He believed that education for women was not important, that the only thing a woman should learn was how to support her husband and live in happy co-existence with him while performing her biological role of becoming a mother and thus serving the state's interests.
[clarification needed] The impact of this was that Sección Femenina encouraged women into secondary and university education so they could impart knowledge to the next generation.
[11] The end of the Franco period saw a demand in many new services from the state as a result of previous suppression of these needs by the regime.
[2] During the early 1900s, women's literacy rates tended to be more constant and unchanging compared to men because literate men were much more likely to leave the rural countryside for the big city, depleting smaller rural settlements and lowering male literacy rates.
[9] Literacy rates for both men and women in Spain were adversely affected by a number of factors in the early regime period.
During the late 1930s, the Francoist government forced a number of bookstores to close because of their supposed connections to liberalism of the Spanish Republic.
[7] National Literacy Campaign (Decree 24/07/1963) was primarily aimed at assisted men to read in order to increase their productivity in the workforce.
[13] Issues of women's literacy rates trailing that of men would continue well into the period following the establishment of the new Spanish constitution in 1978.
Francoist thinker Onesimo Redondo said of co-education, "coeducation is a chapter of Jewish action against the free nations, a crime against the health of the people, who must punish with their heads the responsible traitors."
(Spanish: “la coeducación como un capítulo de acción judía contra las naciones libres, un delito contra la salud del pueblo, que deben penar con sus cabezas los traidores responsables”)[18] The purpose of single-sex education was to limit the educational opportunities for girls and women.
[18] Reforms were made to primary school education in 1945, with the goal of bringing students into political alignment with the state and of ensuring social stability.
[20] The Elementary Education Act of 1945 included a set of principles to be implemented in the curriculum that integrated religious, patriotic and nationalism.
Primary schools started the day with hoisting the Spanish flag, and singing nationalist songs like El cara al sol.
The church is not opposed to a coexistence of sex, but to easily replace a legitimate community by a promiscuity of a tendentiously egalitarian nature.
A curriculum guide by Sección Feminina said of the subject that its purpose was, "(...) to get women to benefit from the effects of this activity, having a spiritual background and considering the goal of perfecting the body, so that it can serve the interests of the soul that is contained in it (having children and caring for of the family).
At the same time, their working class contemporaries were taught in government run schools while girls in rural Spain were largely left uneducated.
This reform was in part a result of girls seeking further educational opportunities both in high school and at the university level.
[11] Following the war, changes were made to undo the system established by various political and ideological entities during the Second Spanish Republic.
This included major reforms in 1938 to the secondary education system, with the intention of making high schools into feeder programs for Spanish universities.
The numbers grew dramatically, with 1,681 female university students by 1927 as a result of reforms made the previous year.
[11] Sección Femenina Sindicato Español Universitario became the primary organ for the government to mediate with the female university students population.
They were not involved with encouraging and mostly supporting students, but about ensuring that university women remembered that their primary purpose was to become good wives and mothers.
[23] The 1943 Ley de Ordenación Universitaria saw major reforms by the regime to university education in that saw knowledge acquisition made secondary to the promotion of patriotic values, with knowledge being shared needing to comport with these values and align with state promoted Catholic dogma.
[11] The 1943 lay required that all women at university complete six months of social service in state institutions under the guidance Sección Femenina's S.E.U supervision.
[23] Pilar Primo de Rivera attended the 1943 National Council of Spanish Education Service as the leader of the Women's Section.
While an influential leader at the first edition of the National Council, she took pains to make sure her rhetoric was that which indicated a subordinate role because she was a woman.
"[5][27] She continued, arguing that women had never offered anything as they lacked intelligence and creativity, that they never discovered anything, and that they needed guidance from men to interpret information.
[7] One Sección Femenina publication casually refers to these women, stating, "The university has seen the arrival of these girls who study happily, write novels and organize group activities and have overcome the traditional passive attitude of their predecessors as they follow the route of intelligent to become part of a minority in our nation's life.
[13] It was only after the end of the Franco period, near the beginning of the twenty first century that the number of women in Spanish universities would surpass that of men.
Their focus was on discrediting feminist discourse from the Second Republic and supporting the state in defining the role of women as wives and mothers.