Women in 1960s Spain were facing a period of transition.
Period overview.
Internal Spanish women migrants found life in Spain difficult during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s as Francoist policy dictated they remain in the home. Unlike their husbands who could new develop social connections through outside employment, immigrant women were isolated having left behind their previous social support networks.
Starting in the 1950s, Spain started adopting a more consumerist economy. This would continue on into the 1960s and would play a role in introducing Spanish women to the new modern Western woman. This introduction would result in the eschewing of the concept of True Catholic Womanhood.
By the 1960s, Francoist Spain had changed its definition of Catholic womanhood. Women were no longer only biological organisms existing for the sole purpose of procreation, but as beings for whom Spanish cultural meaning rested.
Despite being contraception being illegal, by the mid-1960s, Spanish women had access to the contraceptive pill. Women could be prescribed the pill by their doctors if they were married and could make a case that they had a gynecological problem which the pill could fix, but this reason could not be a desire to avoid being pregnant.
The 1960s marked an economic shift in Spain, as the country moved from an agrarian based economy of the rural countryside to an industrial based economy of the cities. This necessitated the introduction of women on a large scale into the Spanish workforce. The 1960s saw the same inequalities of the past, with most of the economic gains going towards the bourgeois while the poor were left destitute and unable to strike for better working conditions. Parts of rural Castile and still lacked roads, electricity and running water.
By the end of the 1960s, the destiny of women in Spain was changing as women increasingly began to express their dissatisfaction with state imposed patriarchy. Their dissatisfaction would play a large role in the later collapse of the regime following Franco's death.
Women in the Cortes Españolas provided negligible contributions to the body during the 1940s and 1950s, these women would be more influential during the 1960s and 1970s as Spain's economy changed and broader Spanish culture demanded contradictory and complex things from women as the regime tried to keep the changing culture in line with its fascist ideology.
Pilar Primo de Rivera was viewed by many inside the regime as a critical player in successfully encouraging Franco to relax restrictions for women during the 1950s and 1960s.
Starting in the 1960s, women's groups and feminists organizations began to emerge. Women's associations were tolerated by the regime but were not completely legal.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Women's Section aided in raising expectations of what was possible for women to accomplish by taking personal responsibility for their actions.
Women in opposition to the regime.
It was only during the 1950s and 1960s that some of the Communist women involved with POUM and Trotskyite purges began to re-evaluate their role in them; their change of hearts only occurred after Stalinist Communism lost its prestige among leftist circles.
Women were arrested and tortured for their involvement in the Francoist period. Security officers would insult women, questioning their status as both women and mothers.
Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores and Communist Comisiones Obreras were the two leading underground clandestine unions during the 1960s and 1970s. Women were involved with UGT as part of their opposition to the regime.
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo.
The late 1950s and early 1960s saw severe repression of CNT by Franco's government that made activism even more difficult. María Bruguera Pérez participated in clandestine meetings of CNT.
CNT was in a crisis during the 1960s. Earlier, members of the organization had signed and agreement with members of the Franco government to withdraw from active resistance in the regime. They had done so under the belief that democracy would soon emerge in Spain. This left the organization adrift. When democracy finally did come, they were unprepared.
Partido Comunista de España.
The leadership of Santiago José Carrillo Solares in PCE would result in the party renouncing the use of violence in the mid-1960s. This led to a split in the party, with Partido Comunista - Marxista Leninista (PC - ml) being formed and later the founding of FRAP (Revolutionary Antifascist Popular Front).
Women in PCE were pressured to have sex in the mid-1960s and 1970s to prove that they were free. There was an element of lack of choice if they wanted to prove their leftist credentials. According to Merche Comalleba, "The PCE militants told us that we were some sluts, some whores, that our goals were neither feminist nor political nor anything". PCE student activist Paco Fernández Buey said of the mid-1960s, "It was natural for an imprisoned male communist's girlfriend to be virtuous and faithful to force, even if her partner was not going to get out of jail in decades."
Partido Socialista Obrero Español.
Unlike other European countries where parties held control over unions, PSOE had very little leverage over UGT in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s despite a large overlap in leadership. During the 1950s and 1960s, neither UGT nor PSOE put much consideration into political ideologies and practices related to improving the lives of women.
During the mid-1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, Barcelona based Movimiento Socialista de Cataluña was highly influenced by the British Labor party, who had developed extensive contacts with the group to give them legitimacy within Catalonia. Female leaders in the group in this period included Serra i Moret. PSOE's relationship with the group in this era was unstable, and Lucila Fernández was the only prominent female figure in PSOE's Catalan organization.
Carmen García Bloise was one of the female leaders inside PSOE during the 1960s. She believed that PSOE and UGT needed to be governed from inside Spain, not from the exterior. Along with others in the informal Paris group, she believed that militants inside Spain should be given greater weight and consideration inside PSOE and UGT. Her position closely aligned her with ASO. She played a critical role in understanding the need for PSOE to be governed from the interior and then assisting in moving those structures there from the exterior.
Basque nationalism.
