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The Incorporation of Women in the Agricultural Trade Union Struggle: The Case of the Galician Peasants’ Union Sindicato Labrego Galego

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2020

Ángel Rodríguez-Gallardo  and
María Victoria Martins-Rodríguez
Ángel Rodríguez-Gallardo
Affiliation:
University of Vigo and University of Coimbra
María Victoria Martins-Rodríguez
Affiliation:
Complutense University of Madrid and University of Coimbra
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Abstract

This project investigates the participation of rural Galician women in social movements regarding labor and rural concerns from 1970 to 1990, with a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. Based on the studies we have analyzed we can conclude that the recognition of rural women and their roles in their organizations have been consolidated in recent years. Rural women have gradually become significant social players in the development of their communities and, consequently, their economies. This study also demonstrates that participation in organizations plays a major role in the development of women's identities by changing the rural definition of gender. In the case of Galician women, historical relegation is evident as the empowerment of rural women did not begin until a group of feminist women became members of the Executive Board of Sindicato Labrego Galego. The driving force behind this empowerment was the creation of organizations for women with clear and specific objectives.

Information

Type
Labor Activism Under Neoliberalism
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 98: East Europe and the Troubled Memory of “The Worker” / Labor Activism Under Neoliberalism / Lines of Labor, Lines of Production , Fall 2020 , pp. 121 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2020

Introduction

This project investigates the extensive participation of rural Galician women in rural Galician social movements regarding labor and rural concerns from 1970 to 1990. The study takes a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, considering historical, gender, and rural studies conducted in industrialized and developing countries over the last twenty-five years. Many of the reports analyzed argue that the diversity of women's work and their vital circumstancesFootnote 1 have changed in recent years. Furthermore, other studies on community, social, and political organizations for women, as well as other organizations in which womenFootnote 2 are involved, have also been useful for understanding the changes to genderFootnote 3 as part of the so-called “new rurality” or rural restructuring process. This concept stems from peasant economy theories that assume women are central elements in production and public life.Footnote 4

Based on the studies we have analyzed, and from an interdisciplinary—historical, geographical, and rural—viewpoint, we can conclude that the recognition of rural women and their roles in their organizations have been consolidated in recent years. Therefore, rural women have gradually become significant social players in the development of their communities and, consequently, their economies. As other authors have already noted,Footnote 5 this study also demonstrates that participation in organizations plays a major role in the development of women's identitiesFootnote 6 by changing the rural definition of gender. In the case of Galician women, historical disenfranchisement is evident in the fact that the empowerment of rural women did not begin until a group of feminist women who had completed at least secondary education became members of the Comité Executivo (Executive Board) of the Sindicato Labrego Galego Galego (Galician Peasants’ Trade Union) (SLG) in 1984 (the recognition of belonging to a subordinate group came late for Galician women). The driving force behind this empowerment was the creation of organizations for women with clear and specific objectives. This empowered them in society and led them to occupy or share places traditionally reserved for men. As a result of their real and symbolic strength, the organizations chose women who had demonstrated their importance in the claims of rural workers (many of the women were farmworkers) or who had demonstrated their capacity for leadership thanks to their education (a minimum of secondary education at that time)Footnote 7 or to their knowledge of the situation of rural women (this is the case of the first female agents of Extensión Agraria, who had first-hand experience of the difficulties facing rural women). In some cases, this osmosis acted as a driving force for a culture and, later, an awareness of empowerment that gradually became more and more apparent.

We point out the importance of education in the promotion of women in peasant political and union structures, since it allowed for the assumption, by women, of leadership positions despite the historical difficulties that had prevented this from happening. Galician women had historically been disenfranchised socially and politically, and the promotion of women in political and union structures only began to happen with the generation of women who were educated at the end of Francisco Franco's regime and in a more evident way with the generation of women educated in the 1980s, who already had other references and social knowledge and who already began to reach secondary and university studies, which fostered the development of a critical spirit and new forms of political and union communication. This was the first generation that consciously introduced an ideology of feminist consciousness in the rural world.

The Development of Women's Social Agenda

We have analyzed the social interaction, incorporation, participation, and training of Galician women in peasants’ trade union movements from the latter years of the Franco dictatorship to fifteen years after the beginning of democracy, i.e., from 1973 to 1990. We use the peasant trade union Comisións Labregas (Peasants’ Commission) as “interlocutor” and “player”Footnote 8 in this comparative analysis, albeit in a wider context of women's participation in the social and labor movements of rural Galicia, socio-politics and/or their survival.

Comisións Labregas was created as an underground trade union in 1973 and changed its name to SLG four years later. The last year analyzed in this study is 1990, when the trade union created the Secretariado para a Muller (Secretariat for Women) as the culmination of a complex process of recognition, participation, empowerment, and challenges to existing power relations.Footnote 9 However, it was also a time of social action and political transformation in and beyond the farming world; the fifteen years between 1975 and 1990 marked a period of critical reflection on the social situation of women in Spain and the rest of the world.Footnote 10

This complex process introduced a “feminist agenda,” and an agency for women only (meetings and events, autonomous political structures, sociopolitical decisions) in the peasants’ trade union that considered topics and proposals related to women's rights and opportunities. In such a conservative sector as farming, a “feminist roadmap” was created (its actual implementation is another matter, since the control exercised by men and their resistance to giving up their power acted as significant counterweights). This was so because the influence of gender theory on the expectations of peasant women could not be ignored.

It should first be noted that the feminist movement in the rural world has almost always been seen as a threat rather than a proposal of liberation. This has been favored by the fact that feminism has mostly theorized about issues traditionally alien to the “rurality” discourse: equality, difference, independence, and women's liberation. In fact, trends within the feminist movement itself have changed with swings in theory. To a certain extent, the feminist perspective of equality of rights and opportunities for men and women has gradually been accepted; however, other perspectives underlining women's “singularity” and their changing identities and experiences have not.Footnote 11 Santasmarinas Raposo's 1986 surveys on Galician farm men and women suggested that women, especially older women, considered equality impossible. Men's viewpoints could be summarized as follows: “Yes to equality, as long as women do the cooking.”Footnote 12 The communication structures of the SLG sought to introduce the perspective of equality by refuting traditional gender discrimination in education.Footnote 13

Until very recently, the influence of the feminist movement's ideas had not been noticeable in the rural context,Footnote 14 mainly due to the movement's criticism of the traditional family, its hostility towards the exclusive power of men, and its attack against the traditional or secular values of rural communities.Footnote 15 In Raposo's 1986 surveys on workers from the Axentes de Extensión Agraria (Agricultural Advisory Service) in rural Galicia, a significant percentage of Galician women associated feminist movements with urban environments and what they knew about them came exclusively from the media. Only a group of women from the new generations saw feminist demands as positive.Footnote 16 However, there is continuity in the forms used by groups of “aware” urban and peasant women in Galicia with a uniform understanding of certain social, labor, and rural issues. That understanding was used to construct a complex and flexible movement that adapted to various influences.

As far as empowerment is concerned, Galician peasant women have slowly gained power and recognition by defying the power relations of the farming world, its patriarchal ideology, and the structures that foster social inequality and gender discrimination.

