Women in POUM in Francoist Spain

Women in POUM in Francoist Spain were few as many, along with male dominated leadership, were forced into exile following the end of the Spanish Civil War.

The organization finally dissolved during the 1950s in Toulouse, France with its memory kept alive by the wife of its last president, María Teresa Carbone, through the Fundació Andreu Nin .

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.

[5] Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) was founded on 29 September 1935 in Barcelona as a result of mergers of the Bloque Obrero y Campesino and Izquierda Comunista.

By the mid-1936 and through to 1938, Spanish communist found itself in internal conflict between Stalinist and Trotskyites, with PCE lining up behind Stalin and POUM supporting Trotsky.

[citation needed] Most of POUM's leadership were in Republican prisons in Barcelona near the end of the Civil War at the hands of PCE who acted at the behest of the Soviet Union.

[citation needed] POUM all but disappeared in Spain at the end of the Spanish Civil War, with PCE and PSOE being more successful at re-organizing.

[8] Águeda Campos Barrachina was one of POUM women imprisoned during the Franco regime as a result of her involvement with the group during the Civil War.

[10] Anarchist ideas about abortion in the early Francoist period were informed by opinions exemplified by Director of General Health and Social Assistance of the Generalitat of Catalonia Félix Martí Ibáñez during the Civil War, with a policy called "Eugenics Reform" that included support of abortion by removing it as a clandestine practice.

[11] During the later parts of the war and at its conclusion, some women from POUM were coerced into making false confessions in Moscow courtrooms, and then sent to Soviet prisons.

[12] It was only during the 1950s and 1960s that some of those women involved with POUM and Trotskyite purged began to re-evaluate their role in them; their change of hearts only occurred after Stalinist Communism lost its prestige among leftist circles.

In a letter to friended in the United States, she said of her experiences, "Sometimes, it seems to me that as long as life is this dreadful quagmire that drowns us, how many efforts we make to try to live normally will not be of any use.

To live, to hold onto the light, to enjoy the sun, to eat every day, to read books, to what extent all this seems to be wished, forced.