The repression behind nationalist lines during the war and the immediate years that followed left many politically active women with few choices but to leave or face death.
PCE's Unión de Mujeres Antifascistas Españolas (UMAE) attracted large numbers of politically active female Spanish exiles.
Women in the Basque Nationalist Party also went into exile, with many helping in charity work, worshiping activities and propaganda efforts.
Swiss aid worker Elizabeth Eidenbenz arrived at the camps on the frontier in December 1939, and immediately set about improving maternity services.
Most of Spain's militant women who remained in the country were in prison or had gone underground where they served as important figures in coordinating activities between all three groups.
[7] Partido Comunista de España became the dominant clandestine political organization in Spain following the end of the Civil War.
[8] Women were involved with the party, helping to organize covert armed resistance by serving in leadership roles and assisting in linking up political leaders in exile with those active on the ground in Spain.
[8] During the later part 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.
[9] PCE aligned Unión de Mujeres Antifascistas Españolas (UMAE) attracted large numbers of Spanish exiles in France in the immediate post-war period.
[4] In Paris in the mid-1940s, UMAE took pains to make clear that women could be involved with the organization while keeping up with all their domestic work.
Activities for women included supporting prisoners, fund-raising, protecting children, acquiring clothing for distribution to other exiles in need and providing snacks for PCE party events.
[11] Oran, Algeria, received around 7,000 members of PSOE and UGT who fled into exile as a result of the Spanish Civil War.
These women included Veneranda García Manzano, Matilde de la Torre, Julia Álvarez Resano and Margarita Nelken.
The International Socialist Conference in Zurich in June 1947, with García Perez serving as the secretary of the Feminine Section of PSOE.
The only socialist woman in leadership for PSOE was Carmen Maestre Martín, and she was actually on the executive committee of Junta de Liberación Española (JEL), which was not founded until February 1943.
On 30 January 1944, she was appointed to the Sección de Trabajo, Previsión, Asistencia y Sanidad del Consejo Técnico of JLE.
Matilde de la Torre and Julia Álvarez Resano had both been expelled from PSOE in 1946, and became political non-entities as a result.
[11][14] Agrupación de Socialistas Asturianos en México member Purificación Tomás played an important role among socialist women in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s.
[11] Purificación Tomás created the Secretariado Femenino, with the goal of integrating women's issues into the broader Spanish socialist movement.
[14] From 1970 to 1972, Carmen García Bloise was a substitute member of the PSOE Steering Committee in exile based on her position in the 6th area (Seiene).
[11] 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.
In a letter to friends 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, no matter how many efforts we make to try to live normally, they 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.
[16] PNV's women section, Emakume Abertzale Batza, was created in April 1922 in Bilbao and closed in September of the following year.
[18][19] Following the war, most of its members were forced into exile in France, Belgium, England and Catalonia, where the organization was reconstituted and would never return to Spain.
[18] Basque PNV women in exile in Argentina created a branch of the organization on 16 August 1938 called Acción Nacionalista Vasca.
During the war, she went to France where she became involved with the Francophone Basque Resistance Information Service, helping to clandestinely send messages to people in prison.
[23] Garbiñe Urresti returned from exile in Venezuela after Franco's death and ran a clandestine Basque language radio station.
[19] Republican mothers abroad addressed the problem of specifically being targeted by Franco's regime by creating the Unión de Mujeres Españoles (UME) in France.
The purpose of the organization was to legitimize political activity of mothers as being part of the broader efforts of "female consciousness".