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Women and Images of Women in the Spanish Civil War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Frances Lannon
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At the end of the Spanish Civil War in the spring of 1939, General Franco celebrated his victory by decreeing that full military honours be accorded to two statues of the Virgin Mary. The first was Our Lady of Covadonga, patron of the first great reconquest of Spain through the expulsion of Islam in the middle ages. Now, after removal by her enemies ‘the Reds’ during the Civil War, she had been restored to her northern shrine in Asturias, marking the completion of what the decree described as the second reconquest. The other statue was of Our Lady of the Kings (de los Reyes) in Seville, invoked—so the decree ran—during the battle of Lepanto against the Turks in 1571 and the battle of Bailén agaínst the French in 1808, and invoked once more in the first desperate days of the military rising in July 1936, when a victory for the ‘Red hordes’ in Seville might have changed the whole course of the war. In Covadonga and Seville, in the undefeated stronghold of the Virgin of the Pillar in Zaragoza, and across the length and breadth of the country, the Virgin Mary had saved Spain and deserved every honour and tribute. It was equally true that from far north to far south, Franco and his armies and his Nazi, Fascist, and Islamic allies had made Spain safe for the Virgin Mary. There would be no more desecrated churches, no more burned statues, no more banned processions, just as there would be no more socialists, anarchists, communists or democrats. Spain would be Catholic and authoritarian, and Spanish women could concentrate their energies on emulating Mary, and being good wives and mothers or nuns.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 1 , December 1991 , pp. 213 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1991

References

1 Legislación Española, ed. Plà, L. Gabilán and Alcahud, W. D. (8 vols., San Sebastian, 1937–1940), vii. 6–7Google Scholar. The author would like to thank the British Academy for a grant to do research for this paper at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

2 Clara Campoamor (Radical) and Victoria Kent (Left Republican) were elected to the Constituent Cortes in June 1931, followed by Margarita Nelken (Socialist) in December 1931. In the November 1933 general elections three female candidates were successful for the Socialist Party, Nelken, Matilde de la Torre, and María Lejarraga de Martinez Sierra. In the February 1936 elections, Nelken and de la Torre were joined by Julia Alvarez Resana for the Socialists, Dolores Ibárruri (Communist) and Victoria Kent (Left Republican).

3 Legislación Española, iv. 24–5, 239–43, 26; viii. 136–7.

4 Legislación Española, iv. 109–10.

5 Legislación Española, i. part 2, 312–14, 320–1.

6 Legislación Española, v. 563–6; vi. 131–4.

7 Legislación Española, i. part 2, 294. For a study of this purge in one province, see Redondo, J. Crespo, Purga de maestros en la guerra civil (Burgos provincia) (Valladolid, 1987)Google Scholar.

8 Legislación Española, i. part 2, 318–19.

9 There is a substantial and growing prison and exile literature. For womens’ prisons in Franco's Spain, see especially di Febo, G., Resistencia y movimiento de mujeres en España 1936–1976 (Barcelona, 1979)Google Scholar; on exile, see Iglesias, S. García, Exilio, (Mexico, 1957)Google Scholar, Mistral, S., Exodo. Diario de una refugiada española (Mexico, 1940)Google Scholar, and Pamiès, T., Records de guerra i d'exili (Barcelona, 1976)Google Scholar.

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33 See especially various articles in Emancipación 29 May 1937.

34 The essential work on Mujeres Libres and their publications is Nash, M., Mujeres Libres (Barcelona, 1976)Google Scholar. See Ackelsberg, M., including ‘Mujeres Libres: Individuality and Community. Organizing Women during the Spanish Civil War’, Radical America xviii. no. 4, 1984Google Scholar, ‘Women and the Politics of the Spanish Popular Front: Political Mobilization or Social Revolution’, International Labour and Working-Class History no. 30, 1986, and Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (Bloomington, 1991)Google Scholar.

35 See for example Landau, K., Le Stalinisme en Espagne. Témoignages de Militants Révolutionnaires sauvés des prisons staliniennes (Paris, c. 1938)Google Scholar.

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42 Escritos 36.

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