Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-t5pn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T01:21:40.574Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Women and Images of Women in the Spanish Civil War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Frances Lannon
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

At the end of the Spanish Civil War in the spring of 1939, General Franco celebrated his victory by decreeing that full military honours be accorded to two statues of the Virgin Mary. The first was Our Lady of Covadonga, patron of the first great reconquest of Spain through the expulsion of Islam in the middle ages. Now, after removal by her enemies ‘the Reds’ during the Civil War, she had been restored to her northern shrine in Asturias, marking the completion of what the decree described as the second reconquest. The other statue was of Our Lady of the Kings (de los Reyes) in Seville, invoked—so the decree ran—during the battle of Lepanto against the Turks in 1571 and the battle of Bailén agaínst the French in 1808, and invoked once more in the first desperate days of the military rising in July 1936, when a victory for the ‘Red hordes’ in Seville might have changed the whole course of the war. In Covadonga and Seville, in the undefeated stronghold of the Virgin of the Pillar in Zaragoza, and across the length and breadth of the country, the Virgin Mary had saved Spain and deserved every honour and tribute. It was equally true that from far north to far south, Franco and his armies and his Nazi, Fascist, and Islamic allies had made Spain safe for the Virgin Mary. There would be no more desecrated churches, no more burned statues, no more banned processions, just as there would be no more socialists, anarchists, communists or democrats. Spain would be Catholic and authoritarian, and Spanish women could concentrate their energies on emulating Mary, and being good wives and mothers or nuns.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 1 , December 1991 , pp. 213 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1991

References

1 Legislación Española, ed. Plà, L. Gabilán and Alcahud, W. D. (8 vols., San Sebastian, 1937–1940), vii. 6–7Google Scholar. The author would like to thank the British Academy for a grant to do research for this paper at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

2 Clara Campoamor (Radical) and Victoria Kent (Left Republican) were elected to the Constituent Cortes in June 1931, followed by Margarita Nelken (Socialist) in December 1931. In the November 1933 general elections three female candidates were successful for the Socialist Party, Nelken, Matilde de la Torre, and María Lejarraga de Martinez Sierra. In the February 1936 elections, Nelken and de la Torre were joined by Julia Alvarez Resana for the Socialists, Dolores Ibárruri (Communist) and Victoria Kent (Left Republican).

3 Legislación Española, iv. 24–5, 239–43, 26; viii. 136–7.

4 Legislación Española, iv. 109–10.

5 Legislación Española, i. part 2, 312–14, 320–1.

6 Legislación Española, v. 563–6; vi. 131–4.

7 Legislación Española, i. part 2, 294. For a study of this purge in one province, see Redondo, J. Crespo, Purga de maestros en la guerra civil (Burgos provincia) (Valladolid, 1987)Google Scholar.

8 Legislación Española, i. part 2, 318–19.

9 There is a substantial and growing prison and exile literature. For womens’ prisons in Franco's Spain, see especially di Febo, G., Resistencia y movimiento de mujeres en España 1936–1976 (Barcelona, 1979)Google Scholar; on exile, see Iglesias, S. García, Exilio, (Mexico, 1957)Google Scholar, Mistral, S., Exodo. Diario de una refugiada española (Mexico, 1940)Google Scholar, and Pamiès, T., Records de guerra i d'exili (Barcelona, 1976)Google Scholar.

10 Dolores Ibárruri claimed with pride that the Communist Party had proposed this interpretation within days of the July 1936 rising; see her Speeches and Articles 1936–38 (New York, 1938), 132–43, 232Google Scholar.

11 For a thorough discussion of Franco's propagandist use of Teresa of Avila, see di Febo, G., La santa de la raza. Un culto barroco en la espańa franquista (Barcelona, 1988)Google Scholar.

12 Parker's, own account in Among Friends American International Brigade publication, Spring 1938, 4–5Google Scholar.

13 Two contrasting accounts are given by Orwell, George, Homage to Catalonia (1966 edn.), 8–9Google Scholar, who found it exciting, and Campoamor, Clara, La Révolution espagnole vue par une Républicaine (Paris, 1937), 103Google Scholar, who found it sinister and threatening.

14 Pamiès, T., Cuando éramos capitanes (Barcelona, 1974), 119–20Google Scholar.

15 ‘Sim’, Estampas de la revolutión española 19 de julio 1936 (Barcelona, 1936)Google Scholar. For a large collection of images of women during the war, see Nash, M., Las mujeres en la guerra civil (Salamanca, 1989)Google Scholar.

16 The Times 25 July 1936 and 4 August 1936. These are among the huge number of newspaper cuttings made for each day of the Civil War by the late Burnett Bolloten, and held in the Bolloten Collection at the Hoover Institution.

17 There is an autobiography, They Shall Not Pass (1966). Among numerous accounts of her life based on interview material, see Carabantes, A. and Cimorra, E., Un mito llamado Pasionaria (Barcelona, 1982)Google Scholar. Cimorra was a long-standing colleague in the Spanish Communist Party and in exile.

