Women in the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo faced many specific challenges owing to a long history of sex-based discrimination in the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement and in the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). From early in its history, there was a belief that a woman's primary role was to reproduce and that only men should be in the workforce. Few women were involved in the early efforts inside Spain, and internationally there were active attempts to keep women out. The formal creation of the CNT in 1910 did little to change this. Anarchist men inside the CNT actively tried to keep women out to avoid diminishing their own importance.
The creation of the Second Republic did little to change this dynamic. Women were largely locked out of the CNT and events in this period, even when the groups claimed to be in favor of gender equity and their articles of federation claimed to support women's rights. Mujeres Libres was created in this period, and served as the largest and most important women's organization of its kind. Founded by women who were locked out of the CNT, it was doubly discriminated against due to its affiliation with the CNT and deliberate efforts by the CNT to deny the group recognition as an affiliate. The CNT ignored working-class women, and made the hunger situation worse in cities like Barcelona where the leadership blamed women for bread and food riots.
The conclusion of the Civil War was another repressive period for anarchist women and women affiliated in any way with the CNT. Many wives, daughters and mothers of CNT militia people, former milicianas and CNT members were executed by Francoist forces, while others found themselves being given life sentences in prisons. Women continued to support the CNT clandestinely, although in the absence of CNT records, their history remains incomplete.
Prelude to the Second Republic (1800–1922)
Early Spanish anarcho-syndicalism The early Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement drew part of its philosophy regarding women from the first congress of the International Workingmen's Association () (AIT) in 1866. The congress created a resolution that said, "Without the family, the human species is only a conglomerate of beings, without certain functions, without reason, without law and without purposes. Without the family, men are a huge confused, immense community, where the only enemy is man. Without the family, women do not have on the earth, have no reason for being, since without the family woman is only a wandering being, condemned by her physical constitution to premature exhaustion, to incessant and impotent efforts, which transform her organism in a radical way and amount to the negation of the species and the disappearance of the species." The international Congress then went on to defend distinct sex roles based on biology where femaleness is defined by procreation. The belief carried on in the movement that women should remain out of the workforce as an appendage to man because of man's need to produce, whole women reproduced.
Views in Spain changed little in the next ten years. While the 1872 Congreso de la Regional de España in Zaragoza published a declaration espousing equal rights between the sexes, this period otherwise saw little material, especially material aimed at a male audience, to support these utopian positions. More broadly, this mid-19th century in Spain saw no women represented among Spain's unions and trade associations.
A few women were involved in the movement, but little is known about them. The two most well known ranking women before the 1900 and the birth of the CNT in 1910 were Manuela Díaz and Vicenta Dura. They served as secretaries in 1883 in Federación Regional Española de la Internacional. Beyond this fact, little is known about them, other than their opposition to the Franco-Prussian War, which they signed a petition by Ateneo Catalán in Barcelona in 1869, and that they participated in the Federación Regional Española de la Internacional Congress in 1872 in Zaragoza.
Formation of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo
The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo was formed in 1910 as an anarcho-syndicalism organization. The framework of gender being part of the labor and anarchist union movement entered Confederación Nacional del Trabajo's platform between 1910 and 1913. At this time, when women internationally wanted to be involved in their own national organizations, they were locked out. This included leading feminists of the day like Clara Zetken, Rosa Luxemburg and Alexandra Kollantai who espoused the belief that the personal is political. They were forced into women's only organizations that had little power in the broader movement. The only opportunities for them to full integrate was through youth organizations or the formation of women only trade unions.
The 1918 Congress of CNT demonstrated the gender based tensions among anarchists in Spain. Men tried to use the Congress to assert their own power over women in both the public and private sphere. This was in large part because male anarchists did not want to see a power dynamic change which would result in a diminishment of their own status.
Much of the early history of this period is only known because of Teresa Claramunt, Soledad Gustavo, Maria Caro, Angela Graupera, key women in CNT in terms of creating a history of women's voices and documenting their activities in the pre-Republic and Republic periods. It was during this period from 1910 to 1920 that anarchist women eschewed CNT. A consequence of their rejection of CNT was the creation women's only organizations in Spain including Acción Femenina in 1921. Another consequence of male rejection of female involvement was that some women sympathetic to their cause were rejected from participating, even on the margins. Maria Dolores Rodríguez sympathized greatly with the movement, but her embrace of Catholicism and its organizational structure resulted in her being excluded from it.
