To apply the instruments of the analysis of sociability to Spanish women does not mean merely the application of a comfortable category to a colourful object. Even extending them to the modern history of Spain, these instruments allow nuance in the category of so-called «informality», by analysing the ways in which the history of gender blurs the two forms of sociability; a precise, historicised and critical study is called for. If in the 1970s and 1980s feminist groups investigated their past, they have had a notable aftermath: in recent years, studies have proliferated on the Falange, on the workers movement, and on the suffragists, both on the national and (with the development of research in the Autonomous Communities) the regional level. And if one can trace a chronology of democratic associations from the nineteenth-century liberals to recent times, the historiography will also be able to establish key themes and statistical studies.