The Spanish Feminist Context

The establishment of an agrarian trade union structure in Galicia with a majority participation of women was important for the influence of the first social organizations of women. At a global level, said organizations had grown since the UN's proclamation of the International Year of Women in 1975. In Spain, this revealed the backwardness and discrimination suffered by Spanish women and led to the first feminist and democratic program presented in public in February 1975 by various women's university organizations, Christian women, separated women, and peasants. This gave rise to the creation of a coordinator of organizations and groups of women from all over Spain that prepared the First Women's Liberation Days just two weeks after the death of the dictator Franco in December 1975. The events were attended by approximately five hundred women, whose activities were still semi-clandestine. This marked the starting point for the construction of a vast and unified liberation movement on the left of the political spectrum, culminating in the demonstration that took place on January 15, 1976, under the slogan “Woman: fight for your liberation” and in a context in which the Galician and Spanish feminist movements were accused by “leftist men” of being “petty bourgeois” and of “dividing the working class” by criticizing men's exclusive hold on power. In Galicia, the Asociación Galega da Muller (the Galician Women's Association) (AGM) was formed in 1976 during the transition from dictatorship to democracy, and it brought together women from all left-wing political and social structures, despite their differences, to focus on discriminatory struggles for peasant and urban women.Footnote 17 These new feminine political demonstrations recovered the tradition of the Spanish feminist movement of the early twentieth century, combining political demands and social claims. The Asociación Democrática da Muller Galega (the Democratic Association of Galician Women) and the Coordinadora Galega de Asociacións Legais da Muller (Galician Coordinator of Women's Legal Associations) were formed in 1977, and only one year later, in 1978, Feministas Independentes Galegas (the Galician Independent Feminists) (FIGA) was founded as a result of a split in AGM; all had different bodies and publications. This led to the creation of new feminist groups in the 1980s: Mulleres Nacionalistas Galegas (Galician Nationalist Women), Mulleres Progresistas (Progressive Women), Mulleres Libres de Santiago (the anarchist collective of Free Women of Santiago), and Mulleres Rurais (Rural Women). The 1980s also saw certain specific action areas created in trade unions and political parties.

Peasant women from the trade union Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) were very active during the transition from dictatorship to democracy, especially at the forefront of the battle against the “statistical silence” (through the Encuesta de Población Agraria, the Agrarian Census, the Farm Structure Survey, etc.) which erased them from the agricultural sector. Under these conditions, peasant women did not have a valid and statistically recognized legal and social status; they could not earn a salary or benefit from social security; nor could they receive unemployment, accident, or maternity benefits. In view of such precariousness, CCOO filed claims for recognition in the agreements under the slogan of “same pay for the same job” to counter the abuses of rural employers who took advantage of women to pay lower wages for longer working hours. Another key issue of the Women's Secretariat of CCOO was to denounce employers’ consistent failure to observe laws on health and safety for women working outdoors. In the 1980s, trade union representation in the countryside was dominated by men, and women were excluded from representing agrarian organizations by cultural patterns and behaviors little or not at all sympathetic to the specific problems of rural women. Although, since the Fifth Confederate Congress women assumed more dynamic roles and their being assigned certain responsibilities reduced exclusionary or sexist behavior, this fact conditioned the low-level representation of women in the different governing bodies of the Union and the unequal affiliation of women to CCOO, depending on the geographical area of the agricultural activity. The work was arduous for CCOO women trade unionists, not only because of sexist behavioral and cultural patterns, but also because, as a CCOO study revealed, rural women themselves had assumed and internalized that trade unions and their representative activities were reserved exclusively for men. This meant that even in the 1990s, machines, paperwork, and union meetings were “men's things,” while women “helped men when necessary.” Their space was the house and looking after the family. This situation explains the organizational increase of women in the agrarian structures linked to CCOO. The base of the claim seemed straightforward: Women are involved in all agricultural and livestock activities in the same way as men. Therefore, they should be part of the union without discrimination. In addition, peasants represented a large collective with potential, which pointed to a new dimension in the peasant struggle. CCOO peasant women gave a new dimension to these claims. Moreover, these provisions had been adopted when trade union structures were established, and in the case of CCOO, this had taken place before the 1978 Constitution. This explains the pressure exerted by women in the union to achieve their needs. As a result, other organizations, such as the Sindicato Obrero del Campo (Field Workers’ Union) (SOC) were gradually incorporating women into their ranks.Footnote 18

The Beginning of a Labor Union Consciousness

I have provided an overview of the level of participation, recognition, and empowerment of women in socio-politics in the SLG from 1970 to 1990. As already mentioned, the gender perspective was ignored in the rural world during a substantial part of this period; however, in previous works based on oral sources (Digna Rabia/Honourable Rage 2011), I have established a continuum between Galician rural women having a feminist agenda and having agency, even power, with conclusions in line with those presented by Roseman (1997 and 1999).Footnote 19 Ana María Abraira, a Comisións Labregas activist in Cirio-Pol (Lugo), was astonished in 1977 by Galician peasants’ lack of interest in participating in trade unions to end the historical exclusion of Galician farmer women.Footnote 20 During that period, there was a struggle between sometimes opposite discourses: the feminist discourse, which has considered rural women as “victims;” and the discourse of the media, which has usually described rural women as “heroines.”Footnote 21 Even in the communication bodies of Comisións Labregas, the struggles led by peasant women have always had Homeric connotations, giving an image of the peasant women as protagonists of impossible struggles. One example is the fight led by Cándida Ulfe in November 1984. A peasant from the deprived area of As Enchousas (A Coruña),Footnote 22 a willing member, like many other peasant women, of Comisións Labregas, locked herself up in her house, together with her three-year-old daughter and her seventy-seven-year-old aunt, to avoid eviction from the land on which she worked.Footnote 23 Ulfe was representative of ten percent of the peasants who exploited the land let by the owner as “landlords” in a feudal economic framework similar to that of South Africa.Footnote 24 In this way, rural women have never been a homogeneous group: Differences in class and work status have been maintained through the years by women who owned farms and were subordinated to the patriarchal system and by other women working in a semi-feudal system. The latter assumed an even higher level of subordination, as this economic relationship was maintained for several generations in exchange for compensation in the form of goods or money.

Usually, women joined the union for economic reasons and for the protection of their labor rights, since most of them had no economic rights over the lands they worked on. However, once they were organized, many of them began a slow process of empowerment in parallel to the defense of their rights.

Although there are no studies on the relationship between gender and the control or governance of rural organizations, it is known how important participation, recognition, and empowerment are in socio-political movements.Footnote 25 The longstanding exclusion of women from male-dominated networks has prevented or limited their presence in leadership and middle-management. This is especially painful in a place like Galicia, where women represent the majority of the farming population (634,608 women vs. 600,497 men) and the majority of the working farming population.Footnote 26

Gender-based percentage of agrarian workers from 1976 to 1984

In Spain, the 1982 Agricultural Census, which is the most reliable, showed that women's participation has been classified as the role of “farmer's wife,” statistically underestimating the participation of the female workforce.Footnote 27 The figures show that the percentage of the female agrarian population has fallen considerably since 1970 (15.8 percent in 1980),Footnote 28 although it still remained far above the 6 percent of the European community.Footnote 29

Percentage of male and female agrarian workers in Spain

However, the participation of women in agricultural activities was different from one Spanish region or autonomous community to another. The table on the agricultural workforce according to gender and regionFootnote 30 shows that it is much higher in the North and Northwest, that is, in the area of Spain that has a rainy climate, where livestock farming is very important.

