Rosa Maria Arquimbau i Cardil was a Catalan writer, journalist, feminist, and suffragist. Together with Maria Teresa Vernet i Real, Carme Montoriol i Puig, Anna Murià, Elvira Augusta Lewi, Aurora Bertrana, and Mercè Rodoreda, Arquimbau was considered a model of the "femme de lettres" and one of the six major female Catalan novelists of the 1930s. Her novels and plays, which depicted modern life subjects, earned "critical and popular success". While they were characterized as vivid and sometimes poignant, they were also criticized as trivial and frivolous.
Biography
Born in Barcelona, Arquimbau was a relevant Catalan female activist, journalist and writer whose genres included short stories, novels, dramas, comedies, essays, and poetry. Her short stories were first published when she was a teenager. The humor in her comedies is described as ironic and situational. During the period of 1924-36, she worked at almost all of the daily and weekly newspapers of the left: Joventut Catalana, La Dona Catalana, Flames Noves, La Nau, Imatges, La Publicitat, l'Opinió, and La Humanitat. She wrote a column in La Rambla, called "Films & Soda", her comments, often laced with irony, depicting the changes women face. Writing on topics such as secularism, the death penalty, fashion, women's prisons, politics, morality, and Mussolini antifeminism, her articles often caused controversy with more conservative newspapers. Arquimbau was a political activist. In 1932, she signed the Bases pera la Constitució d’un Front Únic Femení Esquerrista, participating in the campaign to collect signatures in favor of women's suffrage. She was president of the "Front Únic Femení Esquerrista", as well as a member of the Republican Left of Catalonia. She was associated with the Club Femení i d’Esports de Barcelona i alLyceum Club, Associació de Periodistes de Barcelona and Foment de Cultura Femenina. Of her honors, Arquimbau received the Premio Joan de Santa Maria in 1957. She died in Barcelona in 1991.
