Women in POUM in Francoist Spain

Last updated

Women in POUM in Francoist Spain were few as many, along with male dominated leadership, were forced into exile following the end of the Spanish Civil War. Those in exile often felt isolated and alone. Those who remained were sometimes sent to prison. POUM women participated in a hunger strike at Madrid's Las Ventas prison in 1946. The group fell by the wayside as Partido Comunista de España became the pre-dominant resistance organization in Spain. The organization finally dissolved during the 1950s in Toulouse, France with its memory kept alive by the wife of its last president, María Teresa Carbone, through the Fundació Andreu Nin .

Contents

Background

Hotel Rivoli Rambla : Former POUM Headquarters in Barcelona. Hotel Rivoli Rambla - Former POUM Headquarters - Barcelona - Spain (14396391473).jpg
Hotel Rivoli Rambla  : Former POUM Headquarters in Barcelona.

Francoist Spain was a pseudo-fascist state whose ideology rejected what it considered the inorganic democracy of the Second Republic.  It was an embrace of organic democracy, defined as a reassertion of traditional Spanish Roman Catholic values that served as a counterpoint to the Communism of the Soviet Union during the same period. It came into exist in 1939 following the end of the Spanish Civil War. [1] [2] Misogyny and heteronormativity where linchpins of fascism in Spain, where the philosophy revolved around patria and fixed gender roles that praised the role of strong male leadership. [3]

In July 1936, the Spanish Civil War started with a military coup attempt launched from the Spanish enclave of Melilla.  In October of that same year, Franco took over as the Generalissimo and Chief of State in Nationalist zones.  On 19 April 1937, Catholic and Falangist parties were merged, making Falange Española Tradicionalista the official state party behind Nationalist lines.  On 30 January 1938, the first National State Cabinet meeting was held, with the Spanish Civil War formally coming to an end on 1 April 1939 and an official government formalized on 8 August 1939. [4]

The Franco regime banned all political parties and trade unions.  The only permissible type organization was Falange, founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera in 1933. [5] An election was held in 1966, where people were given the option to affirm or deny Franco's leadership.  With more voters than electors, Franco was affirmed as Head of State. [5] Prince Juan Carlos was appointed as Franco's official successor in 1970, with Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco being the unofficial successor. Carrero Blanco was assassinated in 1973 by ETA. [5] Franco died in November 1975. [5]

Party history

Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) was founded on 29 September 1935 in Barcelona as a result of mergers of the Bloque Obrero y Campesino and Izquierda Comunista. [6] They would find support from many inside the anarchist union, CNT. By the mid-1936 and through to 1938, Spanish communist found itself in internal conflict between Stalinist and Trotskyites, with PCE lining up behind Stalin and POUM supporting Trotsky. The Russian backed Stalinist PCE started purging left-wing Trotskyites in the during the Civil War, culminating in the May Days of 1937 purges in Barcelona and the overthrow of Prime Minister Largo Caballero. POUM was damaged by these events, but did not disappear. Instead, members went into hiding until the end of the war and continued to publish La Batalla and Juventud Obrera .[ citation needed ]

Most of POUM's leadership were in Republican prisons in Barcelona near the end of the Civil War at the hands of PCE who acted at the behest of the Soviet Union. [7]   Some managed to escape to exile in France, but thousands were stuck in concentration camps. Later, they were accused of opposing the French government and some were sent to German concentration camps.[ citation needed ] After the end of World War II, POUM constituted itself legally abroad. [7] El Combatiente Rojo was published by POUM starting in 1939.  It was one of several publications produced by POUM militants in the decade after the Civil War.[ citation needed ]

