Youth, gender and the creation of prototypes for a 'new generation' in Republican Spain

The Second Republic was declared in a Spain whose intellectual elite had become thoroughly captivated by the idea that each generation came to the world with a specific purpose or destiny. In interwar Europe, generation-a term previously used to refer to the act of producing offspring, or to the parent-child relationship-became widely accepted as a social category, and theorised by sociological thinkers-perhaps most notably, Jose Ortega y Gasset. The emergence of the category coincided with the consolidation-in the West-of the conception of youth as a social category and politically mobilised group. In political formations desperate to modernise and eager to break with the politics and elites of the Restoration, youth became a potent metaphor for social change. Meanwhile, self-identified 'youth' became increasingly visible in public life. At the dawn of the Republic, young writers and activists of diverse liberal and radical persuasions began identifying -in an assortment of Enlightenment principles, radical political concepts, and modernist responses to the 'social question'-the seeds from which a new culture would grow to form the Republican nation. As young Spaniards engaged in this search began to identify as members of a generation, they also began imagining what the generation cultivated within a new culture and new moral universe might look like.