In Spain, Galicia stands out because, together with Asturias, it is the only autonomous community where there were more active agrarian women than men. This is directly related to the long-standing tradition of male migration in Galician society. Since 1970, the percentage of the female agricultural population (as well as the male) did not stop falling. In general, the diversity of women's occupations made it more difficult to accurately count the active female population.

Agrarian population by gender and regional communities

Previous studies on this topic in other European countries have highlighted the critical importance of female agricultural work, considering that many female agrarian jobs are not programmable, specialized or mechanized; in other words, they could be considered “supportive roles.”Footnote 31

In countries such as Italy, agriculture was an essential economic activity from 1860 to 1950, with roles similar to those observed in Spain. The woman's role varied according to the importance of her husband's role. The wife of the head of the family was in charge of the domestic chores, but also of the agricultural work. Moreover, women's wages were less than half those of men, even though they were engaged in such arduous tasks as rice weeding. The process of feminization in Italian agriculture sped up from 1950 to 1960, coinciding with the decline of the agrarian population (from 8.6 million in 1951 to 6.2 million in 1961). This led to a higher number of women becoming heads of families but also heads of agricultural properties.

This feminization of agrarian labor, usually confused with domestic chores,Footnote 32 was accompanied by a process of emancipation. The latter was more visible in the South and center of the country, with values close to sixty percent and forty percent, respectively. This female agricultural entrepreneurship increased the percentages from 18.9 percent in 1970 to 21.8 percent in 1982 and to 25.9 percent in 1990.Footnote 33

The situation was repeated in Portugal during the final period of the dictatorship (1969–74), when the number of women working in agriculture increased because many men went to fight in the colonies or travelled to other countries in search of work. By 1974, with a salary that was half that of their male counterparts, women were at the forefront of land occupation and the creation of cooperatives to cultivate it. This was maintained even after the revolution, as the radicalization of these movements continued its course.Footnote 34 The so-called “last revolution of Europe” also obtained freedom for the Portuguese women because, for the first time, they gained social recognition through the right to vote.Footnote 35

Furthermore, the hegemony of the masculinity discourse in peasant organizations, based on concepts such as competitiveness, entrepreneurship, economic primacy, and preparation, also limited the introduction of feminine discourse patterns in the rural world and institutional public life: city councils, trade unions, political parties, etc.Footnote 36 In fact, the forms of socio-political intervention in rural areas have failed to be “feminized” and the long-standing status quo has tended to exclude gender and hide feminine subjectivities.Footnote 37 During the period studied here, the number of Galician women belonging to a political organization (2 percent), trade union (0.2 percent), cultural organization (2 percent), religious group (7.5 percent), sports club (1 percent), recreation association (1.2 percent), or cooperative (9 percent) remained a minority. Only two percent played a political role and only 0.18 percent were actively involved in a trade union or a religious, cultural, sports, or recreational association.Footnote 38

In their work, Muñiz and Santasmarinas (1986) linked the lack of studies about rural women in Galicia to patriarchal ideology, which conceives the land in the image and likeness of man.Footnote 39 The analysis of the discourse of movements in the rural world shows how mainstream discourses have marginalized women, usually describing them basically as wives, housewives, family caretakers, housekeepers, or a cheap source of labor.Footnote 40 When analyzing the media discourse on the various conflicts reviewed in this work, the invisibility of women becomes evident; “they are not mentioned,”Footnote 41 as they have had no power of decision or negotiation.

There is a growing number of papers that are uncovering the register of demonstrations by women, through different typologies of resistance struggles against abuses and arbitrariness of power.Footnote 42 They focus on demonstrations by women-consumers against a rise in prices or new food taxes between the late nineteenth century (1898) and the second decade of the twentieth century (1918). Although there was an attempt to consider these female protests as impulsive acts, it has been shown that they were a well-defined genre of collective action operating according to a strict and limited protocol. Women were prominent in these sometimes–mass protests against male power, produced, or prepared contexts of crisis or political change, and they offered a gendered reading that constructed a metaphor for “bad” male power (male power unable to give a response to “hungry women” had the value of “castration”), thus transforming consumers’ actions into those of political agents. The Spanish consumer protests of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were effective in achieving limited political demands and opening the door to the new trade union movements and Republican parties that appeared in Spain in the 1920s and 1930s. This situation was repeated decades later by the female agrarian movement.

Galician Rural Women in the History of Peasant Conflicts

Franco's regime brought the Galician land-reform movement and peasant association networks to an end before the Civil War of 1936–39. Changes in land ownership relations stagnated, and agricultural transformations and improvements faded away.Footnote 43 Women, who started to participate in and lead other socio-political organizations, did not take part or have any place in the agricultural movement. Although their roles were negligible and remain hidden, work in the social sciences is gradually recovering their achievements.Footnote 44 Franco's corporative system of Cooperativas de Hermandades de Labradores y Ganaderos (Brotherhoods and Peasant and Farming Cooperatives), later perpetuated with the Cámaras Agrícolas (Chambers of Agriculture), held back Galician agriculture through the cooperation of landlords, rural owners, and well-off peasants. In the 1970s, there was a technical renovation and commercialization of the agricultural sector, albeit a limited one, as a result of economic liberalization and state-led development.

It was during this time of expansion when the first Galician organizations started to appear outside the Sindicatos Verticales, hierarchical trade unions allowed by the state, likely influenced by the conflicts resulting from the construction of the dam of Castrelo de Miño.Footnote 45

The origin of the new Galician nationalist movement of the 1960s (similar to, but less active than movements in other territories with national aspirations, such as the Basque Country and Catalonia) is to be found in left-wing urban and rural movements, with more of a dynamic character than any actual presence. This was to be joined by the progressive cultural Galicianization of the state left-wing with the Partido Comunista de Galicia (Communist Party of Galicia) (PCG) some of whose members went on to form a nationalist, Marxist-Leninist party: Unión do Pobo Galego (Union of the Galician People) (UPG) in 1964. The social democratic Partido Socialista Galego (Galician Socialist Party) (PSG) had appeared one year earlier. These two parties were to represent the two ideological trends, which, with changes in names, alliances, and splits, were to represent the left wing and Galicianism up to recent times.

These first Galician peasant organizations were based on patriarchal gender relations, with men controlling all external relations and socialization practices in the community,Footnote 46 resulting in more or less explicit forms of oppression and exploitation of women.Footnote 47 A number of women who belonged to clandestine political organizations in the later stages of Franco's dictatorship reported that they were also the ones who did the housework during the meetings, usually “belittled” by men when they spoke at the assemblies, and saw their political role continually diminished in comparison with that of men. However, they also admitted that many women helped maintain that patriarchal system.Footnote 48

Although the development of the early peasant structures stems partly from the Galician nationalist world, certain “open town councils” or groups of progressively minded priests, teachers, farm workers, peasants, and farmers who met undercover in clubs, schools, and rectories during those years had been created earlier. In many cases, the meetings focused on getting better prices, fair salaries, or structural agricultural improvements.Footnote 49 As far as women's participation is concerned, a significant number of female peasants were involved in the protests against the reforestation that took place during those years. Their involvement also stretched to other proposals that became popular in the following years, such as the opposition to pulp plants. It was women who took part in clashes against the members of the National Forestry Heritage brigades, hampering the work of the machines and even physically assaulting law enforcement officers; these conflicts led to people being killed, injured, and imprisoned. Other forms of opposition led by women had to do with the destruction of crops by fire, grazing in no-go areas, and stealing wood. In many of these events, it was women who had firsthand information about the conflicts thanks to their social capacity to infiltrate in local neighborhood networks and spread the word.Footnote 50

