Women in 1940s Spain were mainly recognised as mothers and homemakers.
The 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. 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 visible to outsider European 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", 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.
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. Displays of grief were 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 were expected to be homemakers.
From the 1940s to the 1980s, women were able to be reported to the authorities for violating female morality. These women could then be imprisoned in reformatories without a trial. Women were incarcerated for a variety of reasons including: being a comparsa, not obeying her mother, going out too often, and reluctance to work.
In Barcelona during the 1940s, women had to be accompanied by a male relative if they wanted to be out on the street at night; they could not go out unaccompanied. Internal Spanish female 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 social networks in their home countries.
During the 1940s, the number of women in Málaga sentenced to Caserón de la Goleta for food acquisition related crimes increased. The city itself had a severe food shortage and typhus was common. Some women would willingly get sent to prison in order to be able to suck on leftover orange peels because that was considered to be more plentiful than what was available on the streets. The prison was rife with typhus and other diseases whose spread throughout the prison was aided by the cramped conditions where women were put six to a room designed for two.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Francoism said prisoners could be redeemed by the Church. Consequently, promulgating the faith was often made a condition of release. In order for prisoners with children to receive subsidies, they needed to be married. As a result, many women got married behind bars and had their children baptized as Roman Catholics.
The most popular novels written by women in the 1940s and 1950s were romance novels (), outselling all other types of women's writings. These were not serious literary works, but were intended for mass consumption. This period was male-dominated and literary establishments refused to take women's literary efforts seriously. Consequently, there was very little serious criticism of women's writings. When their works were criticized, they were often compared only to works of other women. Some criticism in literary publications would comment on a female writers appearance, while taking very little note of her actual writings. When socially acclaimed women writers like Carmen Nonell were recognized, they were recognized in ways that sought to erase their gender.
Women's rights and feminism One of the issues for feminists in the 1930s and 1940s was that they never were able to successfully challenge the regime's definition of womanhood as motherhood. Those who did were not viewed as representative of the movements they came from. This included feminists in the pre-Civil War period such as Hildegart Rodriguez and Lucia Sánchez Saornil. It was more common for feminists to embrace the concept of motherhood, with Federica Montseny as an example.
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.
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 limits imposed by the regime.
The 1940s saw the emergence of the chicas topolino. Named after an Italian car, women in this movement wore wedge shoes with cork soles, skirts worn a little longer than the knee, nylon stockings and tight dresses. They went to dances and smoked. They wanted to go to the Chicote and smoke American cigarettes. They tried to imitate famous actresses of this period such as Amparo Rivelles, Concha Monte, Irene Dunne or Myrna Loy. They were most prominent on the Catalan coast, where they were scandalized for wearing bikinis. In this period, these chicas Topolino are considered to be the Spanish feminists of 1940s Spain.
A group of female novelists had started writing in the 1940s. During the 1960s, their work began to emerge and describe feminist life in post-Civil War Spain.
Abortion and contraception
+Birth rate and women's marriage ageYearBirth rate per thousand womenPercentages of marriages where women were
under the age of 20ref1938161219402612.51941201319432212
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 impose eugenic policies 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 as it curbed the spread of genetic disease and tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases.
Women could and did go to prison for having abortions. During the 1940s in Almería, 9% of female prisoners were there because they had abortions, had committed infanticide or abandoned their children. This compared to 20.45% who were in prison for sexual offenses that mostly included prostitution, and 4.9% who were in prison for crimes against authority. The remaining prisoners were there for other offenses, like coercion, crimes against religion, weapons possession or having a false identity.
Abortion was not allowed to be discussed in society, with women intentionally kept ignorant. Abortion, along with other facets of women's sexuality, was only allowed to be discussed in a medical setting by male doctors. Abortion was not allowed to be discussed in newspapers. The few newspapers that did mention abortions, used euphemisms. One example was in an article by Pedro Galán Bergua in Heraldo de Aragón dated 1 January 1942: "The evil is not in those who marry, but in the married who are satisfied with the reduced offspring and go to methods condemned by God and for the country."
State-controlled and state-supported religious, medical, and legislative newspapers from the 1940s give an impression that all women accepted the imposition of the state around the topic of abortion and its relation to the need for the maintenance of the population size. Despite this, one estimate in 1943 by Matemólogo de la Sanidad Nacional Angel Clavero Núñez estimated one abortion for every three live births; they estimated that 125,000 abortions were performed every year. Abortions were generally only recorded when a woman had a resulting health complication.
Between 1940 and 1950, there were 44 abortions reported in the province of Zaragoza. 29 of these involved single women or widows. Judicial documents indicate single women and widows had abortions to avoid the disgrace of having a child outside of marriage.Sentencia Numero 97 de 1946. Audiencia Provincial de Zaragoza. La segunda del sumario 31, 1941. Archivo Histórico Municipal de Zaragoza.