Chapter 3 - Lorca, the Feminist

Summary

FEMINIST CONTEMPORARIES OF Lorca such as Margarita Nelken, María Martínez Sierra or Carmen de Burgos, and indeed women before and after them, rarely figure on either secondary school curricula or, for that matter, university syllabi, at least not in the United Kingdom. By contrast, Lorca's theatre, primarily his women-centred trilogy of rural tragedies – Bodas de Sangre [Blood wedding], Yerma [Yerma] and La casa de Bernarda Alba [The House of Bernarda Alba] – has been a permanent feature of school reading lists for many years, cementing Lorca's place in the popular imagination as Spain's most prominent defender of women.

While Lorca never did declare himself to be a feminist, his theatre is notable, as Roberta Johnson remarks, for its ‘acute awareness of women's status within Spanish society, especially regarding class, education, work, and marriage’ and, according to Roberta Ann Quance, for ‘its sympathetic treatment of the repression of women's bodies and their desire’. His rural tragedies, written between 1932 and 1935, are a case in point, and it is surely no coincidence that their exploration of the experience of women should have taken place during Spain's Second Republic, at a time when women's issues had moved to the forefront of Spanish politics. Founded in 1931, Spain's Second Republic sought to improve the condition of women in the country and challenge the structural inequalities that had denied them the same access to education as men, the same rights at work, and had made ‘married women legally subordinate to their husbands’, including in the acquisition and disposal of property. These inequalities had been legitimized by the ideology of the Catholic Church which proclaimed the importance of the family above all else and insisted that women's sole vocation was to marry and become mothers (see Lannon, p. 275). Now ‘the new Constitution of the Second Republic described Spain as a democratic Republic of workers and introduced universal suffrage. It separated Church and State, secularized education, and instituted civil marriage and divorce’ (Lannon, p. 274). Most importantly, it granted men and women equal civil and political rights (see Lannon, p. 274).

Even before the advent of the Second Republic, feminist arguments in favour of granting women equal rights had already taken root in Spain.