María Laffitte

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María Laffitte y Pérez del Pulgar, also known as the Countess of Campo Alange, was a Spanish writer, art critic, and advocate for women’s rights. She was born on 15 August 1902 in Seville, Spain, and died on 9 July 1986 in Madrid. Although born into a privileged family, she lacked formal academic training. She married José de Salamanca at age 20 and moved to Madrid; by age 24 she already had three children.

She began writing almost by necessity, describing how an internal voice guided her. Her first major work, The Critical Biography of María Blanchard, was published in 1944 after she couldn’t find a publisher and chose to self-publish. She later wrote a biography of Concepción Arenal. Writing under the names María Campo Alange or the Countess of Campo Alange, she built a reputation in literary and art circles. She was active in the Academia Breve de Crítica de Arte, served as vice president of the Ateneo de Madrid, and was a member of the Real Academia Sevillana de Buenas Letras.

Laffitte founded the Seminar on Women’s Sociological Studies (Seminario de Estudios Sociológicos de la Mujer, SESM) in 1960. The SESM gathered professionals and researchers to study the situation of women in Spain and continued until her death in 1986. It included scholars such as María Salas Larrazábal, Lilí Álvarez, and Elena Catena.

She worked with prominent Spanish intellectuals like Eugenio d’Ors, José Ortega y Gasset, and Gregorio Marañón, though she often faced patriarchal attitudes. Her work explored how history, anthropology, art, and science shape women’s roles. In 1948, a year before Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, she published La secreta guerra de los sexos (The Secret War of the Sexes) in Spain, criticizing the way science often justified women's subordination. Her writings on women and gender roles remain influential and debated.

In 2008, the Maria Laffitte Women’s Federation was founded in Seville to honor her legacy.