Lilí Álvarez: del tenis a la plenitud vital. La teoría de la formación de una mujer comprometida

Abstract

This article provides an approach to the idea of training of women from the intellectual and cultural view that has sport as shaft and engine of change. It is worth highlighting the importance of sport in the modern customs of the contemporary Spain and its impact on the process of women’s liberation that, for decades, had been excluded from physical activities. Only some women had access to the new lifestyle that found a reference in tennis, sport involving high doses of modernity and sociability from the moment that allows teams of doubles, made up of players of both sexes. Thus, when analysing the figure of Lilí Álvarez (1905-1998) we can get a closer approach on the relationship between tennis and the eternal feminine. She was one of the most remarkable Spanish athletes of the last century. Apart from her well known sporting success, this tennis player is distinguished for her achievements in the intellectual, journalistic and theological fields, contributing to new ideas regarding the role of secular women in the Church. After reviewing her defense of "amateurism" and some considerations about feminist thought, it leads to a summary of her philosophy of education, understood as a learning path linked to Pauline, Ignatian and Saint Teresa contributions, into a global idea that points towards the fullness of life. Her educational thought marks a path through three stages which invite you to recover the initial fullness, lost because secularization and specialization are characteristic features of modernity. Therefore, she proposes the rehabilitation of that original and primitive fullness, since it is worth living a life orientated and centred on the idea of wholeness, where the human being converges towards God, in a kind of absolute and full communion.