Consuelo Berges Rábago (1899 – 23 December 1988) was a Spanish translator, journalist, writer, and biographer.
Biography
The daughter of a single mother belonging to a family of freethinkers and republicans, Consuelo Berges did not go to school. She was educated by reading everything in the extensive family library, in Spanish and French.
At 15, she moved to Santander, to the home of her father's family, to prepare for the entrance exam to the Normal School of Teachers, whose instructors came from Madrid's Higher School of Teaching, using methods inspired by the new pedagogical theories of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza.
After finishing her training, she worked in Cabezón de la Sal, where she started at the Torre Academy, an initiative of , who did not have a teaching degree, to prepare high school students. There she met , who was an inspector of primary education, and founder of the Santander afternoon newspaper . There Consuelo Berges published her first articles under the pseudonym Yasnaia Poliana, and later in El Sol of Madrid, La Nación of Buenos Aires, and the Revista de las Españas, published by the Ibero-American Union in Madrid. Her views, always controversial, aroused interest in the intellectuals of the time, and she maintained correspondence and friendship with Clara Campoamor, , , Concha Méndez, Azorín, José Ortega y Gasset, Rosa Chacel, Waldo Frank, Francisco Ayala, María Zambrano, Max Nordau, and Rafael Cansinos-Asséns.
In December 1926, fed up with Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, she emigrated to Arequipa, Peru, where she stayed with her cousin Julia Gutierrez, owner of the city's only bookstore. She taught grammar at an academy, contributed literary articles to Las Noticias, and gave lectures. In the latter she created a certain controversy, such as the one she gave at the University of San Agustín in 1927, about "The Indianist Myths", in which she had little tolerance for the indifferent fashion of the indigenism subscribed to by American intellectuals, descendants of Hispanics, "without a hint of indigenous blood or desire to assume their responsibilities, blaming everything on the Spanish colonization."
In November 1928, she traveled from Peru to Bolivia and Argentina. She arrived in Buenos Aires, where she wrote for El Diario Español, financed by the Spanish embassy. The ambassador, Ramiro de Maeztu, did his best to weather the incendiary articles Berges wrote against the attempt – proposed by his embassy – to unite the Spanish residents in Argentina into the Spanish Patriotic Union of the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera.
In 1929, she was appointed director of the Montañés Center's magazine Cantabria, and collaborated with Dr. Avelino Gutiérrez at the Spanish Cultural Institution. She also contributed to the literary supplement of La Nación, directed by , and whose secretary was Guillermo de Torre. He was married to Norah Borges, who was part of her group of friends, along with Alfonsina Storni, Concha Méndez, and Salvadora Leguina.
In 1931, after the proclamation of the Second Republic, she returned to Europe with Méndez and went to Paris, where she was welcomed by her cousin Julia Gutiérrez, who had come from Arequipa with her four children, and her second cousin, the painter María Blanchard. Blanchard had undergone a conversion to Catholicism, like her friend Paul Claudel, and insistently invited the anarchist and anti-clerical Berges to visit churches and attend mass, so she ended up shying away from their relationship.
In the newspapers and magazines to which she contributed, she defended her liberated ideas and the women's vote advocated in the Congress of Deputies by her friend Clara Campoamor, against the opinion of Victoria Kent and those with her who thought that women – under the powerful influence of the church – were not yet in a position to exercise true public autonomy, and would vote mostly conservatively.
At the end of 1931, she arrived in Madrid, summoned by Campoamor, who proposed several positions and destinations in the new Republic, which Berges rejected. She continued writing articles to be able to live, and also to defend her ideas, while working as a librarian at the Archives of the Provincial Charity Board. She collaborated on the publications of the CNT, FAI, and Mujeres Libres. Under the initiation name of Yasnaia, she was a member of the Masonic lodge of Adopción Amor, constituted in Madrid on 2 December 1931 under the auspices of the Mantua lodge and dependent on the Spanish Grand Lodge. Her activities were focused on the achievement of equality of Masonic rights for men and women. In her article entitled "La mujer y la masonería" (Women and Freemasonry), she states: