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Citizenship and Gender Equality in the Second Spanish Republic: Representations and Practices in Socialist Culture (1931–1936)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2014

ANA AGUADO
ANA AGUADO*
Affiliation:
University of Valencia, Av. de Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, 13, 46010 Valencia, Spain; Ana.Aguado@uv.es
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Abstract

This article contributes to historiographical debates on political cultures, the construction of female citizenship and democracy development through an analysis of the construction of gender identities in socialist culture and working-class culture in Spain. From 1931, in the context of the Second Spanish Republic, socialist culture experienced a complex mixture of egalitarian proposals, collective actions and strategies to achieve the political mobilisation of women. This process reformulated in female terms many of the concepts historically present in this political culture: equality, freedom, secularism and citizenship.

Citoyenneté et égalité des genres pendant la seconde république espagnole: représentations et pratiques dans la culture socialiste (1931–1936)

Par l’intermédiaire de l’analyse de la construction des identités de genre dans la culture socialiste et la culture de la classe ouvrière espagnoles, cet article contribue aux débats historiographiques sur les politiques culturelles, la construction de la citoyenneté des femmes et le développement de la démocratie en Espagne. Dès 1931, dans le contexte de la Seconde République espagnole, la culture socialiste a connu un mélange complexe de propositions égalitaires, d’actions collectives et de stratégies pour obtenir la mobilisation politique des femmes. Ces processus ont reformulé en termes féminins nombre de concepts qui étaient déjà présents dans cette culture politique: égalité, liberté, sécularité et citoyenneté.

Staatsbürgerschaft und geschlechtergleichstellung in der zweiten spanischen republik: darstellungen und praxis in der sozialistischen kultur (1931–1936)

Diese Untersuchung ist ein Beitrag zur historiografischen Debatte über politische Kulturen, die Konstruktion des weiblichen Staatsbürgers und die Entwicklung der Demokratie. Im Mittelpunkt des Beitrags steht eine Analyse der Konstruktion von Geschlechteridentitäten in der Kultur des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterklasse in Spanien. Nach der Ausrufung der Zweiten Spanischen Republik im Jahre 1931 erlebte die sozialistische Kultur eine komplexe Mischung aus egalitären Vorschlägen, Arbeitskämpfen und Strategien, mit denen die politische Mobilisierung der Frauen erreicht werden sollte. Im Zuge dieses Prozesses wurden viele der historisch in dieser politischen Kultur bereits bestehenden Konzepte mit Blick auf Frauen neu formuliert: Gleichheit, Freiheit, Säkularismus und Staatsbürgerschaft.

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Contemporary European History , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 95 - 113
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

We need to talk to all women, whether they belong to our class or not. Working women have no need of these acts of propaganda, because they know how to fulfil their duty . . . Therefore, I am going to speak as a woman rather than as a socialist

Maria Lejárraga, El Socialista, 27 October 1933

Maria Lejárraga uttered these words at the first socialist rally aimed at women, held at the Casa del Pueblo in Madrid in October 1933, where she shared the stage with Margarita Nelken, Carmen del Barrio and Victoria Herrero; the newspaper El Socialista reported the speech in an article entitled ‘Feminist Rally’.Footnote 1 Coming from an active socialist and later a member of parliament (or deputy), her words summarise the importance of the politicisation and mobilisation of women as citizens and voters before the election call of November 1933.

From 1931 and in the context of the Second Spanish Republic, socialist culture in Spain was to go through a complex development process involving egalitarian proposals, collective action and strategies for the political mobilisation of women. The specificities and importance of this process have been insufficiently analysed; this article aims to show that during the period in question, many of the concepts intrinsic to this particular political culture – equality, freedom, solidarity, laicism, citizenship, progress – were successfully redefined and reformulated to make them inclusive of women.

It would be hard to say the same of any previous historical period, even up to the 1930s, in the sense that the historical development of essentially socialist feminist thinking (here as in other political cultures) took place in a specific context, at a crossroads, and within clear political-ideological and sociological limits. Even inside those limits, there had been few signs of feminist militancy – not surprisingly in view of the fact that political organisations had historically been structured on the assumption that the only political subjects were men. Nor did the socialist imagination encompass any hegemonic models of femininity and masculinity.Footnote 2 Despite those limitations, however, the Second Republic acted as a melting pot in which egalitarian discourses, couched in the language of socialism, gained an unprecedented momentum. This impulse had immediate and obvious legislative, civil, associational and educational repercussions.

The construction of gender identity, its importance and its specific meanings within socialist culture – and, by extension, in working-class cultureFootnote 3 – will be analysed in what follows.Footnote 4 It will be considered as a fundamental part of the social and political history of the Second Republic, and explored first from a more global perspective, as part of the history of class languages and class practices,Footnote 5 and secondly in the context of debates over political cultures, citizenship building and the development of democracy in twentieth-century Spain.Footnote 6

The theoretical and methodological starting point will be the need to integrate some of the most significant contributions from both political and social history, and gender history, particularly women's history, referring to the study of political cultures and the historical construction of social identities, and leading to a reflection on the construction of gender identities and its historical links to political language, most particularly the relationship between gender identities and the development of feminist discourse. These ideas had been developing within socialist culture since the early twentieth century, but became particularly intense in the Spain of the Second Republic. The new political context stimulated their development, linked to demands for political and legal equality for women, to women's suffrage and ultimately to the achievement of female citizenship.

My discussion will be conceptually linked with Joan Scott's statement that gender identities – meaning, in this context, female identities – are neither ahistorical nor ‘natural’. They are variable phenomena that are constructed and redefined in different historical contexts, and are discursively structured in contrast to other identities.Footnote 7 It should be repeated that the development of any political culture depends on the extent to which the collective identities generated at its core are representative of the surrounding reality, thus giving legitimacy and meaning to the defence of a shared system of values and thoughts.Footnote 8

It is a commonplace of historiography that questions about women and their subordination have not traditionally aroused much interest in socialist circles.Footnote 9 This claim arises from the fact that socialist culture – like other political cultures of the time – shared many of the prejudices that the hegemonic gender system made it culturally difficult to avoid, along with an anti-feminist or sexist discourse that followed the dominant models of femininity in representing women as, above all, dependent. While accepting part of this commonplace, however, it is necessary to revisit it. Within the evident historical limits, I shall now examine the evolution of feminist thinking in socialist culture, as part of the political context of the Second Republic, in order to reveal its importance as a fundamental aspect of the republican democratisation process.Footnote 10

Why was it fundamental? Because the democratisation and modernisation driven by the Second Republic acted as a catalyst to stimulate and re-define practices and discourses that had existed within socialist culture from the beginning, but as minority, and often contradictory, elements. From the beginning of the twentieth century the heterogeneous inheritance of Spanish feminism had focused on the egalitarian referents present in different political cultures, and had thus been able to bequeath an ideological and organisational legacy to the years immediately preceding the proclamation of the Second Republic.

In order to analyse this issue, we must first inquire into the conditions that enabled discourses, and egalitarian practices, developed by socialist culture in the Second Republic to act (sometimes unintentionally)Footnote 11 as identity referents, mobilising a female population which would be incorporated into political citizenship during those years. Secondly, it is important to be aware that the socialist feminist movement used instruments that were available in every political culture.Footnote 12 The movement's discourse was manifested in the written and spoken word, in the press, in magazines, at meetings and conferences, and in parliament. Thirdly, we shall examine how this discourse led to the organisation and mobilisation of collective action, and to changing practices in the social sphere.Footnote 13 This was a medium-term mobilisation designed to stimulate the ‘feminine awakening’ that had begun in Spain at the time of the First World War, drawing on turn-of-the-century freethinking and secularisation.Footnote 14

Is socialism the same thing as equality? An old background to a new feminism

Specialist historians have repeatedly noted the dramatic under-representation of women in political organisations – including socialist and labour organisations – during the first third of the twentieth century.Footnote 15 Political parties and unions were still a male bastion in the 1930s: very few women took part in organised militancy. During this initial period, female militancy within Spanish socialism was confined the Women's Groups (Grupos Femeninos) created by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE) since 1910, starting with the Socialist Women's Association (Agrupación Femenina Socialista) of Madrid in 1906; and to the few women members of the General Workers’ Union (Unión General de Trabajadores, UGT), recruited from previous trade unions and women's friendly societies.Footnote 16 Still smaller was the number of women who held positions of political responsibility, or were included in delegations to socialist congresses. For example, only twelve women delegates attended PSOE congresses between 1912 and 1932.Footnote 17

In other words, misogyny and hegemonic gender models prevented women from assuming a significant presence, even within the labour movement and the political cultures of the left. It was almost universally assumed in late nineteenth-century socialism that the protagonists of social emancipation, politics and the revolutionary utopia had to be men.

