Who Wore the Trousers in Eighteenth-century Spain? the Role, Function and Potential of Satire in José Clavijo Y Fajardo’s Pamphlet El

José Clavijo y Fajardo’s satirical allegory, El tribunal de las damas, certainly fulfils the great Roman satirist Horace’s utili dulci dictum, so prized by Spain’s neoclassicists, on the importance of literature’s being both entertaining and instructive. Its witty representation of the age-old debate about the balance of power between the sexes, in the form of a court-room battle over the introduction of a new fashionable head adornment for women shaped like trousers (calzones), is an amusing allegorical tale that personifies a series of positive and negative moral qualities as the plaintiffs, defendants and court officials. Yet arguably like all satire, behind the amusing façade there is a serious message about both the perception that the satirist has of living in a time when things are not as they should be, and the desires and expectations that s/he has for things to change: in this case, as often occurs in satire, for things to return to a former idealized status quo.