When the Comisións Labregas (Peasants’ Commission) was created underground in 1973, the involvement of several Comités de Apoio á Loita Labrega (Committees to Support the Peasant Struggle) (CALL) groups supporting peasant unions, played a major role.Footnote 51 These groups were made up of parish priests and deacons from grass-roots Christian groups,Footnote 52 rural teachers, undergraduates from rural areas, technical workers providing vocational training in agriculture, and agricultural technicians, many of them from the Guísamo School. They formed a dynamic partnership beginning in 1970, given the “limited openness” of the peasant world towards union proposals.Footnote 53 As a result of the clandestine meetings between peasants and CALL, whose initial groups were established in Ribadeo,Footnote 54 the first agricultural program based on a hierarchical classification of prioritiesFootnote 55 was developed in 1974.

Between 1976 and 1977, Comisións Labregas tried to join several of the underground trade unionsFootnote 56 into one single trade union in Galicia, but talks failed. As a result, it continued on its own until the establishment of the SLG in Santiago de Compostela in 1977. The process was completed at a largely male constituent assembly, a trend that continued in both its First and Second Congresses in 1979 and 1984.

Comisións Labregas focused its first union actions on reclaiming communal woodlands and the abolition of the business quotas of the rural social security system.Footnote 57 However, those collective actions also covered conflicts that had to do with an aggressive state policy against the rural environment, such as the electricity company Fenosa's plan to build the nuclear plant of Portocelo in the small village of Xove; the protests to defend the wetland of Baldaio in 1978;Footnote 58 the construction of dams;Footnote 59 the protests against the company Lignitos de Meirama in As Encrobas (Cerceda); and the demonstrations against the construction of pulp plants in Ponteceso and Quiroga.Footnote 60 In other cases, the conflicts and demonstrations had to do with changes in the agricultural prices policy, which worked as a “collective agreement on agricultural wages and working conditions;” they intensified when the Arias Navarro administration regulated eighteen agricultural products. In the case of Galicia, the price war included A Limia potatoes and the “milk agreement.”Footnote 61

These agricultural conflicts reveal economic, social, and political dynamics related to the opportunities created for women in the rural context for the empowerment of rural women and the feminization of the peasant economy.Footnote 62 In January 1975, a large group of women in Vilachá, a village in the parish of Portocelo, demonstrated for four days against the nuclear plant that Fenosa wanted to build in Xove.Footnote 63 According to Ledo, their protests triggered others that emerged during the following months. When expressing their demands: “non a queremos, non a queremos” (“We don't want it!”),Footnote 64 their protests abounded with the idea that those anonymous and unknown women were defending their land; in other words, what was theirs. To defend their land, they managed to participate in, coordinate, and empower a succession of protest actions against a company that represented the interests of the Franco regime.Footnote 65 Indeed, several of those women, some of whom were trained professionals and others peasants, introduced practices of “feminization of the peasant economy” by specifically disseminating agricultural innovations such as silos, greenhouses, new stables, water supply systems, and training courses for women. All this increased women's participation in collective actions, decision-making and organizations.Footnote 66 This explains the importance given to the figure of Prudencia (Pencha) Santasmarinas, a Servicio de Extensión Agraria (Agricultural Advisory Service) worker from Viveiro, in late 1976 and early 1977. She led and coordinated the campaign for social action against the nuclear plant,Footnote 67 which also led to the establishment of SLG,Footnote 68 bringing together associations with different ideologies.Footnote 69 The positions of women like Pencha Santasmarinas transformed the traditional tasks of the technical staff of the Agricultural Advisory Service vis-à-vis the work to be done with rural women, which, until then, had focused on improving their household chores and other work. However, the dominant conservative gender-perspective approaches in place in rural Galicia limited the recognition of other empowered women's leadership in other conflicts.Footnote 70 This was also influenced by feminism/nationalism dialectics in certain political organizations, in which the national dimension outweighed the gender dimension, not only because of the patriarchal trend in the rural world, but also because nationalist organizations were reluctant to question the marginalization and oppression of women.

However, it must be noted that this process of “feminization of social and economic peasant life” has been, and remains, a slow process of progress and setbacks.Footnote 71 In fact, the figure of Pencha Santasmarinas was not echoed so extensively or considered as important as that of male leaders. Therefore, in the newspaper libraries and literature of the period, preventing the construction of a nuclear plant in Xove has been slowly turned into a victory of nationalist political and peasant organizations despite the fact that Pencha Santasmarinas was arrested as a ploy to render the movement against nuclear plants in Galicia leaderless.Footnote 72

In media reports on the protests and demonstrations in the wetland of Baldaio in the late 1970s, there are hardly any references to the presence of women.Footnote 73 However, in 2005, Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro filmed a documentary about the life of the Galician film-maker Carlos Varela Veiga (the only Galician director of “militant cinema” who recounted the history of the Galician national-popular movement). One of the events the latter covered in his work was the conflict of Baldaio, and he clearly shows the participation of women in that conflict. One of those women was Oliva Pose, a well-known member of Comisións Labregas, considered by her neighbors as “the model of popular resistance against aggression,”Footnote 74 the peasant heroine capable of summarizing the “environmental” meaning of the struggle fought by “those on her side”: “The environment cannot be private. It has been really very hard, but it has been worth it.”Footnote 75 Actually, several of the women who played a leading role in the protests in Baldaio used classical or imperishable forms of resistance often seen in feminine social practices, such as furtively gathering shellfish on the Baldaio beach, “a prohibited act carried out deliberately as a form of protest,”Footnote 76 or the symbolic occupation of the beach.Footnote 77 All those acts of resistance were connected with the union activities of the Comités de Axuda á Loita Labrega (Committees to Support the Peasant Struggle), which organized meetings to plan the strategy and demands of the struggle and which actively involved a significant number of women.Footnote 78

This means that even the empowerment process associated with the presence and participation of women in peasant organizations has not been duly recorded, avoiding the recognition of women as citizens and participants in decision-making forums. Something similar occurred in the protests and demonstrations related to the As Encrobas conflict (1975–78), where a subsidiary of the electricity company Fenosa, Lignitos de Meirama S.A., wanted to expropriate lands and homes considered of public interest owing to the existence of lignite. The company wanted the lignite to supply a thermal power station located at the bottom of the mine. The documentary by Xosé Bocixa, As Encrobas. A ceo aberto, makes it possible to rebuild the “empowerment process” of women in the conflict thirty years after the fact. It emphasizes the first-line participation of over a hundred women in the protests of As EncrobasFootnote 79 and how they resorted to forms of resistance they had used for decades, including preventing entry to the land by the company's managersFootnote 80 or leading the protests and cancelling the possible use of out-of-proportion violence against the peasants by means of “symbolic forms of aggression” against law enforcement officers.Footnote 81 Society saw that women were capable of solving conflicts differently from men, “not so much from an escalation of positions, confrontation and resolution by force and violence, but from the ability to engage in dialogue and seek strategies to reach consensus and agreement, in other words, using nonviolent means.”Footnote 82 However, no women sat on the Peasants Committee set up to negotiate with the expropriating company in As Encrobas, and no support was given to the process of participation and empowerment that had taken its first steps in those years.Footnote 83

