Women in the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo
The congress created a resolution that said, "Without the family, the human species is only a conglomerate of beings, without certain functions, without reason, without law and without purposes.
The international Congress then went on to defend distinct sex roles based on biology where femaleness is defined by procreation.
Beyond this fact, little is known about them, other than their opposition to the Franco-Prussian War, which they signed a petition by Ateneo Catalán in Barcelona in 1869, and that they participated in the Federación Regional Española de la Internacional Congress in 1872 in Zaragoza.
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.
Maria Dolores Rodríguez sympathized greatly with the movement, but her embrace of Catholicism and its organizational structure resulted in her being excluded from it.
In the 1920s, anarchist viewed women having fewer children, increased sex education and the elimination of prostitution as position that would provide resistance to institutions and ideologies they opposed, including capitalism, religion and the military.
[6] CNT ignored specific needs of women, including maternity leave, childcare provisions and equal pay; they instead focused on general needs or needs of men in the workforces they represented.
Major trade unions at the time like UGT and CNT ignored specific needs of women, including maternity leave, childcare provisions and equal pay; they instead focused on general needs or needs of men in the workforces they represented.
[2] While CNT offered a utopian view of women, the period of the Second Republic saw the realization of a massive contradiction in ideology with practice.
[2][11][12][6] Women were effectively locked out of the two largest anarchist organizations, CNT and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI).
Its members included Pilar Grangel, Áurea Cuadrado, Nicolasa Gutiérrez, Maruja Boadas, Rita Prunes and Conchita Liaño.
[1][13] Two years later, with will still not feeling represented by CNT, Mujeres Libres would be created in April 1936, and eventually see membership of over 20,000 women.
[13][1] Lucía Sánchez Satornil had been writing for newspapers and working in Madrid as a secretary for the local CNT branch during the Second Republic.
In one article, she wrote, "The problems of the proletarian woman requires solutions specific to the margin of class conflict resolutions."
She would soon team up with other women inside CNT including Mercedes Comaposada, Amparo Poch, Carmen Conde, Suceso Portales and Joaquina Colomer to address these issues.
Meanwhile, Libertad Rodenas, Pura Pérez and Olimpia Gómez worked with CNT youth group Juventudes Libertarias to further their goals for women.
Representing working-class people, they set out to prevent the Nationalists from seizing control while also serving as reforming influences inside Spain.
These militias often lacked the typical military structure in order to better represent their ideologies and better mobilize local populations.
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.
[17][14] While the war broke down gender norms, it did not create an equitable employment change or remove the domestic tasks as the primary role of women.
Behind the scene, away from the front, women serving in personal family and Republican opposition support roles were still expected to cook for soldiers, launder their uniforms, look after children and tend to dwellings.
[15] Federación Nacional de Mujeres Libres was founded in the early months of the war, and quickly gained support by many inside CNT.
Despite representing a small slice of CNT membership, these women were able to quickly integrate many unions into rearguard militias.
CNT leadership continues to maintain a position that women should not have their own separate branch inside the broader movement.
[18] From her position as a CNT-FAI representative, Montseny enacted policies that allowed for the legalization of abortion in parts of Spain still controlled by Republican forces, sex education and the distribution of contraceptives.
[21] The October 1938 CNT congress in Barcelona saw Mujeres Libres locked out, with the fifteen women strong delegation barred from entering.
This sometimes would lead to rioting, which CNT leadership then worked hard to fault each other over in an attempt to avoid responsibility for the bread shortage.
The problem was compounded by the fact that middle and upper-class people in Barcelona were readily buying bread on the black market.
[22] When this aspect was brought to attention, CNT offered sexist excuses as to why working-class women were unable to buy bread.