Women's history

POUM all but disappeared in Spain at the end of the Spanish Civil War, with PCE and PSOE being more successful at re-organizing. [8] Women affiliated with POUM found themselves imprisoned following the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War. [9] [10] Most of the resistance in Spain during the early Franco period was a result of guerrillas, who coordinated their activities in the interior both with political militants in exile and with militants in prison.  Most of Spain's militant women who remained in Spain were in prison or had gone underground where they served as important figures in coordinating activities between all three groups.  Prisons in this case proved invaluable for many militant women as they allowed them to rebuild their activist networks or create new networks.  They were also one of the biggest sources of female resistance to the Franco regime by exercising daily resistance behind prison walls. [8] Águeda Campos Barrachina was one of POUM women imprisoned during the Franco regime as a result of her involvement with the group during the Civil War. [9] In 1946, women political prisoners in Madrid's Las Ventas prison held a hunger strike to protest the poor quality of food they were provided.  Women from socialist, communist and anarchist organizations came together behind bars to coordinate the strike.  While they were successful in seeing food quality improved, prison officials subsequently reorganized the prison population to prevent further political collaboration within the confines of the prison. [10]

Anarchist ideas about abortion in the early Francoist period were informed by opinions exemplified by Director of General Health and Social Assistance of the Generalitat of Catalonia Félix Martí Ibáñez during the Civil War, with a policy called "Eugenics Reform" that included support of abortion by removing it as a clandestine practice.  Their policies also included support of working-class women, by attempting to provide them with economic relief so elective abortions were not needed. During the Civil War, the only women's anti-fascist group to support the legalization of abortion was POUM. Mujeres Libres never mentioned abortion nor contraception.  Support of policies in favor of legalization consequently largely were made by leftist men.  Women did not see abortion as part of a policy of women's liberation. [11]

During the later parts of the war and at its conclusion, some women from POUM were coerced into making false confessions in Moscow courtrooms, and then sent to Soviet prisons. Their major crime was being Trotskyites. [12] It was only during the 1950s and 1960s that some of those women involved with POUM and Trotskyite purged began to re-evaluate their role in them; their change of hearts only occurred after Stalinist Communism lost its prestige among leftist circles. [12]

Many of those affiliated with POUM went into exile. [13] Mika Etchebéhère was a POUM militant who went into exile in Argentina following the war.  In a letter to friended in the United States, she said of her experiences, "Sometimes, it seems to me that as long as life is this dreadful quagmire that drowns us, how many efforts we make to try to live normally will not be of any use. To live, to hold onto the light, to enjoy the sun, to eat every day, to read books, to what extent all this seems to be wished, forced. Deep down, you feel that you do not live, that you are vegetating, that you are floating."  In another letter, she said, "The beings that I love the most have died or are absent and I see this strange fact: I live increasingly away from the beings that surround me, and I take refuge in memories, in the past. I can not find a place in reality. I'm constantly upset, hurt. Beings and things that I endured perfectly before, now make me nervous and exasperate me to a point that I came to believe myself seriously sick with nerves. The effort that I do to improve myself exhausts me, and I end up shutting myself up with books and memories. Anyway, I'm not worth much lately. However, I hope that one day I will get better."  Other POUM women militants in exile expressed similar feelings of isolation and being torn apart inside. [6]

María Teresa Carbonell married the last POUM President Wilebaldo Solano in the 1950s. She assisted him in running POUM's headquarters in Toulouse. She later helped found Fundació Andreu Nin in order to keep the legacy of POUM alive. [7]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sección Femenina</span> Womens branch of the Spanish political party Falange

The Sección Femenina was the women's branch of the Falange political movement in Spain. Founded in 12 July 1934 as part of the Sindicato Español Universitario (SEU) of the Falange Española de las JONS, and fully incorporated to FE de las JONS later in the year, it remained as part of the FET y de las JONS following the 1937 Unification Decree, subsequently becoming an official institution of the single-party of the Francoist dictatorship. Following General Franco's death and the beginning of the transition to democracy it was disbanded on 7 April 1977 together with all Movimiento Nacional institutions. Sección Femenina was led throughout its history by Pilar Primo de Rivera, the younger sister of Falange Española founder José Antonio Primo de Rivera.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan Comorera</span> Spanish politician and journalist