Conclusion

Women's empowerment is basically a feminist concern, although there are differences in how it is understood and sought, depending on theoretical perspective. Third-World feminists, mainly Black and post-colonial, have shown that the category of “women” is not homogenous because not every woman shares the same experiences and forms of oppression.Footnote 84 Galician women have historically been marginalized (legislative, labor, and fiscal consideration was achieved only a few years ago), as rural women were not empowered until a feminist-thinking group who had completed, at a minimum, secondary education became members of the Executive Board of the SLG in 1984Footnote 85 and Lidia Senra Rodríguez was elected General Secretary of the SLG in 1989.Footnote 86 The peasant women who belonged to the SLG had begun a process of critical learning by organizing meetings exclusively for women so that they could see themselves as capable of participating in public affairs. The magazine Fouce developed a public sphere of feminine intervention that had to do with health issues (contraception, diseases, etc.) or labor and political demands in order to end female sexual stigmatization.Footnote 87 Several educated women became involved in these public events focused on peasants and women's issues.Footnote 88 In addition, Rodríguez herself promoted the development of health resources specialized in women's illnesses, the creation of family-planning centers, and women's involvement in the elections to the Cámaras Agrarias (Agricultural Chambers). Cultural and psychosocial programs were also created to influence the working status of peasant women.

Galician women started to participate in peasant affairs in the 1980s, not only to question the patriarchal system, but also to end or differentiate their traditional statuses as wives, mothers, and partners. Indeed, the Third Congress of the SLG in 1989 included, for the first time, a proposal exclusively devoted to the peasant woman.Footnote 89 It emphasized the exhausting working days of women on the farm and at home, which prevented them from having any kind of representation in the public, political, and union spheres. It also made it difficult for them to access information about their bodies and their rights (many women could not vote in the Agricultural Chambers because they did not pay Social Security contributions). The parliamentary committee considering the issue of peasant women in 1989 marked the first attempt to promote women's participation in every area of public life, opening up the debate about involving men in household chores and definitively underlining women's roles as agricultural workers in every institutional agricultural register, despite the fact that they did not pay Social Security contributions. The driving force behind that proposal was the promotion of organizational structures for women with clear and specific objectives, empowering them in their social spheres, and taking on roles traditionally reserved for men.

After the establishment of the Secretariat for Women in 1990, its activity was initially limited, except for a few meetings in areas with a feminist tradition, such as the district of Betanzos, attended by Carme Freire. In 1994, Pura Seoane took the lead of the Secretariat for Women and focused on the right to pay Social Security contributions and own farms. Both issues required women to demonstrate their level of social involvement, resorting to the courts to denounce the continuity of the patriarchal system as one that denied women the right to pay Social Security contributions because their income was lower than their husbands’, who worked outside their farms. It also prevented them from owning a farm if their husband owned another one, even in cases of inheritance; their demands have continued since the 1990s.

This empirical analysis of the contribution made by Galician women and their empowerment in agrarian trade union organizations, especially the SLG, has required recognition of the construction of processes of social equality and new forms of organization in said structures. The organized peasant women fought to establish equality and involve women in political, social, and cultural decisions. The creation of these real or symbolic spaces of equality in the agricultural world took on various formats in the peasant world, gradually assuming rights that have been maintained (thanks to or in spite of institutional practices), not without difficulty, to date in the form of rights and opportunities. As a result, the feminist roadmap has thus far continued to involve feminism in the rural world of Galicia (which has also served as a model for other areas), which, despite structural difficulties, has continued to work towards empowering feminine human capital. The presence of female secretaries and leaders in trade unions and the training of many female activists in gender issues has intensified the presence of women in roles of responsibility in the peasant world and, above all, the transversal nature of gender issues at every level in trade union organizations and in each and every one of their practices. Indeed, many of those peasant women have changed the form of collective bargaining processes, public communications, the methods used to convince men to become involved in the fight for equality, and the mechanisms for improving relations with other political organizations to achieve common policies on reconciliation. They have also increased awareness of labor and social rights and of the plights of victims of gender-based violence.

Today, women represent a significant proportion of members of peasant trade unions. This is largely the result of the actions taken by the women of the SLG, who have inspired other trade unions in the education and health sectors, for example. Furthermore, the trade union practices of the highly feminized SLG have influenced trade union practices in other areas and inspired many other social, political, and cultural practices. All this is clearly part of the great revolution brought about by women in the last forty years.

References

Notes

1. Vid. Jo Little: “Feminist Perspectives in Rural Geography: an Introduction,” Journal of Rural Studies 2 (1986): 1–8; van der Burg, Margreet and Endeveld, Marina, eds. Women on Family Farms. Gender Research, EC Policies and New Perspectives (Wageningen, 1994)Google Scholar Circle for Rural European Studies; Wells, Betty L., “Creating a public space for women in US agriculture: Empowerment, Organization and Social Change,” Sociologia Ruralis 38 (1998): 371–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Midgley, Jane, “Gendered economies: Transferring private gender roles into the public realm through rural community development,” Journal of Rural Studies 22 (2006): 217–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O'Shaughnessy, Sara and Krogman, Naomi T., “Gender as contradiction: From dichotomies to diversity in natural resource extraction,” Journal of Rural Studies 27 (2011): 134–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. For organizations in rural sectors, vid. Norma Villareal Méndez, “Sectores Campesinos, Mujeres Rurales y Estado en Colombia” (Ph.D. diss., Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 2004), 114–538.

3. Elizabeth Teather, “Contesting rurality: country women's social and political networks,” in Gender and Rurality, eds. Sarah Whatmore, Terry Marsden, and Philip Lowe (London, 1994), 31–49.

4. Cfr. Tracey L. Moyle; Maureen Dollard and Saswata Narayan Biswas, “Personal and economic empowerment in rural Indian women: a self-help group approach,” International Journal of Rural Management 2 (2006): 245–66; and Otilia Driga, Esteban Lafuente, and Yancy Vaillant, “Reasons for the Relatively Lower Entrepreneurial Activity Levels of Rural Women in Spain,” Sociologia Ruralis 49 (2009): 71–96.

5. Berit Brandth and Marit S. Haugen, “Breaking into a Masculine Discourse Women and Farm Forestry,” Sociologia Ruralis 38 (1998): 427–42; Margaret Altson, “Women's Representation in an Australian Rural Context,” Sociologia Ruralis 43 (2003): 474–87.

6. The establishment of a Secretariat for Women (Secretariado para la Mujer) in 1977 in the Spanish trade union Worker's Commissions (Comisiones Obreras, CCOO) led to this union becoming the social organization with the largest number of women in management positions and the establishment of a joint Confederal Executive Committee (Comité Ejecutivo Confederal) consisting equally of men and women, vid. Carmen Bravo Sueskun, De la domesticidad a la emancipación. Las mujeres en la sociedad navarra, 1961–1991 (From domesticity to emancipation. Women in society of Navarra, 1961–91), (Pamplona, 2012), 451.