All this led to an inconsistent and contradictory attitude among socialist leaders to the ‘woman question’. They frequently appealed to women to identify themselves strategically with the workers’ cause, but this appeal was made from a male perspective, to women as mothers or wives. In labour terms, this coincided with the assumption that a wife would always share a husband's republican principles and bring up her children to share them likewise.Footnote 18 An early twentieth-century edition of the socialist newspaper La lucha de clases explained that:

Socialist mothers lead their sons along the right path. They see the need to join with men in conquering the society of the future. They elude the grip of the priest, who holds and tricks them, thinking that they in turn will hold and trick men.Footnote 19

Socialist culture had enormous potential in the Spain of the first third of the twentieth century. But it was a culture with a complex and often contradictory world-view, a unique symbolic universe made up of diverse ideological and cultural referents: readings, social spaces, family traditions and social practices which contributed to fostering awareness and cohesion among the working class.Footnote 20 The initial programme of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE), founded in 1879, included some references to gender equality, with limited theoretical elaboration. Among other things, it mentioned the need to eliminate labour exploitation and wage inequality between women and men. This programme remained substantially unchanged from 1879 to 1939. Thus it was in force during the Second Republic and the Civil War.

Meanwhile, in the wider European context of the Second International, an egalitarian discourse had been building since the last decades of the nineteenth century which led to the creation of the Socialist Women's International. Among other actions and proposals, in 1910 March 8 was proclaimed as International Working Women's Day; and the International did a lot to encourage the incorporation of women into political life.Footnote 21 The social action of socialist women, and of European working-class organisations, from the early twentieth century encompassed not only labour and social demands but also political claims, and the vote as a civil and democratic right. A speaker at the Congress of the Socialist International held in Marseille in 1925 proclaimed that:

The socialist parties of all countries should do everything possible to support women's organisation within the labour movement. Every Socialist Party should consider the emancipation of women as one of its most important tasks. The emancipation of women requires the granting of the same political rights to women and men, including equal rights to vote and stand for office in constitutions which now benefit only men . . . The socialist movement must take account of women's needs as well as men’s.

Feminist demands, especially for the vote, had been explicitly formulated in Spain since the First World War, and were closely linked with such left-wing notions as freethinking, secularism and socialism.Footnote 22 This early, secular feminism would vindicate social, legal, educational and cultural equality between men and women in many ways, an equality that would end subordination to male authority.Footnote 23

Spanish socialism, as an egalitarian ideology, was very much part of this movement, although its progress was slow and limited during the first decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 24 Even mainstream socialist (and also republican)Footnote 25 discourse put certain limits on the proposed equality between women and men. Moreover, curbs on the potential freedom and autonomy of women were justified by invoking the traditional relationship of women with religion and the Church, and the ideological control the latter could exercise over their consciences – an idea springing from the ancient misogyny which still lurked behind modern philosophical and scientific thinking, and behind the dominant models of femininity and masculinity in Spanish society.Footnote 26 Despite these limitations, the presence of women in the socialist movement in early twentieth-century Spain was crucial to the extension of feminism in its various conceptualisations.Footnote 27

From the First World War onwards, the egalitarian thinking of socialist women was to influence, and act as a referent for, the political agenda adopted at congresses of the PSOE and Socialist Youth (Juventudes Socialistas), particularly in the 1920s. The eleventh National Congress of the PSOE, held in 1918, called for universal suffrage for men and women over the age of twenty-one, as well as civil equality, the abolition of home-based work and the creation of municipal nurseries for the children of female workers. In 1929 the same demands were echoed by the Third National Congress of Socialist Youth, which also raised other issues relating to women's rights, including a divorce law, equality between ‘legitimate’ and ‘natural’ children, equal pay for men and women, and even ‘legal punishment for the crime of seduction followed by abandonment’.Footnote 28

