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 deliver food to needy women in Guipuscoa (1937). All the adults do the
Roman salute. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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. During the 1940s, the number of women in Málaga for crimes related to food acquisition sentenced to Caserón de la Goleta increased. The city itself had a severe food shortage and typhus was common. Women would get to the prison and happily suck on orange peels because that was more than was available on the streets of Málaga. The prison would not protect them from typhus and other diseases which continued to spread throughout the prison 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. One rule required that 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. Starting in the 1950s, Spain started adopting a more consumerist economy. This would continue on into the 1960s and would play a role in introducing Spanish women to the new modern Western woman. This introduction would result in the eschewing of the concept of True Catholic Womanhood. Many women made such moves with the hope that they could be more anonymous and avoid accusations of small towns of being "reds". Prohibitions against the sale of contraception in Andalusia in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were largely ineffective as women had various means to try to limit the number of children they had. This was especially true for women engaging in sex outside of marriage at a time when that practice, along with having children when single, were highly condemned by the government. Women were willing to take risks to have sex for pleasure by using some form of birth control. For many married
Andalusian women in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, there was a certain fatalism about the fact they would inevitably become mothers. It was difficult for them to try to negotiate family planning with their spouses. The 1950s saw a diminishment of the importance of the Women's Section as their role in shoring up the economy and producing propaganda for national unity were less needed. In response, it switched to become more clearly a social welfare arm of the state. The organization lost much of its political influence and position within the Francoist structure. Its survival was largely because of their involvement in education and no other organization offered women of this period the same level of opportunities.
Pilar Primo de Rivera was viewed by many inside the regime as a critical player in successfully encouraging Franco to relax restrictions for women during the 1950s and 1960s.
1960s (depicted in 1932), the first woman with an engineer title in Spain. After rising within Falange, she was designated as mayor of Bilbao in 1969, the first woman mayor in Francoism. By the 1960s, Francoist Spain had changed its definition of Catholic womanhood. Women were no longer only biological organisms existing for the sole purpose of procreation, but as beings for whom Spanish cultural meaning rested. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Women's Section aided in raising expectations of what was possible for women to accomplish by taking personal responsibility for their actions. By the end of the 1960s, the destiny of women in Spain was changing as women increasingly began to express their dissatisfaction with state imposed patriarchy. Their dissatisfaction would play a large role in the later collapse of the regime following Franco's death. Women were involved with UGT as part of their opposition to the regime. An unknown number of women went to North Africa and
Portugal for abortions. During the early and mid-1970s, the
Supreme Court of Spain received a large number of appeals from women over their adultery convictions. A man with the initials of MDL was convicted on 15 October 1976, and successfully was granted her appeal a year and a half later. The Supreme Court said in granting the appeal, "nothing is said in the judgment appealed regarding the fact that the defendant had knowledge of the woman's marital status." Another woman who had a relationship was less fortunate, with the Supreme Court dismissing her appeal despite her claim that she had permission of her husband. The court said in rejecting the appeal, "there was no consent, because although the husband knew the behavior of his wife, he could not exercise the action while the guilty lived abroad." A man and a woman appealed their 14 September 1973 adultery conviction on the grounds of marital separation on the part of the woman. The Supreme Court rejected this, saying, "as long as the marriage is not annulled or the current legality is modified, the marriage bond subsists and its ethical and fidelity duties remain." Divorce in the late Franco period and early transition period was available via
ecclesiastical tribunals. These courts could nullify marriage for a fee. Consequently, they were mostly only available to the rich. The Civil Courts would only be involved in separation procedures at the provisional level. The Catholic Church was actively opposed to civil divorce in the mid and late 1970s. == Employment ==