7. While the feminist movement in the cities will be nourished basically of university students, in rural it will do it of peasant women without studies. However, those that at least managed to obtain secondary education will occupy positions of leadership and political and union empowerment within the peasant world, since such training allowed them, together with an in-depth knowledge of agrarian labor reality, to assume functions of management, organization and communication within of the peasant organizations.

8. We followed Antonio Herrera González de Molina, La construcción de la democracia en el campo (1975–1988). El sindicalismo agrario socialista en la Transición española (The construction of democracy in the country (1975–188). The socialist agricultural unionism in the Spanish Transition), (Madrid, 2007), 15.

9. The term “empowerment” was developed in the World Conference on Women held in Beijing (Peking) in 1995 to refer to the increase of participation of women in decision-making processes and access to individual and/or collective power, which has to do with the recovery of the very dignity of women as human beings. However, its origin lies in liberal thinking, linked to the idea of empowering a person, without the more radical connotations taken on by Third World feminist thinking, vid. Michael Peters and James Marshall, “Education and empowerment: Postmodernism and the critique of humanism,” Education and Society 9 (1992): 123–34. Vid. Liv Toril Pettersen and Hilde Solbakken, “Empowerment as a Strategy for Change for Farm Women in Western Industrialized Countries,” Sociologia Ruralis 38 (1998): 318–30, to understand the term participation as a precursor of empowerment.

10. The first Secretariat for Women (Secretariado de la Mujer) was established in CCOO in 1977 as a structure to link the trade union and the feminist movement, Bravo-Sueskun, De la domesticidad a la emancipación, 449–50.

11. Brandth and Haugen, “Breaking into a Masculine Discourse Women,” 427–42.

12. Ramón Muñiz de las Cuevas and Prudencia Santasmarinas Raposo, “Estudio sobre a muller na sociedade agraria galega” (Studies about women in the peasant Galician society), in IV Xornadas Agrarias Galegas A Muller na Agricultura (Sada/A Coruña, 1988), 7–79, held from October 24–26 1986 in the Centro de Ensinanzas Integradas in Ourense.

13. Rosario Regueira Cereijo, “8 de marzo: Día da Muller Traballadora. Problemática da muller en Galicia” (8th March: International Woman's Day: Women's problems in Galicia), Fouce. Voceiro das Comisións Labregas-Sindicato Labrego Galego 108 (1987): 10–11.

14. Interview with Lidia Senra, former SGL secretary, August 10, 2010.

15. Vid. Lourdes Benería, “La aparición de la economía feminista” (The emergence of the feminist economy), Historia Agraria 17 (1999): 59–61.

16. Muñiz de las Cuevas and Santasmarinas Raposo, “Estudio sobre a muller,” 21–25. Interview with Pencha Santasmarinas, August 20, 2010.

17. Statements of Nanina Santos, María Xosé Queizán, Fina Varela, Eva Loira, Pencha Santasmarinas, and Lidia Senra, in the documentary Digna Rabia, 2011, directed by Martins Rodríguez and Rodríguez Gallardo.

18. Teresa Ortega López, “Semillas de cambio. Campesinas en el franquismo, la transición y la democracia” (Seeds of changing. Peasants in the francoism, transition and democracy), Andalucía en la historia, 51 (2016): 68–72.

19. Sharon R. Roseman, “Celebrating Silenced Words: The ‘Reimagining’ of a Feminist Nation in Late-Twentieth-Century Galicia,” Feminist Studies 23 (1997), 43–71; and Sharon R. Roseman, “¿Quen Manda? (Who's in Charge?): Household Authority Politics in Rural Galicia,” Anthropologica XLI (1999), 117–32.

20. Fix to: Ana María Abraira, “A marxinación da muller labrega” (The exclusion of the peasant woman), Fouce. Voceiro das Comisións Labregas-Sindicato Labrego Galego 2: 6–8 (1977). A similar situation in CCOO, Bravo-Sueskun: De la domesticidad a la emancipación, 445–54. The lack of interest of gender power for the forms of male struggle can also be seen in the anthropological perspective adopted in the work of Lila Abu-Lughod, “The romance of resistance: tracing transformations of power through Bedouin women,” American Ethnologist 17 (1990): 41–55, when women's “minor” challenges to the restrictions imposed by the male power of Bedouins of the western desert of Egypt (smoking, sexually irreverent speech, resistance to marriage, etc.) are analyzed.

21. Initially, historiographic accounts have wavered between the traditional invisibility of women's social and political activities (as was the case in Galician society in 1975–90) and their consideration as “heroines” to meet the need for creating “myths” that “helped along” agrarian claims.

22. “A loita das enchousas serviu para algo” (The struggle in As Enchousas served a purpose and was successful), Fouce. Voceiro das Comisións Labregas-Sindicato Labrego Galego 106 (1987): 10–11; Xosé Manuel Pereiro: “Galicia o la supervivencia del feudalismo rural” (Galicia or the survival of the rural feudalism), El País, November 14, 1986.

23. Ulfe was convicted by the County Court of A Coruña and received a one-month arrest sentence and a fine for the crime of disobedience and resisting authority when trying to avoid being evicted from the land she worked on. She was supported by Comisións Labregas, which led the usual collective actions in that period: fliers, graffiti, manifestos, a sit-in in the bishopric of Ferrol, resistance in the house vs. the Civil Guard, injuries, arrests, prosecutions, bails, duress, awareness-raising in fairs, assaults, etc.

24. Many peasant women who farmed the land leased endured the landowners’ patriarchal violence: prohibition to access the land, abusive payment to reclaim the land, threats, evictions, destruction of houses, loss of personal effects, etc. For these issues, see Carolyn Sachs, Gendered fields: rural women, agriculture and environment (Oxford, 1996); Sandra Hill-Lanz, Women on Farms. A report on women farm workers in the Western Cape (Pretoria, 1994); Sandra Hill-Lanz and Morgan Mitchell, Women on farms: growing stronger. (National Women on Farms Programme, 1997).

25. The literature on the participation of women in social conflicts throughout history is discussed in a continuum, which ranges from empowering women to their absolute dependence on men. There are references in Araceli Freire Cedeira, En defensa de lo suyo. Propiedad forestal y conflictividad social durante el franquismo: los montes vecinales de Cerceda, A Coruña (Defending what was theirs. Forestry ownership and social conflict during Francoism: The communal forests from Cerceda, A Coruña), (Santiago de Compostela, 2011), 96–97.

26. Source: Source: Spanish National Institute of Statistics, Fondo documental, Anuarios estadísticos (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, INE, Fondo documental, Anuarios estadísticos, http://www.ine.es/inebaseweb/libros.do?tntp=25687). Labor Force Survey.

27. Dolors García Ramón, “Actividad agraria y género en España: una aproximación a partir del Censo Agrario de 1982” (Agricultural activity and gender in Spain: an outline survey on the basis of the 1982 agricultural census), Documents D'Analisi Geogràfica 14 (1989): 89–114.

28. Percentages of the active Spanish population in the agricultural sector. Source: Spanish National Institute of Statistics, Fondo documental, Anuarios estadísticos (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, INE, Fondo documental, Anuarios estadísticos, http://www.ine.es/inebaseweb/libros.do?tntp=25687).

29. Comission des Communautés Europénnes, 1984, L'emploi des femmes en Espagne, Luxembourg, Office des publications officielles des Communautés Européenes.

