Women in Francoist Spain (1939–1978) were the last generation of women to not be afforded full equality, which wouldn't be granted until the Spanish Constitution was signed in 1978. Women during this period found traditional Catholic Spanish gender roles being imposed on them, in terms of their employment opportunities and role in the family. For Republican women, Francoist Spain was a double loss, as the new regime first took away the limited political power and identities as women which they had won during the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939), and it secondly forced them back into the confines of their homes. Motherhood would become the primary social function of women in Francoist Spain.
Feminism in Spain would be co-opted by the regime, encouraging not liberation, but instead the engagement of pious domesticity. The Castilian Association of Homemakers and Consumers was unique in this period, for trying to co-opt the regime to support women's liberation from the inside.
Some women in the Communist Party of Spain would support violence against the state through armed resistance. Other women found themselves in prisons. Pregnant women in prison often had their children kidnapped by the state, in order for them to be placed in families that supported the government line. Many Republican women went into exile in this period, with a number of them working to support other women in the same position.
Background
Francoist Spain was a quasi-fascist state whose ideology rejected what it considered the inorganic democracy of the Second Republic. It was an embrace of organic democracy, defined as a reassertion of traditional Spanish Roman Catholic values that served as a counterpoint to the Communism of the Soviet Union during the same period. It came into existence in 1939 following the end of the Spanish Civil War. Misogyny and heteronormativity were linchpins of fascism in Spain, where the philosophy revolved around patria and fixed gender roles that praised the role of strong male leadership. For women, the end of the Civil War represented a loss and an introduction of a repressive regime specifically targeting them.
The fascist ideology entered as a framework to justify Franco's actions in overthrowing the Second Republic with a grounding in support of Falange española, which was created by José Antonio Primo de Rivera in 1934, with Franco assuming leadership of the party in April 1937. Franco used his status as head of Falange to become Caudillo, fashioning himself as a political and spiritual leader who led the country in a Crusade against the secular forces of the Second Republic. The regime sought legitimacy through propaganda efforts, involving reclaiming elements of Spain's past. This included citing of Jerónimo Merola's 1587 work, República original sacada del cuerpo humano. It also borrowed from the works of Spanish intellectuals including Joaquin Costa, Angel Ganivet, and José Ortega y Gasset. It also tried to tie in modern Catholicism, and works such as Pius XII's Mystici corporis Christi published in 1943. This process was part of an effort to create the perception of a new Golden Age for Spain.
Spain was described during the mid-1950s as an example of the Leonine Ideal, and had support from Pope Pius XII in Rome. Pius XII was anointed Pope only a month before the end of the Spanish Civil War. Franco sent a telegram to Pius XII to congratulate him on his election, with the telegram being published in the daily monarchist newspaper ABC. Both Franco and Pius XII were vehemently anti-atheist Communist in their world views.
Timeline The truth of the Spanish women's experience in this period is not one experience, but many that continually juxtapose upon each other where various stories about their experiences have been highly politicized.
1930s
As a consequence of the Spanish Civil War, over a million Spaniards died, another million were forced into exile and an unknown number disappeared. Franco's regime would continue Civil War based reprisals until the end of World War II, with an estimated 200,000 people being executed by the regime or died in prison in that period for their alleged Republican links. Adolf Hitler provided support for Franco during the Spanish Civil War.
In the first days of the Francoist period, it was a crime to be a mother, daughter, sister or wife of a "red", and this could be punished with long prison sentences or death.
Women were subjected to economic reprisals by the regime. In Galicia, around 14,600 people were victims of such reprisals. Mother of a Republican A Gudiña mayor, Florinda Ortega Pérez was one such victim. The government confiscated her business and all her property, along with fining her 10,000 pesetas. This bankrupted her and forced her into exile.
