Spanish feminism went through several waves in the Francoist period. Broadly speaking, they are first-wave feminism taking place from the mid-nineteenth century to 1965, second-wave feminism taking place from 1965 to 1975, and third-wave feminism taking place from 1975 to 2012.
First-wave feminism in the Franco period (1939 - 1965) First-wave Spanish feminism was about women assisting other women in improving their lives. Despite the revolutionary nature of the Second Spanish Republic and the Spanish Civil War as it related to the rights of women, neither resulted in a fundamental change in Spanish society's attitudes towards women. Patriarchy continued to play a huge role in the lives of Spanish women across both periods, and then into the Franco era. Feminism and socialism continued to have a fraught relationship during the early Francoist period. 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 female fighters came from the middle class and more urban areas. They desired to go to Chicote and smoke American cigarettes. They tried to imitate famous actresses like
Amparo Rivelles,
Concha Monte,
Irene Dunne or
Myrna Loy. They were most prominent on the Catalan coast, where they also scandalized people by wearing bikinis. For women who had abortions in the 1940s, they did not appear to do so out of any conscious effort to subvert the regime's ideological position around the role of women; rather, these women were trying to protect themselves, their families and their economic well-being by taking the only step available to them in the face of an unwanted pregnancy. A group of women novelist emerge to describe feminist life in post-Civil War Spain in this period. These women had started writing in the 1940s, with a second cohort joining them in the 1960s when censors began to relax.
Seminario de Estudios Sociólogicos sobre la Mujer was created in 1960. The liberal women's Catholic organization's purpose was end discrimination in education and prepare women to enter the wider Spanish society as members of the workforce, and had connections to 1960s and 1970s Spanish Women's Movement thanks to members like María, Condesa de Campo Alange. It became less important as later Spanish feminism rejected a Catholic-based model. During this period, very few works of feminists writers were allowed. The major exceptions were the works of
María Campo Alange and
Mercedes Formica. Formica was one of the major supports of the 1958 Civil Code reforms that reduced restrictions placed on married Spanish women. Formica was active in developing a feminist consciousness in Madrid in this period. Having a higher profile enabled some women to speak more easily on women's issues. This was the case of
Carmen de Icaza, Baroness de Claret. Her ties to the Franco regime and the Falangist movement always made her suspect in many circles. While she may have written about women more sympathetically than many of her contemporaries, her embrace of the right called into question if she was a real feminist.
Francoist anti-feminism Francoist ideologies about womanhood and anti-feminism mirrored those of the Italian fascists and German Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s. Broader goals around women included utilizing them to increase the population, strengthen the family around a patriarchal structure and control the lives of women.
Sección Feminina One of the goals of the Women's Section was to use fascist ideology about the role of women and Falange's teachings in a woman's individual agency to attract leftist women who were seeking to enjoy some semblance of the freedoms they had enjoyed during the 1920s and 1930s. They did this in part through educational efforts and providing a political outlet.
Sección Femenina de Falange worked to depict feminism as a form of depravity. It associated feminism with drug abuse and other evils plaguing society. State supported feminism, expressed through Sección Femenina, offered
Isabel the Catholic and
Teresa of Avila as symbols for Spanish women to look up. They had first been used by Francoist women during the Civil War, and reminded women that their role was to become mothers and to engage in pious domesticity. A 1944 edition of
Medina. Semanario de la SF said, "The life of every woman, despite what she may pretend, is nothing but a continuous desire to find somebody to whom she can succumb. Voluntary dependency, the offering of every minute, every desire and illusion is the most beautiful thing, because it implies the cleaning away of all the bad germs -- vanity, selfishness, frivolity -- by love." The group offered classes for women. Their focus was on discrediting feminist discourse from the Second Republic and supporting the state in defining the role of women as wives and mothers. Sección Femenina did things like creating agricultural and adult schools, sports centers and libraries. They organized cultural groups and discussion groups. They published their own magazine. They worked to preserve traditional rural life. All of this was done with the underlying goal of encouraging traditional womanhood, of remaining in the home as a good daughter, and later as a good wife and mother. Second-wave Spanish feminism was about the struggle for the rights of women in the context of the dictatorship. PCE would start in 1965 to promote this movement with MDM, creating a feminist political orientation around building solidarity for women and assisting imprisoned political figures. MDM launched its movement in Madrid by establishing associations among the housewives of the
Tetuán and
Getafe in 1969. In 1972, Asociación Castellana de Amas de Casa y Consumidora was created to widen the group's ability to attract members. Feminist women were involved in unrecognized roles in PCE, PSOE and other political organizations, generally working towards supporting broader political goals not specific to women. Women's associations were tolerated by the regime but were not completely legal.