Joan Comorera i Soler was a Spanish Communist politician, journalist and writer from Catalonia who spent several years in Argentina before returning to Spain in 1931 at the start of the Second Spanish Republic. He was a Catalan nationalist, and was elected chairman of the Socialist Union of Catalonia in 1933. In 1936 he became Secretary General of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), in alliance with the Spanish Communist Party. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) he built up his party into a major political force during the struggles among the supporters of the Republic between Socialists, Stalinists, Trotskyists and Anarcho-syndicalists. After the Republicans were defeated by the right-wing forces led by Francisco Franco he went into exile, living in Mexico and then in France. In 1949 he was expelled from the Communist party for his Catalan nationalism, and survived an assassination attempt. In 1951 he moved back to Catalonia using a false name. He was arrested in 1954 and died in prison four years later.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminists and the Spanish Civil War</span> Feminism in the spanish civil war

Feminists were involved in the Spanish Civil War, although the conditions underlying their involvement pre-dated the Second Republic.

Women in the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification were faced with many of the same problems as other Communist and Anarchist women in the 1930s, such as hypocrisy of the male leadership in their support of women's rights, while continuing their sexist and patriarchal behavior in private.

Women in the Communist Party of Spain were highly active, the most visible figure in the movement being Dolores Ibárruri, who joined in its early years. The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera pushed the group underground, where they had to meet clandestinely around their public face, the football club Oriente FC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women in the Popular Front in the Spanish Civil War</span>

Women in the Popular Front in the Spanish Civil War were part of a broad leftist coalition founded ahead of the 1936 Spanish general elections. The Second Spanish Republic represented a changing cultural and political landscape in which women's political organizations could flourish for the first time. It failed to empower women completely, as they were often locked out of governance roles and positions in political organizations. Many organizations continued to discriminate against women, as Marxist ideology did not see them as a unique group with special needs but as part of larger class grouping in which class equality needed to be prioritized.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women in the Spanish Civil War</span>

Women in the Spanish Civil War saw the conflict start on 17 July 1936. The war would impact women's everyday lives. Feminist solutions to problems of women in this period often took an individualistic approach. For women of the Second Republic, by close of the Civil War their efforts for liberation would fail.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women in Francoist Spain</span>

Women in Francoist Spain (1939–1978) were the last generation of women to not be afforded full equality under the 1978 Spanish Constitution. Women during this period found traditional Catholic Spanish gender roles being imposed on them, in terms of their employment opportunities and role in the family. For Republican women, Francoist Spain was a double loss, as the new regime first took away the limited political power and identities as women which they had won during the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939), and it secondly forced them back into the confines of their homes. Motherhood would become the primary social function of women in Francoist Spain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women prisoners in Francoist Spain</span>

Women prisoners in Francoist Spain were often there because of specific repression aimed at women. During the Civil War, many women were in prison because family members had Republican sympathies or the authorities wanted to lure out male Republican affiliated relatives; it was not a result of anything the women did themselves. The Law of Political Responsibilities, adopted on 13 February 1939, made such repression easier and was not formally removed from the Criminal Code until 1966. Prisoners and people in concentration camps, both male and female, would total over three quarters of a million by the end of the Spanish Civil War. Of these, 14,000 women were held in the Las Ventas Model prison in Madrid.

Feminism in Francoist Spain and the democratic transition period took place in a specific socio-historical context. Spanish feminism went through several waves in the Francoist period. Broadly speaking, they are first-wave feminism taking place from the mid-nineteenth century to 1965, second-wave feminism taking place from 1965 to 1975, and third-wave feminism taking place from 1975 to 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women in exile during Francoist Spain</span> Women political exiles during the Spanish Civil War

Women in exile during Francoist Spain were a result of their being on the wrong side during the Spanish Civil War. The repression behind nationalist lines during the war and the immediate years that followed left many politically active women with few choices but to leave or face death. The exact totals of women who were murdered, fled or disappeared is unknown, as it was only possible to make estimates.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women in Partido Comunista de España in Francoist Spain</span>

Women in Partido Comunista de España in Francoist Spain faced many challenges. Partido Comunista de España (PCE) had been made illegal by the new regime, which banned all political parties and trade unions. In the final days of the Civil War and during the first days of Francoist Spain, women were imprisoned just for being related to "reds". They were also investigated, harassed, imprisoned and executed for expressing sympathy for Republicans or belonging to any leftist organization. Many women in PCE were caught up in this. PCE women's organization Agrupación de Mujeres Antifascistas survived the war, and shifted their priorities to assisting political prisoners in Francost jails.

