Concepción Arenal

Arenal attended law lectures in Madrid in the 1840s wearing men's clothes, because women were not admitted; when she was found out, the rector examined her himself and let her continue, seated apart. She wrote on poverty, prisons and charity for the rest of her life, and in 1863 was appointed visitor of women's prisons, the first such post in Spain, then dismissed for a political change and later reappointed as inspector of houses of correction.

Her argument was that a prisoner is a person and that the state which punishes has obligations of its own. She wanted classification instead of common wards, education instead of idleness, work that was paid, and above all that visitors and officials should treat those inside as capable of change; her line was to hate the crime and pity the criminal. She wrote the Letters to the Delinquents to be read by prisoners rather than about them, and a study of the condition of women in Spain which is blunt about marriage and the law. She died at seventy-three in Vigo. Her stone says only that she left her life's work to virtue and to science.