18 Text in Speeches and Articles 1936–38, 7–8.

19 Berenguer, S., Entre el sol y la tormenta: Treinta y dos meses de guerra (1936–1939) Barcelona, 1988Google Scholar.

20 Berenguer, , Entre el sol y la tormenta 44–51Google Scholar.

21 Berenguer, , Entre el sol y la tormenta 114–15Google Scholar.

22 Berenguer, , Entre el sol y la tormenta 173–4Google Scholar; Pamiès, , Cuando éramos capitanes 54–5Google Scholar.

23 ‘Militante comunista dentro y fuera del hogar’, Emancipación 15 March 1937; ‘El Comunismo y la familia’, Emancipación 29 May 1937.

24 Speeches and Articles 188–91.

25 Aróstegui, J. (ed.), Historia y Memoria de la Guerra Civil (3 vols., Valladolid, 1988), ii. 163Google Scholar.

26 Aróstegui, , Historia y Memoria 163–4Google Scholar; Nash, M., Mujer y movimiento obrero en España 1931–1939 (Barcelona, 1981), 106–7Google Scholar.

27 Speeches and Articles 234, where the text is abbreviated; full text published separately under the title Unión de todos los españoles (Barcelona, no date), this quotation, 75.

28 Nash, M., ‘Milicianas and Home Front Heroines: Images of women in revolutionary Spain (1936–1939)’, Journal of the History of European Ideas 1990Google Scholar.

29 Aróstegui, , Historia y Memoria ii. 159Google Scholar.

30 Etchebéhère, M., Ma guerre d'Espagne à moi (Paris, 1976), 26, 58, 202Google Scholar.

31 Blasco, S., Peuple d'Espagne, Journal de Guerre de la ‘Madrecita’ (Paris, 1938), 86–90, 125–6Google Scholar.

32 For Communist and Popular Front aims and organisations for women, see M. Nash, Mujer y movimiento obrero Chs 5 and 7.

33 See especially various articles in Emancipación 29 May 1937.

34 The essential work on Mujeres Libres and their publications is Nash, M., Mujeres Libres (Barcelona, 1976)Google Scholar. See Ackelsberg, M., including ‘Mujeres Libres: Individuality and Community. Organizing Women during the Spanish Civil War’, Radical America xviii. no. 4, 1984Google Scholar, ‘Women and the Politics of the Spanish Popular Front: Political Mobilization or Social Revolution’, International Labour and Working-Class History no. 30, 1986, and Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (Bloomington, 1991)Google Scholar.

35 See for example Landau, K., Le Stalinisme en Espagne. Témoignages de Militants Révolutionnaires sauvés des prisons staliniennes (Paris, c. 1938)Google Scholar.

36 Méndez, M.T. Gallego, Mujer, Falange y Franquismo (Madrid, 1983), 29Google Scholar.

37 Los 18 puntos de la mujer de F.E.T.y de las J.O.N.S., a single-sheet leaflet, in Hoover Institution Bolloten Collection, Box 53, Miscellaneous Documents vol. iv.

38 de Rivera, P. Primo, Escritos. Discursos, circulares, escritos (Madrid, c. 1943), 13, 26–7Google Scholar.

39 E.g., Escritos 37.

40 Escritos 15.

41 Escritos 65.

42 Escritos 36.

43 Escritos 15.

44 For a discussion of the reasons why wartime challenges to gender relations usually have very limited results, see Macdonald, S., ‘Drawing the lines—gender, peace and war: an introduction’, in Macdonald, S., Holden, P., and Ardener, S. (eds.), Images of Women in Peace and War: Cross-cultural and Historical Perspectives (1987)Google Scholar.

45 Escritos 22. See also Farmborough, F., Life and People in National Spain (1938), 31Google Scholar.

46 Auxilio Social. Social Help, propaganda booklet in English, (Valladolid, c. 12 1938)Google Scholar.

47 Legislación Española, i. part 1, 244–6.

48 Auxilio Social. Social Help.

49 Legislación Española, iii. 22–4.

50 Méndez, M. T. Gallego, Mujer, Falange y Franquismo, 62–9Google Scholar.

51 E.g., in Falcón's, L. biographical prologue to Alcalde, C., La mujer en la guerra civil española (Madrid, 1976)Google Scholar.

52 See Pilar Primo de Rivera's speech to the women of the Basque Provinces and Navarre, defending the Sección Femenina from accusations by Carlist women—margaritas—that it was not properly Catholic and incorporated nothing from their Traditionalism, Escritos 57–64.

53 For a classic account see de Larrañaga, P., Emakume Abertzale Balza. La mujer en el nacionalismo vasco (3 vols., Donostia, 1978)Google Scholar.

54 Etchebéhère, M., Ma guerre d'Espagne à Moi, 148–9, 176, 189, 218Google Scholar.

55 Barthes, R., Mythologies (London, 1973), 129Google Scholar.