All these demands, added to more general claims relating to the elimination of inequality and subordination of women, were incorporated into various socialist programmes, even before the proclamation of the Second Republic. Even the maternalist discourse of the first decades of the twentieth century offered a model of femininity within socialist culture. As time went on, this discourse gained in complexity and acquired additional referents: antimilitarism, anticlericalism, secularism and feminism. It shaped the values that ‘socialist women’, or in a broader sense modern women, needed to adopt. As a phenomenon, it was related to other changes that occurred in Spain around the time of the First World War.Footnote 29

Socialist discourse on gender was limited, variable and often contradictory; nonetheless it was firmly rooted in socialist political culture, reformulated from an egalitarian perspective. Socialist feminism was assumed to be the only ‘true feminism’, which assumed that overall progress must involve eliminating the subordinate social status of Spanish women. Margarita Nelken denounced that status as early as 1919:

Socialist feminism has always and everywhere been the strongest and greatest of feminisms. As we see it, so-called Catholic feminism remains a conservative manifestation: what they understand by feminism is only a means of protecting themselves against anything new. This feminism, which is always accompanied by charity or educational works, is, by its nature and its intentions, at present the greatest enemy of everything that might mean development or progress in Spain.Footnote 30

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Margarita Nelken, who joined the PSOE early in 1931, had come to understand ‘socialist feminism’ to mean the development of gender awareness and social responsibility among women. And she saw this in terms of social class, insisting that working women should relate equality between the sexes to social equality. In other words, she raised the stakes of the relationship between gender and class.

The first socialist statements based on the concept of ‘collaboration’ with men, in terms of female ‘assistance’ to fathers, husbands or children, assumed a more specifically feminist form in the following decade. Here we must mention María Cambrils and her book Socialist Feminism (Feminismo Socialista, 1925). Cambrils’ thought is a key referent in this synthesis between the concept of class and the radical defence of ‘working’ feminism, whereby socialism is understood to enshrine the ideal of the redemption of women. Ideologically and politically, Cambrils conceives socialist feminism as ‘class feminism’, while socialism is understood as the most radical and refined expression of true liberalism:

Socialism, always logical, always liberal, emancipator of the oppressed, free from religious prejudices, enthusiast for true morality, based on science that should be our standard of conduct, grants the vote to all women without distinction and carries feminism to the highest degree.Footnote 31

This ‘socialist messianism’ regarding women can be found in the writings of other prominent socialists ‘awakening’ to feminism between the First World War and the Second Spanish Republic, including Margarita Nelken and María Lejárraga.Footnote 32 This limited, but qualitatively active and decisive, female awakening was to find the Second Republic to be fertile ground, where it would grow into a substantial part of the modernisation and democratisation that took place during the period.

Without analysing different political positions with regard to the republican regime, I propose not only a political interpretation in the narrow sense of the term but also an approach to the question from a chiefly social and cultural perspective, focusing on the spreading of egalitarian referents and discourses that enabled women to be seen as autonomous agents and subjects of citizenship. In this sense, socialist women in the 1920s and 1930s reformulated the concept of equality that was already an essential part of socialist thinking, endowing it with specific connotations – often different from those it had for socialist men – and steadily extending their demands: equality before the law, political equality, equal pay, citizenship for women. Equality and identity were added in this historical construction because, as Arlette Farge has argued, ‘they may need to be apprehended as a whole’.Footnote 33

In this reformulation, it is particularly interesting to analyse identity changes implied by the discursive construction of socialist culture in gender terms in the context of the Second Republic.

The Republic of female citizens

The egalitarian principles of the socialist tradition first found political expression thanks to the democratising principles enunciated in the 1931 Constitution of the Second Republic, which then introduced a number of proposals for equality and citizenship for women. This agenda was not new: aspects of it had been enacted sporadically in previous years. The most urgent and essential objective had been to turn women into full citizens and bind them politically to the republican cause, to the ‘new nation’ that was to be built on a democratic and egalitarian basis.Footnote 34 Secondly, women must be emancipated from the ‘guardianship’ of the Church: a secular and anticlerical purpose which had much in common with republicanism, but had a minor antifeminist component. Thirdly, and as a consequence, women had to be tied more tightly to the socialist cause and to egalitarian principles.Footnote 35 In advancing all these objectives, the socialist movement as a whole played a key role in the 1930s, although the political left failed to mobilise women as effectively as the right.

