Women in CNT in Francoist Spain were persecuted as part of state organized efforts to eliminate remaining leftist elements.
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) was formed in 1910, and from the onset it did not treat women equally to men inside the organization.
Being a female relative of a male CNT militant could lead women being given long prisons or even the death penalty.
This was a result of a number of factors, including that most CNT women militants only became involved in armed resistance during the Spanish Civil War.
Despite their occasional involvement in armed resistance, in more urban areas, women were discriminated when trying to join CNT meetings.
It was an embrace of organic democracy, defined as a reassertion of traditional Spanish Roman Catholic values that served as a counterpoint to the Communism of the Soviet Union during the same period.
The framework of gender being part of the labor and anarchist union movement entered Confederación Nacional del Trabajo's platform between 1910 and 1913.
This included leading feminists of the day like Clara Zetken, Rosa Luxemburg and Alexandra Kollantai who espoused the belief that the personal is political.
This was in large part because male anarchists did not want to see a power dynamic change which would result in a diminishment of their own status.
[7] Much of the early history of this period is only known because of Teresa Claramunt, Soledad Gustavo, Maria Caro, Angela Graupera, key women in CNT in terms of creating a history of women's voices and documenting their activities in the pre-Republic and Republic periods.
Maria Dolores Rodríguez sympathized greatly with the movement, but her embrace of Catholicism and its organizational structure resulted in her being excluded from it.
[6][8] In the first days of the Francoist period, it was a crime for a mother, daughter, sister or wife of a "red", and this could be punished with long prison sentences or death.
[9] The PCE aligned Agrupación de Mujeres Antifascistas survived the war, managing to organize on the local level in the interior though their numbers and capabilities were very much depleted.
[9] María Bruguera Pére connected with CNT militant, Aureliano Lobo, shortly after her release from prison in the 1940s.
The relationship with Lobo gave Bruguera new energy to participate in the left wing struggle in Francoist Spain.
[11] Ma Ángels Alcolea y Pilar Molina organized a militant women's anarchist group in Valencia, drawing from former members of Mujeres Libres and meeting clandestinely in the 1940s.
They called their group Unión de Mujeres Democráticas, and they had two primary goals: to aid prisoners and improve political awareness among women in the province.
When one woman was allowed to attend a meeting in Valencia as a women's representative, she was questioned by men there as to why she was there and shouldn't she be busy at home.
Sometimes, men in CNT would accuse these women of making the organization less effective and more passive because of their "overwhelming feminine love.
"[9] In CNT's Juventudes Libertarias's magazine Ruta, women's participation was criticized as weakening men, "That same affection of a mother or of a companion, which should be an incentive for the man devoted fully to the struggle of a social nature and stimulate him to keep his combative spirit always latent, is, on the contrary, invoked continuously to incite him to abandon these activities [...] It is difficult to make them understand obstinate male brains, where men only conceive of love in an exclusivist way, locked within the narrow limits of family life, that there is another feeling, much broader and disinterested, more noble and elevated: love for humanity, which makes us sensitive to their sufferings and urges us to fight the society that generates them, sacrificing to the common good our own interests, not only material, but also affective.
The Franco regime wanted to suppress this type of female activity when they came into power as they saw it as subversive and an attempt to destabilize them.
The biggest acts of individual rebellion by women in the 1940s would consequently be denunciations of the Guardia Civil for marking her male relatives as being involved with subversive groups like communists.
[16] In 1945 and 1946, members of Sindicato Textil de la CNT were released from prison after having been sentenced in 1939 for belonging to a union.