Women both inside and outside CNT continued to make and refine arguments about the role of women and sex in anarchist philosophy, with most of the women who would later create Mujeres Libres writing about these issues during the end of the 19th century and early 20th century. Their arguments would be further refined as a result of World War I, where they saw the impact of the need for women across Europe to work outside their homes.
Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–1930) During this period, CNT members in many places were required to meet clandestinely. Women continued to refine their positions during the Dictatorship of Primo de Reivera. In the 1920s, anarchist viewed women having fewer children, increased sex education and the elimination of prostitution as position that would provide resistance to institutions and ideologies they opposed, including capitalism, religion and the military. These changes would also emancipate women, by defining them around a task other than reproduction.
Second Spanish Republic (1931–1937) CNT was one of the two major anarchist organizations active during the Second Republic. By July 1936, their membership ranks were over 850,000, and were organized by region and sector of employment. CNT ignored specific needs of women, including maternity leave, childcare provisions and equal pay; they instead focused on general needs or needs of men in the workforces they represented. The CNT also perpetuated gender inequality, by paying its female employees less than men in comparable positions. CNT helped bring a right wing government to power after the 1933 elections by refusing to support the Popular Front alliance, and largely chose to abstain from the elections. They changed their positions for the 1936 elections, which assisted in bring the left back into power in the Second Republic.
The Second Republic did not result in immediate improvements for women inside the anarcho-syndicalist movement supported by CNT. Women were largely locked out of organized political groups and events in this period, even when said groups claimed to be for gender equity. Major trade unions at the time like UGT and CNT ignored specific needs of women, including maternity leave, childcare provisions and equal pay; they instead focused on general needs or needs of men in the workforces they represented. The CNT also perpetuated gender inequality, by paying its female employees less than men in comparable positions. Only 4% of UGT's membership was female by 1932.
While CNT offered a utopian view of women, the period of the Second Republic saw the realization of a massive contradiction in ideology with practice. Ideology promised liberation for women, but in practice in the CNT it meant subjugation of women. One of the biggest challenges faced by leftist women was Marxism prioritized the issue of class struggle over gender issues. For anarchists, syndicalists, communist and socialist women, this often resulted in male leadership deprioritizing women's needs and locking women out of participation and governance as their needs did not directly relate to the class struggle. Some leftist men, both in political and labor organizations, also resented women entering the workforce, viewing their lower wages as contributing to employers lowering wages among male workers. On the whole, the anarchist movement's male leadership engaged in deliberate exclusion of women and discouragement from seeking leadership positions in these organizations. Women were effectively locked out of the two largest anarchist organizations, CNT and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI).
Continued exclusion from CNT lead women in Barcelona to form Agrupación Cultural Femenina in 1935. Its members included Pilar Grangel, Áurea Cuadrado, Nicolasa Gutiérrez, Maruja Boadas, Rita Prunes and Conchita Liaño. Two years later, with will still not feeling represented by CNT, Mujeres Libres would be created in April 1936, and eventually see membership of over 20,000 women. They would also start publishing a magazine of the same name. The last issue would be published in Barcelona in December 1938, right before the city fell to fascist forces. No issues of it exist. Lucía Sánchez Satornil had been writing for newspapers and working in Madrid as a secretary for the local CNT branch during the Second Republic. From this position, she became one of CNT's more prominent women, and often collaborated with other labor organization media outfits. In one article, she wrote, "The problems of the proletarian woman requires solutions specific to the margin of class conflict resolutions." She would soon team up with other women inside CNT including Mercedes Comaposada, Amparo Poch, Carmen Conde, Suceso Portales and Joaquina Colomer to address these issues. Meanwhile, Libertad Rodenas, Pura Pérez and Olimpia Gómez worked with CNT youth group Juventudes Libertarias to further their goals for women.
Women, both inside CNT's structure and in organizations like Mujeres Libres, continued to try to push CNT to change its position on women to little success. CNT Congress in Zaragoza in May 1936 saw the Fabric and Textile Union of Barcelona publish a position that said of women's sexual freedom, "Sexual problems must have a moral regulator ... Sexual freedom, even though there should be no penalty of any kind for investment cases (read homosexuality) must be regulated by a higher moral concept tending to consider the sexual act as a derivative of the reproductive function of the species." Despite this, Mujeres Libres, the leading women's anarcho-syndicalist organization, tried to no avail to get recognition from CNT from May to July 1936, while also trying to bring more women into the movement. The CNT did not listen, and the Civil War then forced upon leadership an accelerated, radical change in its position.
Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)