Motherhood in the Spanish Civil War
The end of the war ushered in the period of Francoist Spain, and the return of motherhood defined around traditional Spanish Catholicism supported by a series of laws that made women wards of their fathers and husbands.
[1][2][3] This definition of motherhood as womanhood was rarely challenged, and would remain part of a Spanish status quo dating back to an earlier period of Catholic Spain.
During the late 1800s, women and mothers were viewed by men as fragile creatures, subject to the whims of their body, and captive to illness and suffering centered around menstruation, pregnancy and menopause.
According to male thought leaders in Spain, these illnesses necessitated women to remain at home and serve in their natural duty of procreation.
They believed educating women in schools to become better wives and mothers would aid the state, by providing a backbone to support the next generation of male leaders.
[9] Motherhood can not be a pretext for curtailing women's rights and aspirations, because after the hardest period of gestation, it remains in full capacity for both; to say that the woman, being a mother, can not be any more, it is as absurd as if the man, as a father, were established limits and restrictions on his intellectuality and privileges.
[3][11] In the lead up to the founding of the Second Republic and the Civil War, many middle class and upper-class women who became feminists did so as a result boarding school educations resulting in parents unable to guide the evolution of their political thoughts, fathers encouraging daughters towards political thinking, or being indoctrinated in classes essentially aimed at reinforcing societal gender norms.
[15][16] During the elections, pamphlets were distributed in Seville that warned women that a leftist Republican victory would result in the government removing their children from their homes and the destruction of their families.
[18] This was particularly upsetting to male military members on the National right, including General Primo de Rivera who wrote about the incident in a letter.
[19] The economic reality informed the woman, completely ignorant of the naive pleasure of primitive life, that the House excluded her from all the tasks of production, from all the public works that give the right to subsistence.
[25] To this end, conservative leaders successfully oversaw the merger of ACM with the Unión de Damada del Sagrado Corazón in 1934.
Focusing on improved sanitation at medical facilities and encouraging women to change their lifestyles during pregnancy, her work helped to drop the number of infant deaths by 1936 across the city.
[28] Near the end of 1931, workers at a shoe factor in the village of Arnedo near Logroño were fired because they were members of Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT).
[29] Women played roles behind the scenes in one of the first major conflicts of the Second Republic, when workers' militias seized control of the mines in Asturias.
Partido Comunista de España (PCE) male leadership strove to find roles for women that better comported with what they saw as more acceptable for their gender and better fit into the new, more conservative legal framework being created by the Second Republic.
This could create tensions behind closed doors, as it attacked traditional Spanish definitions of masculinity as it made the home the domain of the mother.
[5] While the war broke down gender norms, it did not create an equitable employment change or remove the domestic tasks as the primary role of women.
Behind the scene, away from the front, women serving in personal family and Republican opposition support roles were still expected to cook for soldiers, launder their uniforms, look after children and tend to dwellings.
Many poor, illiterate and unemployed women often found themselves immersed in the ideological battle of the Civil War and its connected violence as a result of forces beyond her control.
[41] In the Republican offensive against Nationalist held Teruel from December 1937 to February 1938, brigades on the ground tried to honor Indalecio Prieto's call to protect civilians, and particularly women and children.
Women who had found themselves widowed recently or who had husbands serving with the Legionaries were raped in a mass orgy event fueled by alcohol provided by local wineries.
On 10 August, show trials were held and many women were given death sentences for things like displaying Republican flags, expressing admiration for President Roosevelt or criticizing their employers.
The Nationalist soldiers then threw their bodies down a nearby well, and proceeded to parade through a local village with the dead women's underwear draped on their rifles.
It led to mothers creating a form of female specific identity that had largely not existed in rural Spain prior to the war.
[48] Republican mothers abroad addressed the problem of specifically being targeted by Franco's regime by created the Unión de Mujeres Españoles (UME) in France.
This was particularly true in conservative parts of the Basque Country, where a patriarchal family structure with fixed gender roles of men as the head of household and women as subservient mothers continued into the Francoist period.
Opportunities to work, study or travel required taking classes on cooking, sewing, childcare and the role of women before they were granted.
[52] State supported feminism, expressed through Sección Femenina, offered Isabel the Catholic and Teresa of Avila as symbols for Spanish women to look up.
[35] Following the Civil War, the legal status for women in many cases reverted to that stipulated in the Napoleonic Code that had first been installed in Spanish law in 1889.
Women needed permission to do an array of basic activities, including applying for a job, opening a bank account or going on a trip.
