2 - Engendering Exemplary Women

Summary

As we have seen, the new state warranted new subjects. Implicit in the struggle for power was “the struggle to impose certain meanings at the expense of others” (Graham and Labanyi 6). Fittingly, Sebastian Balfour stresses the significance of “value-systems” as “a battleground for the regime” (“The Desarrollo” 283), and Mary Nash locates the ideological underpinnings of post-war cultural and gender policies in the regime's national-Catholic orientation, “defined as a Spanish essentialism based on Catholicity” (“Moral Order” 289). Unity, sought on national and individual levels (as a milestone of the new state), presupposed exclusion, conformity, and ideological homogeneity. In spite of Franco's reputation as a monolith, the regime's makeup was heterogeneous, owing to the concomitant presence of contesting and often conflicting ideologies. The advocated models of womanhood were not uniform, either. Instead, the normative and therefore normalizing representations varied according to their loci of enunciation and according to the self-legitimating objectives of given discourses (as we shall see from the example of Sección Femenina). By and large, for a model to qualify as “official” it either had to stem from an authoritative source (such as the state or the Church) or bear the Church's seal of approval through the presence of a vast paratextual material (dedications, prefaces, introductions, etc.).

The ensuing attempts to at once fix and institutionalize Francoist definitions of national and gender identities produced a large body of prescriptive texts. While their study further invalidates the argument for the existence of a coherent and monolithic model of Francoist womanhood, it is nonetheless both feasible and useful to trace the premises about the role and alleged nature of the Spanish woman that they share, albeit in varying degrees. In the following pages, I shall briefly outline the constituent elements of a model that, without being attributed to a single discursive practice, was common to all of them.

The new state called its subjects, both male and female, to order (through observance of authorized practices), discipline (through compliance with instituted hierarchies), and service (through surrender of individual will for the benefit of the state).