Luis Ayllón
The journalist Asunción Valdés presented her book “Revivir. La nueva Carmen de Burgos”, in which, among other things, she highlights the travelling vocation of the pioneer of the presence of women in journalism and her eagerness to bring to Spain the advances she observed during her time in numerous European and American countries.
Asunción Valdés was accompanied at the presentation by Roberto Cermeño, president of the Carmen de Burgos Special Group of the Madrid Athenaeum, where a public presentation of the work will take place on Wednesday 26th, with the participation of the former European Commissioner for International Relations and Neighbourhood Policy, the Austrian Benita Ferrero-Waldner.
The biography, published by the Instituto Alicantino de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert of the Diputación de Alicante, highlights, the figure of a woman, forgotten for many years, who was part of the Generation of ’98, but whose work was buried by Franco’s regime and is only belatedly being recognised. Born in Almería in 1867 and died in Madrid in 1932, Carmen de Burgos – or Colombine, the pseudonym by which she was known in Spain and abroad – was the first woman editor of the daily ABC and one of the first to join the Madrid Press Association.
Asunción Valdés -who, in turn, was the first woman to hold various important positions in the world of communication, such as the director of the TVE news programme, the European Parliament Office in Spain and the Directorate of Communication of the King’s Household- highlighted in the presentation of the book the obstacles that Carmen de Burgos had to overcome and her fight for the dignity and value of the person, for equal rights between men and women and the principle of non-discrimination in the law.
One of the aspects that stands out in the biography is the Andalusian journalist and writer’s vocation for travelling, which led her to travel through France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Great Britain and Portugal, and to capture her impressions in excellent chronicles, books and novels. In all her writings one can appreciate her desire to regenerate Spain, taking as a model the legislative advances of those countries, above all in Education and in civil rights such as the vote for women. Particularly striking are her pacifist pleas, when she was immersed in the outbreak of the Great War in Germany.
She also travelled to Latin America on three occasions. In August 1913, hired to lecture, Colombine arrived in Buenos Aires as a celebrity. Mexico and Cuba were her destinations in 1925 as president of the International League of Iberian and Latin American Women. Three years later, she set sail for
Carmen de Burgos, who always felt very proud of being Spanish, reflected in her novels and in the reports she wrote for La Esfera, the most prestigious Hispanic weekly of the time, the impact on her of the great American capitals she visited, as well as the pre-Columbian cultures and the monumentality of their landscapes.
