quality care, the people who carried out this care should possess essential qualities such as kindness, humility, firmness, accuracy and perseverance. [Proficient nurses] should be directed at the inequalities generated by socio-economic, disease-causing and in this sense, they had to take care of the poor with empathy, making if that be the case, a visit to their home without questioning the conditions of hygiene or poverty of the same.” — translation and paraphrase from EAN
While formalized nursing education was not established in Spain until the early 1900s, Arenal took it upon herself to write manuals on how to care for the poor when providing care in their home and for prisoners that detailed pain management, how to empower patients, and how to provide care with respect, empathy, and understanding the spirit of the sick. During Arenal’s prolific career as a renowned Spanish feminist she focused her writings on poverty, education, charity, and prison reform, and was one of the first declared abolitionists of Spain. A statue was erected in her honor in 1934, her image was used on a Spanish stamp in 1935, she was honored as a Google Doodle in 2015, and her 200th birthday was recently marked in Madrid by an exhibit in 2020 from Acción Cultural Española and the National Library celebrating her humanist influence.
Further Reading
Many of Arenal’s collection of essays and poems are still available, including the full digital texts linked above.
Learn about other significant contributions to nursing from early Spain here.
Sources
We sourced the above information from Women & Charity in Spain 1786–1945, EAN, Fascinating Spain, RTVE, Wikipedia, Medicine, Conflict & Survival, NurseManifest, and the Journal of Community Medicine & Public Healthcare
Please submit any additional sources or information to us to add via social media or email us at nursesyoushouldknow@gmail.com.
Learn More
To learn more about inclusion in nursing and be part of the national discussion to address racism in nursing, check out and share the following resources:
Know Your History
- Nursing CLIO to engage with historians and scholars committed to deep work around historical accuracy in healthcare and nursing.
- American Association for the History of Nursing to attend monthly webinars on topics of nursing history, view the calendar here.
Examine Bias
- NurseManifest offers live zoom sessions with fellow nurses on nursing’s overdue reckoning on racism and a page to sign their pledge.
- Breaking Bias in Healthcare is an online course created by scientist Anu Gupta, to learn how bias is related to our brain’s neurobiology and can be mitigated with mindfulness.
- Revolutionary Love Learning Hub provides free tools for learners and educators to use love as fuel towards ourselves, our opponents, and to others so that we can embody a world where we see no strangers.
Support & Advocate
- Critical Conversation on Health Equity and Racism Toolkit from the American Academy of Nursing
- National Coalition for Ethnic Minority Nurse Association to stay engaged with topics relevant to nurses of color.
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