Women in the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party were few in number, mainly as a result of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español) (PSOE)'s resistance to women's rights. The party had opposed the women's rights movement, seeing it as a bourgeois endeavor that interfered with their ability to work for labor rights. Despite warnings from prominent women about the problems related to this position, they re-affirmed it several times in the period prior to the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.
María Cambrils, a socialist women chosen by the government of Primo de Rivera to serve in 1927's Asamblea Nacional Consultiva, was the most important women's voice of her party in this period. The PSOE engaged important feminists of the day but refused to commit to women's rights and suffrage. The PSOE nominally supported women's suffrage when it was discussed in 1927, after Primo de Rivera gave women the right to vote via Royal Decree.
The Second Republic came into being in 1931, with one of three prominent women, Margarita Nelken y Mansbergen, voted into the inaugural Congreso de Diputados as a representative of the PSOE. Clara Campoamor Rodríguez and Victoria Kent Siano, who had talked to the Socialists in the previous period, won seats for other parties because of their dislike for the Socialists' refusal to support women's rights. Kent and Nelken were aligned on the position that women's suffrage should be delayed, but Kent and Campoamor would dominate the women's suffrage discussion during the writing of the Constitution of the Second Republic. While Nelken may have opposed women's suffrage, her party overwhelmingly voted in support of women's right to vote. Veneranda García Blanco, María Lejarraga and Matilde de la Torre claimed three seats for women of the PSOE in the 1933 elections, the first in which women could participate. The 1936 elections saw Julia Álvarez Resano join Congress for the PSOE.
While the PSOE increasingly believed in a militant approach to dealing with Spain's fascist right, it also actively reinforced traditional gender roles and voiced active opposition to increasing militancy on the part of leftist women. As a consequence, following the Asturian miners' strike of 1934 and the July 1936 start of the Spanish Civil War, Socialist women were generally not involved as fighters on the front lines. Those Socialist women who did want to fight had to join Communist and Anarchist units. The Civil War did not change the PSOE's stance on women. The termination of the war would see Partido Comunista de España became the dominant clandestine political organization in Spain. It would not be until the death of Franco that the PSOE would rise again to become the most prominent leftist party.
Prelude to the Second Republic (1800–1922) Party history Partido Socialista Obrero Español was founded in 1879 as primarily a labor movement organization. Its early pre-1900s membership was almost exclusively male, and they had no interest in gender issues. The first women's group inside PSOE in 1902. It would not be the last. These organizations remained small and subordinate to larger, male dominated socialist groups. The early 1900s, 1910s and 1920s also saw a growth of women into the workforce in industries like nursing and education. These women also joined unions. During the 1920s and early 1930s, women became more involved with socialist movements. This did not translate to participation in the political side, as socialist political organizations were openly hostile to women and not interested in attracting their involvement. When women did create socialist organizations, they were auxiliary organizations to male dominated ones. This was the case for Group of Feminist Socialists of Madrid and Feminist Socialist Groups. This differed from anarchists, with socialist women playing much more passive roles than their anarchist peers. As a consequence, when the Civil War came, few socialist women headed to the front lines.
During this period, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español did not overall want to address women's rights as they saw the movement as bourgeois. They wanted to focus on union organization. This contrasted little from the international socialist movement, which always had problems with feminism and women's rights. The International Socialist Congress, Stuttgart 1907 issued a statement in favor of women's suffrage, but said the movement needed to come from the proletariat. The conditional support was because men believed that women's rights should only come after universal male suffrage. Including women's suffrage more openly would hinder their efforts.* The limited inclusion came about as a result First International Conference of Socialist Women which was being held concurrently in the same building.
Socialist woman Lidia Falcón argued that the Socialist men's position would push women away from the party, or would result in only including women who believed in subservience to men. Falcón further argued this position would make feminists into enemies of the party, a truth that would be born out by 1921, which Socialist men decided that to stop their small efforts to promote rights of women as they did not believe it was the time to push for electoral reforms.Cambrils, María, Feminismo Socialista, Valencia, Tipografía Las Artes, 1925, p. 19.