Starting in the mid-1960s, more women began to become involved with ETA militancy. Most of the women who joined up were encouraged to do so because of their fathers. Such social networks played a key role in recruiting and retaining members. These women were also more willing to directly engage in violent opposition to the regime. During the 1960s and 1970s, female ETA members were portrayed by the Spanish media as being one half of a terrorist couple.
Women's rights.
Childcare.
One of the most important female labor activities in the Francoist period, especially between 1940 and 1970, was childcare. The regime used Sección Femenina and Acción Católica to impose its pro-ntalist policies on Spain through the concept of traditional womanhood, that demanded among other things that women tend to the home and be primary caregivers to their children. This was expected of women, even if they were required to take on extra work inside the home or they were able to pay someone to do basic domestic tasks. Men were expected to be in the workforce, providing a steady income that would cover the costs of running the household. There was no differentiation in this period paid and domestic work for women. Both were viewed as two part of the same purpose of women serving Spanish society.
Sección Feminina and Falange provided childcare services during the 1950s and 1960s to women working in the agricultural sector. Official women's participation in this industry were around 5.5%, but informal participation was much higher, resulting in the need for childcare.
Contraception.
For many married Andalusian women in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, there was a certain fatalism about the fact they would inevitably become mothers. It was difficult for them to try to negotiate family planning with their spouses.
Prohibitions against the sale of contraception in Andalusia in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were largely ineffective as women had various means to try to limit the number of children they had. This was especially true for women engaging in sex outside of marriage at a time when that practice, along with having children when single, were highly condemned by the government. Women were willing to take risks to have sex for pleasure by using some form of birth control.
The most popular method in the 1960s was coitus interruptus. Contraceptive legalization began to be an issue for Spanish feminists in the mid-1960s. This was part of their broader interest in women's reproductive rights. Among the feminists involved in this period was Santiago Dexeus Trias de Bes, an assistant doctor of the Maternitat de Barcelona who had an interest in family planning. Elvira Ramos García was also among the group. The pediatrics specialist was a member of the Communist Party of Spain and promoter of the Democratic Movement of Women in Murcia.
Divorce.
During the Franco period, there was the concept of "hidden divorce". These were declarations by the Spanish Catholic Church that a marriage was nullified. They were different from ecclesiastical courts dissolution of marriages. These divorces could come about because of "Pauline privilege", where the church nullified a marriage because neither spouse had been baptized. It could also be nullified if one spouse was baptized was and the other not, and the Catholic spouse could not live as a faithful Catholic because of their spouse's faith. That way, the Catholic spouse could remarry another Catholic with whom they could live peacefully. Another way a Catholic divorce could happy was known as "petrino", a formula created by Pope Pius XI was the same. A divorce could be granted if the married coupled included a Catholic and non-Catholic spouse, where the Catholic spouse wanted the separation so they could remarry to a Catholic.
Guardianship.
Up until the mid-1960s, Franco's legal system gave husbands near total control over their wives. This would not change until women started playing a more central role in the Spanish economy.
By year.
1960.
PSOE, UGT, PCE, CNT, Juventudes Socialistas de España (JSE), Movimiento Libertario Español (MLE) and the Moviment Socialista de Catalunya (MSC) continued their struggle in exile. From 1944 to 1960, the French city of Toulouse served as a major publishing hub for many of these organization's home in exile. The city of Toulouse itself would see around 40,000 exiles from these groups settle permanently in the city.
Josefina Arrillaga was at the center of the battle for the heart of PSOE and UGT between groups in the interior and the exterior. She had been serving at the primary contact with Toulouse but, on 12 April 1960, she was dismissed from this role. Despite her dismissal, Josefina Arrillaga still played a key role in facilitating clandestine communications between Toulouse and key jailed socialist figures in Spain's interior. Her role would see the November 1961 trial of seven Basque nationalists attended by the British journalist and Labour MP Ernest Davies as well as Christian Democrat Right leader José Maria Gil Robles, and the secretary of the Christian Democrat Left.
1961.
Discrimination in employment was banned based on gender in 1961, with exceptions for the judiciary, armed forces and merchant navy. Reforms also meant that women were legally guaranteed the same wage as their male counterparts. This was done with the 22 July 1961 Ley sobre Derechos Políticos, Profesionales y de Trabajo.
Josefina Arrillaga would continue to develop her contact network in 1961 to aid in the socialist cause. New contacts would include Amnesty International founder Peter Benenson, Fritz Erler of the German SPD, German metalworks union IG Metall, and UGT members like Manuel Fernández-Montesinos living in exile in Germany.
1962.
The Second Vatican Council held from 1962 to 1965 assisted in reshaping Catholic discourse around the definition of womanhood. These conversations often found themselves in contradiction to traditional Francoist teachings.
Starting in 1962, censorship across Spain began to officially relax. Further changes to relax censorship occurred four years later in 1966.
Women in PSOE and UGT in 1962.
From 1957 to 1962, the Franco regime faced labor strikes in Asturias, with the biggest in Pozo María Luisa. Sindicato de los Obreros Mineros de Asturias (SOMA) had its greatest strength in this region, with socialist and communist women leading the organization of strikes on 23 March 1957. They organized in two locations, including the esplanade of Pozo María Luisa and at the highway connecting Oviedo with Campo