30. Percentages of agricultural workforce by gender and region in Spain. Source: Spanish National Institute of Statistics, Fondo documental, Anuarios estadísticos (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, INE, Fondo documental, Anuarios estadísticos, http://www.ine.es/inebaseweb/libros.do?tntp=25687).

31. Redclift, N. and Mingione, E., eds., Beyond Employment; Household, Gender and Subsistence (Chichester, UK, 1985).

32. To understand the complexities of this process, it is important to bear in mind the words of Sharon R. Roseman “Strong Women and Pretty Girls: Self-Provisioning, Gender, and Class Identity in Rural Galicia (Spain),” American Anthropologist 104: 22–37 (2002) on the fact that the feminisation of the agricultural sector implied women dedicating their time not only to paid farm work but also to other tasks that were largely unpaid but necessary for their family's survival.

33. Istituto Nazionale di Statistica. ISTAT- Censimento agricoltura.

34. Ángel Rodríguez Gallardo, “Mujeres en prisión durante la dictadura portuguesa” (Women in prison during the Portuguese dictatorship), Studia histórica. Historia contemporánea 29 (2011): 337–66; Rose Nery Nobre de Melo, Mulheres portuguesas na Resistência (Portuguese Women in the Resistance) (Seara Nova, 1975); Vanda Gorjâo and Mulheres em Tempos Sombrios, Oposiçao feminina no Estado Novo (Women in Dark Times. Female Opposition in the Estado Novo) (Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2002); António de Figueiredo, Cinquenta Anos de Ditadura (Fifty Years of Dictatorship) (Dom Quixote, 1976).

35. Portuguese women with secondary studies were allowed to vote since 1931.

36. Bravo-Sueskun, De la domesticidad a la emancipación, 421–549. When talking about feminine discourse patterns, we refer to discursive strategies of resistance against patriarchy.

37. Something similar has been found in certain rural communities in Australia, vid. Bárbara Pini, “A critique ‘new’ rural local governance: The case of gender in a rural Australian setting,” Journal of Rural Studies 22 (2006): 396–408. On the invisibility of women see Margaret Grace and June Lennie, “Constructing and reconstructing rural women in Australia: The politics of change, diversity and identity,” Sociologia Ruralis 38 (1998): 351–70. In Muñiz de las Cuevas and Santasmarinas Raposo, “Estudio sobre a muller,” 33, the men surveyed recognize that only women with sufficient qualification should participate in public affairs. The impossibility of solidifying their identity and participating in socio-political tasks is one of the characteristic features of the struggle for the emancipation of Galician women, and of many other realities.

38. More accurate data in Muñiz de las Cuevas and Santasmarinas Raposo, “Estudio sobre a muller,” 48–49.

39. Ibid., 11.

40. Berit Brandth and Marit S. Haugen, “Rural Women, Feminism and the Politics of Identity,” Sociologia Ruralis 37 (1997): 325–44; Muñiz de las Cuevas and Santasmarinas Raposo, “Estudio sobre a muller,” 19. On the contradictions of the media in that period, which maintained the traditional roles but at the same time included adverts encouraging the emancipation of women, vid. Bravo-Sueskun, De la domesticidad a la emancipación, 25.

41. Tareixa Ledo Regal, Lidia Senra Rodríguez. A historia dun liderado entrañable (Lidia Senra Rodríguez: The history of an endearing leadership) (Santiago de Compostela, 2010), 59.

42. Pamela Beth Radcliff, “Women’s Politics: Consumer Riots in Twentieth-Century Spain,” in Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, eds. VL Enders and PB Radcliff (Albany, NY, 1999), 301–324.

43. Vid. Ramón Villares, La propiedad de la tierra en Galicia, 1500–1936 (Land ownership in Galicia, 1500–1936), (Madrid, 1982); Miguel Cabo Villaverde, O agrarismo (The agrarianism) (Vigo, 1998); Carlos Velasco, O agrarismo galego (The Galician agrarianism) (Santiago de Compostela, 2002).

44. For some references of Galician peasant women who were prominent in the collective actions led by the before Civil War of 1936–39 land-reform movement, Ledo Regal, Lidia Senra Rodríguez, 52–55, and for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, vid. Herminia Pernas Oroza, Historia das mulleres en Galicia. Época contemporánea (History of women in Galicia. Contemporary times) (Baiona, 2011), 180–224.

45. About this conflict, see Ana Cabana and Daniel Lanero, “Movilización social en la Galicia rural del Tardofranquismo (1960–1977)” (Social movements in the rural Galicia during late Francoism), Historia Agraria 48 (2009), 111–32, and the references included therein.

46. Men used to go out to bars, trade fairs and parish meetings, where women used to nearly always be absent, preventing their involvement in any community committee. It was the man who usually registered for the Rural Social Security and farmers insurance and dealt with Banks and the City Council, vid. Muñiz de las Cuevas and Santasmarinas Raposo, “Estudio sobre a muller,” 58–60.

47. Katy Bennett, “A Time for Change? Patriarchy, the Former Coalfields and Family Farming,” Sociologia Ruralis 44 (2004): 147–66.

48. Mª Victoria Martins Rodríguez and Ángel Rodríguez Gallardo, Digna Rabia/Honourable Rage (Asociación Memoria Histórica do 36 de Ponteareas/Unidade de Igualdade da Universidade de Vigo, 2011).

49. Xosé Fernández Roupar, Os labregos galegos diante da loita de liberación nacional (Galician peasants in the face of national liberation) (A Coruña, 1979), 17; Alberto Sabio Alcutén, “Cultivadores de democracia. Politización campesina y sindicalismo agrario progresista en España, 1970–1980” (Growers of democracy. Peasants’ politicization and progressive agricultural trade unionism in Spain 1970–1980), Historia Agraria 38 (2006): 75–102.

50. Freire Cedeira, En defensa de lo suyo, 75–91.

51. Fouce. Voceiro do Sindicato Labrego Galego/Comisións Labregas 117, 15; Fernández Roupar, Os labregos galegos, 17.

52. Sabio Alcutén, “Cultivadores de democracia” 79–80. The involvement of progressive Church members in the development of peasant organizations is also common in Latin America, vid. Emma Siliprandi, “Mulheres agricultoras no Brasil: sujeitos políticos na luta por soberania e segurança alimentar” (Peasant women in Brasil: political subjects in the fight for food Sovereignty and security), Pensamiento Iberoamericano 9 (2011): 170–83. Cabana and Lanero, “Movilización social,” 117, talk about the recognition within rural communities towards individual priests (Ramón Valcarce in Culleredo; Leopoldo López Rego in Melide) and some Agricultural Extension workers such as Ramón Muñiz. We should also mention the case of Prudencia (Pencha) Santasmarinas, an agent for the Agricultural Extension Service in the county of Viveiro and supporter of Comisións Labregas.

53. Sabio Alcutén, “Cultivadores de democracia,” 80.

54. Fernández Roupar, Os labregos galegos, 17.

55. The following year a proposal of basic measures for the farming world entitled “Our Farming Agenda” (O noso programa agrario) was made public. It was disseminated through clandestine distribution channels.

56. Comisións Campesiñas (Farm Workers Committees), Comisións Labregas (Peasants Commissions), Sindicato Agrario Galego (Galician Farming Trade Union), and Sindicato Independiente Labrego Galego (Galician Independent Peasants Trade Union).