Eugenics in Spain in the late 1930s and through to the 1940s was not based on race, but instead on people's political alignment with the regime. Ricardo Campos said, "the racial question during the Franco era is complex." He went on to say, "despite the similarities of the Franco regime with the Italian and German fascism and the interest that the eugenics provoked, the strong Catholicism of the regime prevented its defense of the eugenic policies that were practiced in the Nazi Germany." Campos went on to say, "it was very difficult to racialize the Spanish population biologically because of the mixture that had been produced historically." Vallejo-Nágera in his 1937 work, "Eugenics of the Hispanicity and Regeneration of the Race" defined Hispanicness around spirituality and religion. The goal was the "strengthening psychologically" of the phenotype. Because Catholicism was opposed to negative eugenics, the only way to fight the degradation was through repression of abortion, euthanasia and contraception. Doctors in Francoist Spain had two roles: to be moral protectors of Spanish reproduction and to provide science based medical services. This put male doctors in charge of women's birth control. When medical doctors in the Second Republic and early Francoist period defended birth control, it was on the eugenics grounds that it protected the health of both women and children, especially as it related to the spread of genetic disease and the spread of tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases.
Most of the resistance in Spain during the early Franco period was a result of guerrillas, who coordinated their activities in the interior both with political militants in exile and with militants in prison. Most of Spain's militant women who remained in Spain were in prison or had gone underground where they served as important figures in coordinating activities between all three groups. Prisons in this case proved invaluable for many militant women as they allowed them to rebuild their activist networks or create new networks. They were also one of the biggest sources of female resistance to the Franco regime by exercising daily resistance behind prison walls.
1940s
The 1940s and 1950s were a dark period in Spanish history, where the country was still recovering from the effects of the Spanish Civil War, where the economy was poor and people suffered a huge number of deprivations as a result of the loss of life and the repressive nature of the regime which sought to vanquish any and all remaining Republican support by going after anyone who had been affiliated with or expressed any sympathies towards the Second Republic.
The end of World War II meant Franco felt threatened by the extinction of other European fascist regimes on the continent. To ensure his and the regime's continued existence, he took more further steps to purge outward fascist elements. This resulted in increased lack of coherence for the regime's fascist based ideology. Steps included referring to the government as autoritarismo or régimen conservador de desarrollo ("conservative regime of development"), merging fascist organizations like Falange with more traditional, Catholic organizations to repress Falange's more overt fascist elements, and by not trying to portray the regime as aggressive towards other nations.
Most women in the 1940s were not politically active, involved with guerrilla groups or militants. They were women dealing with hardship, poverty and the imposition of gender norms that imposed on their everyday lives. Their process of coping and surviving often made their personal activities intersect with activism as they subtly challenged the regime and limits imposed by the regime. Women in the Cortes Españolas provided negligible contributions to the body during the 1940s and 1950s, these women would be more influential during the 1960s and 1970s as Spain's economy changed and broader Spanish culture demanded contradictory and complex things from women as the regime tried to keep the changing culture in line with its fascist ideology.
During the Franco period, families of dead and disappeared Republicans were prohibited from mourning publicly. They could not retrieve bodies. They could not give them headstones. They could not wear mourning garb. They could not cry about the loss of their loved ones in public. All grief was only allowed in the private domain, and often centered around photographs the family had of their dead and missing. Photos became a source of comfort, dignity and resistance. They were passed down from generation so families would not forget their histories.
Women were generally not part of the founding of guerrilla groups operating in the 1940s. They were brought in later, as part of a disaffected class, through personal and political contacts. Almost all women involved with guerrilla groups were from rural areas and had family involved. This differed from the previous period, where many fighters came from the middle class and urban areas. One group women belonged to was Agrupación guerrillera de Levante y Aragón (AGLA).
In the 1940s, women were barred from a number of professions. These included being a magistrate, diplomat, notary, customs officer, stock broker, and prison doctor. This was because women's primary job was to be a homemaker.
From the 1940s to the 1980s, families, religious figures, strangers could all report women and girls to the authorities for violating female morality. Girls and young women could then be imprisoned without a trial in the infamous Board for the Protection of Women's reformatories. Examples of reasons women were incarcerated included "having gone with the comparsas of film artist Marisol" and "not obeying her mother. She likes the street a lot and does not want to work." In Barcelona during the 1940s, women had to be accompanied by men such as fathers, brothers or husbands if they wanted to be out on the street at night; they could not go out unaccompanied. Internal Spanish women migrants found life in Spain difficult during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s as Francoist policy dictated they remain in the home. Unlike their husbands who could new develop social connections through outside employment, immigrant women were isolated having left behind their previous social support networks.