Women in the Second Spanish Republic
Communist women also faced internal discrimination, which Dolores Ibárruri successfully navigated to join the top ranks of Partido Comunista de España.
[3] The Popular Front was a coalition of leftist parties created during the Second Spanish Republic ahead of the 1936 elections as a way of ensuring a left wing majority in the Congreso de Diputados.
[19] During the elections, pamphlets were distributed in Seville that warned women that a leftist Republican victory would result in the government removing their children from their homes and the destruction of their families.
[21] Campoamor found herself locked out of the political process for the 1936 elections, as she had criticized her Radical Party for not supporting women's issues and removed herself from their list.
[23][12] The founding of the Second Republic in 1931 brought in a five-year period that began to see both a change in historical gender roles and in legal rights for women.
The first women to win seats in Spain's Cortes were Clara Campoamor Rodríguez, Victoria Kent Siano and Margarita Nelken y Mansbergen.
[7][19] Campoamor and Kent had both been waging highly public battles during the writing of the constitution of the Second Republic over the rights of women, and over the issue of universal suffrage.
[27] Kent, in contrast, received much more support from Spain's right, including Catholics and traditionalists, during this period of constitutional debate as she, alongside Nelken, opposed women's suffrage.
[10] Kent and Campoamor became involved in a grand debate over the issue, receiving large amounts of press related to their arguments around women's suffrage.
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] 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.
[19] Existing tensions within the anarchist movement, as a result of deliberate exclusion or discouragement by male leadership, eventually led to the creation of Mujeres Libres by Lucia Sánchez Saornil, Mercedes Comaposada, and Amparo Poch y Gascón in May 1936, shortly before the start of the Civil War.
Compared to their fellow Second Wave feminists in the United States, they were more radical in that they provided job training skills, health information sessions, and classes where they taught other women how to read.
[2] Mujeres Libres also set up storefront cultural centers (Spanish: ateneos libertario), which provided solutions on the local level, and decentralized governance in a way that made it accessible to everyone.
[19] One of Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista's (POUM) goals during the early part of the Second Republic was to give working-class women a feeling of empowerment.
Classes focused on hygiene, knitting, sewing, reading books, children's welfare and discussing a broad range of topics including socialist, women's rights, the origin of religious and social identities.
[35] Contacts took place in this period between POUM's Alfredo Martínez and leadership in Mujeres Libres in Madrid about possibly forming an alliance.
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.
[21] Women in Partido Comunista de España faced sexism on a regular basis, which prevent them from rising up the ranks in leadership.
[21] 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.
[12] 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.
[12] To this end, conservative leaders successfully oversaw the merger of ACM with the Unión de Damada del Sagrado Corazón in 1934.
[22] In general, PSOE began espousing a more militant approach to combating right wing actors inside Spain, continuing this thinking as the history of the Second Republic chugged along in the face of increasing numbers of labor conflicts and male leadership quarrels.
[45] Near the end of 1931, workers at a shoe factor in the village of Arnedo near Logroño were fired because they were members of Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT).
[12] Imagery from the conflict was subsequently used by both sides for propaganda to further their own agenda, particularly inside PSOE who saw it the situation as a call for political unity on the left if they were to have any hope of countering the rise of fascism in Spain.
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.
[48][12] Franco's initial coalition included monarchists, conservative Republicans, Falange Española members, Carlist traditionalists, Roman Catholic clergy, and the Spanish Army.
"[21] At the start of the Civil War, there were two primary anarchist organizations: Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI).