Congress of Deputies Election Seats Vote % Status Leader 1907 N/A Pablo Iglesias Posse 1910 with CRS – Opposition Pablo Iglesias Posse 1914 with CRS – Opposition Pablo Iglesias Posse 1916 with CRS – Opposition Pablo Iglesias Posse 1918 with AI – Opposition Pablo Iglesias Posse 1919 with CRS – Opposition Pablo Iglesias Posse 1920 Opposition Pablo Iglesias Posse
Education Prior to the Second Republic, Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) recognized that women workers lacked a compensatory educational system and access to educational facilities that was equivalent to their male peers. Yet, despite this, they failed to offer any sort of comprehensive policy solution to this problem and were not willing to advocate strongly on the need to address women's education. The extent of their activism for women's education were demands for integral education for men and women. The Feminine Socialist Group of Madrid met in 1926 to discuss women's rights. Attendees included Victoria Kent and Clara Campoamor.
Women's media and writing Margarita Nelken, María Martínez Sierra and Carmen de Burgos were all important pre-Republic writers who influenced feminist thinking inside Spain. La condición social de la mujer en España was the most notable work of Margarita Nelken in this period. Published in 1919, it was revolutionary in Spanish feminism to the extent that it went beyond describing the problems of women to proscribing solutions, and advocating for changes in women's relationships to groups like working and middle-class men, women of different classes, and institutions like the Catholic Church. Writing from a socialist perspective, her feminist works sought to address the conflict between the roles women were expected to maintain in a patriarchal society.
Feminism The feminism of Spain in the period between 1900 and 1930 differed from similar movements in the United Kingdom and the United States. It also tended to come from a liberal or leftist perspective. Spanish feminist intellectuals in this period included the militant socialist María Cambrils, who published Feminismo socialista. They also included Clara Campoamor, Virginia González and Carmen de Burgos.
Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1930) The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera started in 1923 and continued until 1929, with its end resulting in elections being called for June 1931.
During the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera's had no real national congress until the creation of the Asamblea Nacional Consultiva in 1927. Despite representing various factions across Spain by based on appointment, the body had very little power. A quota system drawn from 18 different regions of Spain, representing different political parties, determined who sat in the body. The last Asamblea Nacional Consultiva group had a representation of only 3% women. Some of the women who sat in the body were wives of nobility, who often did not take their role seriously. Some were drawn from wider society because of their contribution in culture and the arts. Their appointments were a desire to see women become more involved in political life.
PSOE and UGT both had internal divisions over whether to participate in the assembly as it lacked real powers. After much internal debate, both refused to participate. Consequently, the government appointed socialists to the assembly without any party or union oversight. María Cambrils would be one of these socialist women to serve in the 1927 Assembly.
Congress of Deputies Election Seats Vote % Status Leader 1923 Opposition Pablo Iglesias Posse
Women's suffrage
The 8 March 1924 Royal Decree's Municipal Statue Article 51 for the first time included an appendix which would allow electoral authorities on a municipal level to list women over the age of 23 who were not controlled by male guardians or the state to be counted. Article 84.3 said unmarried women could vote in municipal elections assuming they were the head of household, over the age of 23, not prostitutes and their status did not change. Changes were made the following month that allowed women who met those some qualifications to run for political office. Consequently, some women took advantage of this political opening, ran for office and won some seats in municipal governments as councilors and mayors where elections were held. This was a surprise move by Primo de Rivera in giving women the right to vote, and was largely viewed as a way of shoring up his electoral base ahead of scheduled elections in the following year. This brief period saw many political parties try to capture the women's vote before the elections were eventually cancelled. Manuel Cordero of El Socialista of wrote in June 1924 of a right wing governing supporting "the feminine vote supposes a revolutionary act and it seems strange that it is a reactionary which who has projected this reform in Spain."
María Cambrils was pleased with women being given the right to vote, but balked at the restrictions placed upon female voters. PSOE's leader Andrés Saborit also supported this claiming that socialism needed to expand how it discussed women as transformational agents in society, and not allow the Catholic Church to monopolize how women were defined inside Spanish culture.
Women's rights Agrupación Femenina Socialista de Madrid were active during this period. Trying to engage more broadly, they invited three Madrid based women lawyers, Victoria Kent, Clara Campoamor and Matilde Huici, to speak at Casa del Pueblo to better understand women's demands during the period in 1925 and 1926. By 19 March 1926, Campoamor had withdrawn her assistance to Socialists working on women's issues. Nelken would say in 1922 that she saw both Socialists and the Catholics as offering little hope for women, as neither was capable of seeing the problems faced by women. This issue was one she saw as the central failing of feminism, a position that demonstrated a massive rift in Spanish feminism in the Primo de Rivera period.
Second Spanish Republic (1931–1937)
One of the most important things about the Second Republic for women is it allowed them to formally enter the public sphere en masse. The period also saw a number of rights available to women for the first time. This included the right to vote, divorce and access to higher education.
Elections in the Second Republic