“Inseparables”. Tobacco workers in Seville and female homoeroticism at the end of the nineteenth century

A Case Study

Abstract

Micro histories can shed light not only on particular cases in history, but can also illuminate broader historical and structural processes, notably in studies on sexuality. This article examines the case of Teresa Gutiérrez and Pilar Rodríguez, two female tobacco workers at the Seville Tobacco Factory, who were in a romantic relationship at the end of the nineteenth century. On the morning of Monday 9 January 1899, Teresa attacked Pilar with a knife at the Factory, was arrested, and was later imprisoned. The case may have passed more or less unnoticed as violent affrays were common in the Seville factory, but a combination of factors led to its local, national and indeed international renown. Newspapers picked up the story as one of passionate excess and degeneration and the women were framed as Sapphists and Teresa, in particular, as "masculine" and violent. The story was also discussed in detail by Henry Havelock Ellis in the second volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Sexual Inversion, which was also translated into Spanish in 1913. Ellis' interest gave the case, and the aura of the Tobacco Factory, an international dimension and thus made a contribution to understandings and taxonomies of sexual inversion as a transnational phenomenon. This article argues, however, that despite this local and international attention, the case of Teresa and Pilar was, rather than an example of "lesbianism", more akin to older understandings of same-sex relations. On the cusp of new understandings of lesbianism, the women were represented as deviant Sapphists or tribades, closer to a "butch-femme" relationship with Teresa inhabiting a space closer to that of "female masculinity" as discussed by Halberstam. The authors further adopt the category of Bennett on the "lesbian-like" persona to interrogate the representations of the women and place the events within the context of Spain, the tobacco industry and gendered relations of the time.