While childcare centers had been provided by Republican aligned unions in the Spanish Civil Wars, with the start of the Franco period women were discouraged from participating in the workforce.
State policies of the past were continued, with increased efforts to provide more pre-school opportunities to support later school success but without considering the needs of working parents.
Political parties and unions were generally unconcerned with the needs of working mothers and providing them with state-supported childcare services.
[4] The regime used Sección Femenina and Acción Católica to impose its pro-nationalist policies on Spain through the concept of traditional womanhood, that demanded among other things that women tend to the home and be primary caregivers to their children.
[3][4] This was expected of women, even if they were required to take on extra work inside the home or were able to pay someone to do basic domestic tasks.
[4] Working pregnant women had some Government support when it came to childcare as a result of the 1942 Ley de Sanidad Infantil y Maternal.
[7] Starting around 1955, the Government created a childcare policy for children aged three to five, with the goal of developing skills and abilities that would enable them to do better in schools.
These included low levels of female participation in the workforce, societal and cultural views that children under the age of three are best taken care of by their mothers, and the dictatorship imposing its concepts of womanhood on the broader population.
Starting in 1975, state policy switched to offering more opportunities for children to be enrolled in free state-run educational preschool programs.
This, unlike in other western countries, included attempts to regulate private daycare run by people from their homes.
[8] Feminist groups, feminists inside state institutions and women's sections of Spanish unions differed from their European peers in that they infrequently drove needs for a wide range of childcare services to be offered by the state and did not act as primary supporters of the needs of mothers.
[8][14][15] Lastly, Spain was in a dictatorship, where definitions of male and female sexuality were rigidly imposed by the state.
At the same time, not discussing motherhood was viewed by some as rejecting the dictatorship's definition of womanhood that exclusively defined women in that context.
[8][16] Some parties on the right like Alianza Popular (now Partido Popular) were open to talking about educational opportunities for young children but were reticent to discuss childcare as a result of their own beliefs in traditional Spanish motherhood, where women were not allowed to participate in the labor market.