Lesbians in the Spanish Second Republic
During the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the first modern laws specifically punishing homosexual acts came into force, though few cases ever came to court because gays and lesbians were considered by jurists to have mental illness.
Lesbians also lived in a culture oriented around the Roman Catholic Church, which set gender norms and dictated laws which left women in general with few rights and little social capital.
The end of the war saw Francoist Spain reimpose strict Roman Catholic based gender norms and a return of women lacking legal autonomy.
Leniency in sentencing would be totally arbitrary and lesbians could find themselves more severely punished for violating societal gender roles.
[4] One of the first recorded same-sex marriages in Spain occurred on 8 June 1901, when Elisa Sánchez Loriga and Marcela Gracias Ibeas married after deceiving a Galician priest into performing the wedding ceremony.
Despite this, LGBT culture primarily focused around gay men began to develop in Madrid and Barcelona without huge opposition from Alfonso XIII.
[8] Some lesbians who were discovered in this period were forced to undergo conversion therapy, voluntarily submitting to it because they viewed themselves as defective and sick in the head.
These cures often involved chemical and surgical approaches, with hormone treatments first which were then followed by drugs designed to remove a women's sexual libido.
These included Emilio Castelar, José Lázaro Galdiano, Álvaro Retana, Miguel de Molina, Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda and Alfonso Hernández Catá.
[11] A manual published in 1908 described a lesbian as "an active, courageous, creative type, of fairly determined temperament, not too emotional; lover of life outdoors, science, politics or even business; good organizer and pleased with positions of responsibility ....
[9][12][1][2] Implemented for a four-year period that ended in 1932, the law applied to both sexes, and came out of Miguel Primo de Rivera's disgust towards homosexuals in the Spanish military.
[9][14][15] Article 616 stipulated, "Those who routinely or with scandal, commit acts contrary to modesty with persons of the same sex, will be punished with a fine of 1,000 to 10,000 pesetas and special disqualification for public office from six to twelve years."
[4] Few prosecutions were ever brought to trial because jurists, influenced by medical scholars like Gregorio Marañón, believed homosexuals were sick in the head.
Set against an international backdrop of return to normalcy and previous gender roles following World War I, it combined femininity with sensuality.
While this was not comparable to equality for women promised under law, it marked a major step forward in advancing nascent rights for the LGBT community in the country.
[4] Lesbians would still face broader discrimination as a result of their gender, which would leave them at risk of patriarchal male culture and gender-based violence.
[4] Some women's homoerotic literature was shared during the Second Republic, with much of it linked to leftist writings, which were associated with feminist and free love movements.
[10] One of the most prominent lesbians of this period was Lucía Sánchez Saornil, a Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) member and founder of Mujeres Libres.
She performed in many plays written by her openly homosexual friend Federico García Lorca, including Yerma, Blood Wedding, and Doña Rosita.
At the premiere of Yerma in Madrid, right-wing supporters in attendance interrupted the show to accuse her from their seats in the upper gallery of being a lesbian and a queer.
[29][30] Meeting Margarita Xirgu in Barcelona in January 1936 for an interview after the performance of Doña Rosita, she left her position and followed the theater group to Mexico.
The residence allowed women to openly discuss their radical beliefs, including the concept of free love and prison reform.
During the Civil War, gay men and lesbian women behind Nationalist lines were often sent to Prisión Provincial de Huelva, one of the two most notorious prisons in Spain at the time.
Soon, she was appointed as the First Secretary at the Republican Embassy in Paris, where she continued her work in trying to secure passage for Spanish refugee children, attempting to get them into the United States.
The repeal of the law allowing divorce occurred on 23 September 1939, and severely restricted ways which in women, including gender non-conforming lesbians, could behave outside their homes by placing legal and cultural constraints on them.
[17][39][40] The 1932 Penal Code with its concepts of "estado peligroso" and "defensa social" were re-purposed by Franco in 1954 to criminalize homosexuality as a sex crime.
[2] Lesbians in Francoist prisons were charged with prostitution instead of homosexuality, which makes it impossible to determine their numbers when compared to gay men.
[17] The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory was founded in 2000 by Spanish journalist Emilio Silva after he successfully located the remains of his grandfather and eleven others in a roadside ditch.
Starting in 2002, he began lobbying for historical memory to become law, which it did in 2007 with the support of the Zapatero government as La Ley de Memoria Histórica.
Lesbians, benefiting from lower visibility as a means to avoid repression, have a much harder history to document in the Civil War period.
