As our previous discussion has shown, the two doctrines that, during the years immediately following the Spanish Civil War, offered legitimate ways of structuring, understanding, and evaluating “always already” gendered national practices and individual experiences, belonged to the Church and the Falange. Accordingly, the normative models of womanhood were based on a constellation of the sixteenth-century Catholic model of la perfecta casada, the nineteenth-century bourgeois ideal of el ángel del hogar, and the regime's contemporary la nueva mujer of the Falange, promoted seamlessly through a range of educational, political, juridical, and familial policies. Constant among them was the insistence on marriage and motherhood as a woman's paramount objective and a matrix of female subjectivity.

Although the Falangist and Catholic discourses did not always agree in their interpretations of desired feminine conduct (the Church disapproved of the Sección Femenina's modernizing zeal), both those who summoned women to the relinquishing of personal ambitions, embracing difficulties and triumphing over challenges, and those who promoted the Christian rhetoric of humility, resignation, and suffering sought to exalt women's capacity for abnegation: “Acostúmbrate a lo arduo, a superar lo difícil, a la lima de lo áspero, a la poda de la mortificación de los sentidos, al ejercicio de la negación de los caprichos, al vencimiento del yo [sic]” (“Accustom yourself to what is arduous, to overcoming what is difficult, to smoothing out what is rough, to pruning and mortifying your senses, to practicing the denial of your whims, to conquering of the self [sic]”), counseled bishop Enciso Viana (109). Thus, renunciation and suffering were to feminine essence what marriage and motherhood were to female destiny: two sides of the same coin, complementing and completing post-war representations of ideal womanhood.

“En la obediencia que imponemos a los ciudadanos” (“Regarding the obedience which we impose upon the citizens”), wrote Cayuela, an influential intellectual and literary critic of the time, “no se han de contentar con ejecutar la voluntad de los Superiores, sino que han de llegar a reverenciarlos y amarlos” (“they must not be contented merely to follow the will of their Superiors, but instead they must come to revere and love them”) (qtd in Valls 94).