Seminario de Estudios Sociólogics sobre la Mujer was created in 1960. The liberal women's Catholic organization's purpose was end discrimination in education and prepare women to enter the wider Spanish society as members of the workforce, and had connections to 1960s and 1970s Spanish Women's Movement thanks to members like María, Condesa de Campo Alange. It became less important as later Spanish feminism rejected a Catholic-based model. In 1969 at the Federación Internacional de Mujeres de Carreras Jurídicas conference,
María Telo Núñez in Madrid presented a paper on the rights of women under Spain's civil code. This presentation would inspire the creation in 1971 of the
Asociación Española de Mujeres Juristas. The group's goal was to reform family law, which was done with the changes on 2 May 1975. Because abortion was illegal in Spain, during the 1970s, Spanish women who could afford it went to London to get abortions. In 1974, 2,863 Spanish women had abortions in London. In 1975, 4,230 Spanish women had abortions in London. In the a four-month period in 1976, 2,726 Spanish women went to London for abortions. In 1979, 16,433 Spanish women had abortions in London. In 1981, 22,000 Spanish women went to London for an abortion. The first organization created about women's reproductive health and birth control was opened in Madrid in 1976 by Federico Rubio. The conference Sección Feminina contact with other Spanish and international women's groups. It was part of a reality that Sección Feminina could no longer ignore these groups as Spain started to undergo social upheaval because of contradictory demands by the regime placed upon women. In dealing with the evolving problems of women, President of Government Arias Navarro said in 1974 ahead of the International Year of the Woman, that Spain needed a "genuine and profitable Spanish feminism", a feminism that had Spanish origins and was free of foreign influence. It should not come from "communities of traditions well differentiated to ours or that are in a very different state of development." Navarro was likely indicating support for Sección Femenina, and not for other qualified Spanish feminists of the period like
Mercedes Formica and
Maria Angeles Durán. Ahead of the Year of the Woman, the government created eight commissions to investigate the status of Spanish women. They were, "The International Year of Women in the United Nations and in organizations international "; "Analysis of the situation of the maladjusted and marginalized woman"; "Women and social welfare"; "Women and work"; "Women in education and in culture "; "Women in socio-economic development"; "The woman and the family"; and" Women in the civic-social and political community". The government used reports from these commissions to produce two reports that were published in 1975. They were
La situación de la mujer en España and
Memoria del Año Internacional de la Mujer. In 1975, the UN International Year of Women,
Banco de Bilbao made a television advertisement encouraging women to open accounts with them that said, "That determined walk is the symbol of the woman of our day, of the responsible woman who works and lives her time. And to her, for the first time, a bank addresses this message of friendship, this tribute of admiration." MDMnwas created in 1965 in Barcelona by communist and Catalan socialist women. {{Quote box ..
Third-wave feminism in the Francoist and transition period (1975 - 1982) For many people in Spain, the period that marked the beginning transition of Spain to a democracy occurred on 20 December 1973 with the death of Luis Carrero Blanco as a result of an attack by ETA. While the issue of pornography was of interest to feminists in the transition period, it was not center to their political activities as they had other goals they wanted to work on first before seriously visiting the topic. Most of the condemnations of pornography in this period consequently came from conservative women opposed to sex more generally and seeking to return to a more traditionally family centered period.
Flora Tristan,
Alejandra Kollontai and
Clara Zetkin were some one of the key women in articulating the philosophy behind
feminismo socialista.
Zillah Eisenstein,
Chantal Mouffe and
Sheila Rowbotham are the three most important women in defining this movement in a Spanish context.
feminismo de la igualdad and
feminismo de la diferencia are Spanish off-shoots of third-wave radical feminism that appeared during the 1970s.
feminismo de la igualdad involved a critical examination of how the world was structured around men, including sexual division of labor. Built on an earlier movement with large amounts of support in Barcelona, these First Days would change the face of Spanish feminism. The lesbian political movement at the time largely concluded that lesbian sexuality "did not have to be soft or aggressive, nor follow any feminist or feminine pattern." Asociación Universitaria para el Estudio de los Problemas de la Mujer (A.U.P.E.P.M.) was the first women's group to be founded in Salamanca. The mixed gender organization was created in the early 1970s, as an offshoot of a Universidad Complutense de Madrid created organization. It was legally recognized in 1976. Women elected in 1977 included Juana Arce Molina (UCD Parliamentary Group), María Dolors Calvet (communist), María Belén Landáburu González (royal appointment), Mercedes Moll De Miguel (UCD), Elena María Moreno (UCD), María Dolores Pelayo Duque (UCD), María Teresa Revilla (UCD), Ana María Ruiz-Tagle Morales (PSOE), Esther Beatriz Tellado Alfonso (UCD), and Nona Inés Vilariño (UCD). These women faced a double fight in that they were politicians in the time of transition and they were women. At the time, many did not understand the importance of their historical role. In May 1978, adultery was eliminated as a criminal offense in Spain's penal code. Definitions of abandonment were also changed, as they were not consistent for both sexes with women previously only being able to claim abandonment if her husband forced his wife to support his mistress while they were living in the same house. On 7 October 1978, the law was changed to decriminalize the sale of contraceptives, along with information on how to use them. In 1981, the Comisión Pro Derecho al aborto de Madrid produced a 39-page document detailing statistical information about abortion in Spain based on data from the Centro de Mujeres de Vallecas. Its data found that of the 820 women who had abortions, 68% were married, 3% were widowed and 29% were single. Of the 600 women were data was available, they found that 86.9% had their abortion before 12 weeks, that 72% had gone abroad despite limited financial resources to secure an abortion, and that 45.69% had an abortion for economic reasons. PNV and
Convergència i Unió (CiU) were both considered moderate regional parties. Women voters in general favored centrist parties during the 1982 elections, like PNV, CiU and
Centro Democrático y Social (CDS). Women disavowed more the extremist elements like ETA,
Herri Batasuna (HB), Catalan nationalists ERC, and Galician radicals. Abortion was made legal by Congress in 1983, but did not enter into legal effect until 1985 as
Coalición Popular (now
Partido Popular) challenged the constitutionality of the law. The decriminalization of abortion was allowed for three reasons. The first was that it was ethical in the case of rape. The second was it could be a necessary to save the life of the mother. The third reason was that eugenic, allowing abortion in case of fetal malformation. Other countries were legalizing abortion at the same time. Portugal's Parliament made abortion legal in November 1982. Italy made abortion legal in May 1981 as a result of a referendum. == See also ==