57. Vid. Cabana and Lanero, “Movilización social.” The roadmap of the demands can be followed in Fouce. Voceiro das Comisións Labregas de Galicia 122: 6–9. The first collective non-payments took place in Ourense and Lugo in 1972. Protests became increasingly tense in the following years, with government pressure to block the accounts of those who refused to pay. Comisións Labregas started demonstrating blocking roads with their tractors (tractoradas) as a collective action to put pressure on the government, occupying public institutions and sit-ins in religious buildings. There were clashes and arrests, and protesters were injured. CCLL tried to prevent embargoes to peasants, and it became the best-known trade union among peasant women in that period, vid. Muñiz de las Cuevas and Santasmarinas Raposo, “Estudio sobre a muller,” 61.

58. In Lema (Carballo, A Coruña), the wetland of Baldaio was extremely valuable in terms of shellfish and environmental resources. Part of the communal property was used by the company Baldayo, S.A., supported by the Franco regime, for the extraction of sand (1948–67), taken up again since 1971 with protection of the law enforcement agencies and the prohibition to walk on the beach and the wetland, or to gather shellfish.

59. Dams were constructed in Galicia, ensuing to the following conflicts: Castrelos de Miño (1968), Portodemouros (1968), Frieira (1969), Salas (1972), Albarellos (1972) and Barrié de la Maza (1973), vid. Cabana and Lanero, “Movilización social,” 121.

60. Protests against pulp plants took place during late Francoism and the early years of democracy. The pulp plant in Ponteceso was a project of Celulosas de Guipúzcoa to settle in Bergantiños. The project was not carried out due to the opposition of the communities involved, vid. ABC, 2/3/1976; El País, 21/12/1976; La Voz de Galicia, 5/6/2008. Other villages that protested against pulp plants in that period were Quiroga, Ourense, O Barco de Valdeorras, Ponteareas or Negreira, vid. El País, August 12, 1976.

61. Sabio Alcutén, “Cultivadores de democracia,” 80. The so-called “milk agreement” was used to negotiate prize, transport, quality control, production, and payment of milk.

62. Villareal Méndez, Sectores campesinos, op. cit. The “feminization of agriculture” was an expression that became popular with the analysis of the trend of data from 1950 to 1990 from the World Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

63. The conflict began in 1973 and went on until the Socialists came to power in 1982, with peaks of protest in 1977 and 1979, vid. El Progreso, March 18, 2011.

64. Ledo Regal, Lidia Senra Rodríguez, 56–57.

65. This idea of the women defending “what was theirs” is discussed in Freire Cedeira, En defensa de lo suyo, 96–144.

66. Villareal Méndez, Sectores campesinos, 19; Ledo Regal, Lidia Senra Rodríguez, 57.

67. On a comparison of Pencha Santasmarinas as a “woman of action” with the German environmental leader Petra Kelly, vid. El Correo Gallego, October 14, 2007, where the main highlights of her biography can be found.

68. El Progreso, March 18, 2011.

69. The Asociación Sementeira, an organization bringing together several people from clandestine organizations, was very important in the conflict. It was led by Pencha Santasmarinas, vid. El Correo Gallego, October 14, 2007 and El Progreso, March 18, 2011.

70. Other women who led those protests (África Leira Sanmartín, of the Agricultural Extension Service; or the peasants Josefa Domínguez Meitín and Antonia Galdo Fernández) have remained hidden under the male prominence, vid. Ledo Regal, Lidia Senra Rodríguez, 57.

71. Vid. Martins Rodríguez and Rodríguez Gallardo, Digna Rabia.

72. El Progreso, October 14, 2007. Together with Ramón Muñiz de las Cuevas, they developed a new mental environment which encouraged the riots against the nuclear plant in Xove,” El País de Galicia, March 18, 2011.

73. Ledo Regal: Lidia Senra Rodríguez, 57–62.

74. Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro: CineClubeCarlosVarela 1945–1980. Nós, P.C.G/Fundación Bautista Álvarez, 2005. The transformation in connection with the incorporation of women to history explains that Oliva Pose, one of the leaders of the protest movement in the wetland of Baldaio has become a reference in the electronic publication As mulleres na Historia. Álbum de Mulleres (2005) (Women in History. Women's Album), kept active by the Equality Committee of the Consello da Cultura Galega (Galician Culture Council), www.culturagalega.org/album/.

75. Henrique Mariño, “Cuando la guardia civil cargaba con mosquetón” (When the Civil Guard charged with muskets), Solución Salina, June 15, 2012, www.publico.es.

76. Ledo Regal, Lidia Senra Rodríguez, 60; Fernández Roupar, Os labregos galegos, 147.

77. Xosé Vilela, “Baldaio. O sangue chegou ó mar” (Baldaio. Blood  reached the river), Teima (22nd May 1977). The symbolic occupation of the sandy area is led by Olivia Pose and Xan Fraga, “Salvemos as marismas de Baldaio!” (Let's save the wetland of Baldaio!), Cadernos A Nosa Terra de pensamento e debate (23d July 1997); Margarita Ledo Andión, “Baldaio. Agora a represión cóntase por millóns” (Baldaio. Now repression is counted in the millions), A Nosa Terra 65 (June 1979), 3.

78. These included the teacher Aurora Platas. Oliva Pose was attacked by law enforcement officers and ended up admitted to hospital in A Coruña.

79. “Cando a historia das Encrobas se comenzou a escribir nos xornais. Un fito do agrarismo que cumpre 30 anos” (When the events of Encrobas started to be told by newspapers. A landmark of the agrarian reform movement), www.vello.vieiros.com, February 14, 2007; Fernández Roupar, Os labregos galegos, 67–134; Ledo Regal, Lidia Senra Rodríguez, 65.

80. Fernández Roupar, Os labregos galegos, 95.

81. Ledo Regal, Lidia Senra Rodríguez, 64–65.

82. Ledo Regal, Lidia Senra Rodríguez, 66.

83. Fernández Roupar, Os labregos galegos, 110.

84. Kritzinger, Andrienetta and Vorster, Jan, “Women on South African Farms: Empowerment Across or Along Race and Class Divisions?” Sociologia Ruralis 38 (1998): 331–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85. In the Second National Congress of the SLG held in 1984, Lidia Senra Rodríguez (twenty-five years old, from Lugo, union officer), as Secretary for Organization and Finance, and María Xesús Iglesias Rodríguez (aged twenty-six, from Moaña, horticulturist), join the National Board of the trade union. There have been a certain “specialization” pin tasks concerning organization, finance, and treasury in connection with the performance of women in community organizations.

86. In 1977, she was appointed Head of Comisións Labregas-Sindicato Labrego Galego in Val de Lemos (Lugo), when she was nineteen years old. In 1984, she became the Secretary for Finance of the SLG, vid. Ledo Regal, Lidia Senra Rodríguez, 72–76.

87. “Hoxe unha médica fálanos das enfermedades da muller” (Today, a woman doctor talked about the illnesses specific to women), Fouce. Voceiro das Comisións Labregas de Galicia, special issue.

88. These women include the teacher Araceli Pillado Salgado—dedicated to sheep farming and current Chair of OVICA, the Sheep and Goat Farmers Association—and the doctor Andrea Gallego.

89. “A muller labrega” (The peasant woman), Fouce. Voceiro das Comisións Labregas de Galicia, special issue for the SLG Third Congress (1989).