Women in PSOE in Francoist Spain had been involved in important socialist activism since the 1930s, including behind the scenes during the Asturian miners' strike of 1934, even as the party offered few leadership roles to women and address the issues of women. During the Civil War, the party was one of the few left wing actors to reject the idea of women on the front, believing women instead should take care of the home.

Women in Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) in Francoist Spain played important roles in the union dating back to the Second Republic period, even as their specific needs like maternity leave, childcare provisions and equal pay were subverted for the improvement of better overall working conditions. Women UGT leaders in the Civil War period included María Lacrampe and Claudina García Perez.

Women in CNT in Francoist Spain were persecuted as part of state organized efforts to eliminate remaining leftist elements. Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) was formed in 1910, and from the onset it did not treat women equally to men inside the organization. This continued during the Second Spanish Republic, the Spanish Civil War and into Francoist Spain.

Women in 1930s Francoist Spain experienced major changes to marriage. Civil marriages that took place between 1932 and 1939 were annulled, and only if both partners were Roman Catholic were they permitted to remarry.

Women in 1940s Spain were mainly recognised as mothers.

Women in 1950s Spain were mainly involved in childcare.

Women in 1960s Spain were facing a period of transition.

Women in 1970s Francoist Spain were arrested and tortured for their involvement in underground unions the Francoist period.

References

  1. ↑ Morcillo, Aurora G. (2010). The Seduction of Modern Spain: The Female Body and the Francoist Body Politic. Bucknell University Press. ISBN   9780838757536.
  2. ↑ Richmond, Kathleen J. L. (2003-09-02). Women and Spanish Fascism: The Women's Section of the Falange 1934-1959. Routledge. ISBN   9781134439362.
  3. ↑ Valencia-García, Louie Dean (2018-05-17). Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN   9781350038486.
  4. ↑ Payne, Stanley G. (1987-11-15). The Franco Regime, 1936–1975. Univ of Wisconsin Press. ISBN   9780299110703.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Davies, Catherine (1998-01-01). Spanish Women's Writing 1849-1996. A&C Black. ISBN   9780485910063.
  6. 1 2 Coignard, Cindy (2011-10-24). "Memoria(s) de la Guerra Civil: el ejemplo de las militantes del POUM". Amnis. Revue de civilisation contemporaine Europes/Amériques (in French) (2). doi: 10.4000/amnis.1518 . ISSN   1764-7193.
  7. 1 2 3 BARBARROJA, Cristina S. (24 February 2016). "María Teresa Carbonell, sonrisa y memoria del POUM". Público (in Spanish). Retrieved 31 March 2019.
  8. 1 2 Rodrigo, Mercedes Yusta (2004). "Rebeldía individual, compromiso familiar, acción colectiva: las mujeres en la resistencia al franquismo durante los años cuarenta". Historia del presente (4): 63–92. ISSN   1579-8135.
  9. 1 2 Martí, Vicenta Verdugo (2008-06-01). "Franquismo y represión penitenciaria femenina: las presas de Franco en Valencia". Arenal. Revista de historia de las mujeres (in Spanish). 15 (1): 151–176. doi:10.30827/arenal.vol15.num1.151-176 (inactive 1 November 2024). ISSN   1134-6396.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
  10. 1 2 Quaggio, Giulia (2017-06-23). "La cuestión femenina en el PSOE de la Transición: de la marginación a las cuotas". Arenal. Revista de historia de las mujeres (in Spanish). 24 (1): 219–253. doi:10.30827/arenal.vol24.num1.219-253 (inactive 1 November 2024). ISSN   1134-6396.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
  11. ↑ Enders, Victoria Lorée; Radcliff, Pamela Beth (1999-01-01). Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain. SUNY Press. ISBN   9780791440292.
  12. 1 2 Herrmann, Gina (2010). Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain. University of Illinois Press. ISBN   9780252034695.
  13. ↑ "Los trotskistas extremeños: la Izquierda Comunista y el POUM". el salto diario (in Spanish). Retrieved 2019-03-28.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.