Women in the Communist Party of Spain
Women in the Communist Party of Spain were highly active, the most visible figure in the movement being Dolores Ibárruri, who joined in its early years.
The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera pushed the group underground, where they had to meet clandestinely around their public face, the football club Oriente FC.
The birth of the Second Republic in 1931 saw a new era in Spain, where women were welcomed en masse into the public sphere, receiving voting rights, the ability to divorce and increased access to education.
However, male communist leaders tended want them away from the front lines and tried to make clear internationally that female combatants should not come to Spain.
Women were involved behind the scenes, organizing covert armed resistance, bombing Guardia Civil positions, robbing banks and attacking offices of Falanage.
[2][3] The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera forced PCE to go underground, and engage in clandestine activities with their public face being Oriente FC, a football club.
She used her experiences to improve her oratory skills that would serve her later during the Civil War by observing other speakers who managed to successfully engage audiences.
[18] Women in Partido Comunista de España faced sexism on a regular basis, which prevent them from rising up the ranks in leadership.
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.
Twenty-three year old Juanita Corzo, a member of Women Against War, would was given a death sentence in 1939 for aiding Ibárruri, which was later commuted to life in prison.
[14] As a result of PCE male governance trying to remove women from more active roles in the Communist movement, its name was changed to Pro-Working Class Children Committee around 1934 following the Asturian miners strike.
[18] Dolores Ibárruri, Carmen Loyola, Encarnación Fuyola, Irene Falcón, Elisa Uriz and María Martinez Sierra, part of a larger group representing Spain's communist, anarchist and socialist factions, attended the 1933 World Committee of Women against War and Fascism meeting in France.
[14] 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.
[14][17] Nelken was also involved in the strike, then accused of military rebellion and soon thereafter was forced into the exile that year, living in Paris but traveling to Scandinavia and the Soviet Union.
They also created their youth movement, Juventud Socialista Unificada (JSU) in partnership with PSOE in April 1936 as outgrowth of the Asturian events.
Right wing propaganda at the time featured women as vicious killers, who defied gender norms to eliminate the idea of Spanish motherhood.
With the Republic largely maintaining control over its Navy, Franco and others in the military successfully convinced Adolf Hitler to provide transport for Spanish troops from North Africa to the Iberian peninsula.
[18][25] Franco's initial coalition included monarchists, conservative Republicans, Falange Española members, Carlist traditionalist, Roman Catholic clergy and the Spanish army.
[29] Asociación de Mujeres contra la Guerra y el Fascismo underwent a second name change in 1936, shortly after the start of the Civil War.
[3] During the Civil War, Ibárruri earned herself the nickname La Pasionaria as she traveled the country to speak in opposition to Francoist forces.
[20] The Nationalists using rape by Berber forces as a way of bringing women and children into compliance was so problematic, that the British who were scared of allowing Republican refugees in lest they spread the contagion of Communism in the country, finally allowed 3,889 Basque children and 219 female Basque teaches in 1937 to board the Habana and the Goizeko Izarra and head to Britain.
[33] While the national branches of Communist Party supported sending foreign fighters to Spain to fight in the Civil War in the International Brigades, they often opposed their female members from going.
With Nationalist forces threatening her with the potential of being raped by Moorish soldiers if she does not surrender, Republicans were able to cast her as an innocent who chose death rather than to be debased and lose her honor.
Beyond that, Falangist propaganda implied Odena had been guilty of murdering a Catholic priest a few weeks prior, with her suicide was a way of escaping punishment.
[30] Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) was one of the only major actors on the left to immediately reject the idea of women participating in combat.
[30] Union de Muchachas was a communist organized rearguard women's only battalion in Madrid that fought on the front line starting on 8 November 1936.
What is most likely is that various political and military leaders made their own decisions based on their own beliefs that led to different groups of female combatants gradually being withdrawn from the front.
[19] 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.
[54] 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.
[7][55] 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.