The arrival of the Second Republic, offering new legislative and social prospects, encouraged women to fight for equality in the hope that their demands would actually be conceded. The republican ‘new Spain’, an alternative to the anti-liberal and Catholic ‘eternal Spain’,Footnote 36 would not only make women visible in the public sphere and extend their rights and liberties (as aspect that is already well known to and well researched by historians), but also offer them a social and cultural scene that would enable them to acquire the political and linguistic skills they needed to build a consciousness and a specific gender identity, whether or not this led to immediate demands for voting rights.

It is striking that the first emergency decrees included one allowing women to stand, for the first time, for the Constituent Cortes (parliament) of 1931, although women still could not vote until the new constitution was approved. As a result, also for the first time, women candidates stood for election – but only ten of them for all thirteen constituencies, and nine of those were in Madrid. Most had little chance of being elected, but two were chosen by the provincial district of Madrid: Clara Campoamor and Victoria Kent. Most of the women candidates were on the left. Of the successful candidates, Campoamor belonged to the Radical Party (Partido Radical) and Kent to the Radical Socialist Party (Partido Radical-Socialista); PSOE member Margarita Nelken was elected in Badajoz a few months later.Footnote 37

This article is not primarily concerned with the famous debate over women's suffrage in the Constituent Assembly and the turning point it represented. But it is interesting to note that approval of the motion depended on the support of the majority Socialist Party. The socialist position was substantially different from that of the republican parties, including the Radicals and Radical Socialists. The agenda of the Radical Socialist Republican Party (Partido Republicano Radical Socialista), adopted in September 1930, originally called for universal suffrage for all citizens over twenty-three, ‘without distinction of sex’. But this was not the wording of the motion when it was translated into law. The radical socialist deputy Jerónimo Gomáriz pointed out that his party had expressly acknowledged equal rights, but ‘in order to secure the salvation of the Republic, the exercise of these rights must await the passing of an electoral law that would establish when and what women could vote’.Footnote 38 Nonetheless the motion calling for female suffrage was passed, largely thanks to the support of the Socialist Party. This was the first time that Spanish women were recognised as citizens entitled both to vote and to stand for election.

The approval of women's suffrage, recognised in Article 36 of the new republican constitution, was ‘proof’ of the modernity of the ‘New Spain’ as democratised by the republican regime. Fostering the principle of equality was compatible with democratic assumptions, especially socialist ones.Footnote 39 Indeed, once both men and women had the vote it is possible to talk in terms of a fully democratic system, even if the desired changes in the social outlook, mentality and behaviour of both men and women, invoked by the socialists, had still to be effected.Footnote 40

The achievement of political female citizenship in the 1930s implied not only new legislative and organisational possibilities, but also the growth and diversification of multiple egalitarian and feminist discourses emerging within the socialist culture: a lesser known consequence, but an interesting one from the perspective of the construction of collective identities. In this sense, the broad agenda of multiple social reform facilitated not only legal changes as part of a comprehensive legislative and egalitarian package – political citizenship, Civil Code reform, civil marriage, divorce – but also the development of new egalitarian standards through new discursive and practical proposals at deeper levels. They all had the common goal of showing that the Republic was responding to long-standing female demands. The new political situation demanded it, and this meant that the necessary changes in political strategies, which now must be aimed at the new female electorate, fostered the development of egalitarian approaches within the socialist tradition. As María Lejárraga would acknowledge,Footnote 41 there was a real need to counteract not only the Catholic right's powers of mobilisation, but also the upholding, through sheer inertia, of patriarchal mentalities and discourses even among the political cultures of the left.

Socialist politics and egalitarian discourse in the Second Republic

During the Second Republic, the Socialist Party became the most important political organisation in the country, judging by the number of its militants and its influence over the Spanish working and popular classes, and also by the agenda of social reform which guided its legislative and governmental programme. That programme, as implemented by the interim government and the ruling coalition of the Republican-Socialist biennium, would determine many of the modernising and reforming characteristics of the new regime, and bring the working classes and women into political life under a parliamentary system.

Thus, from the beginning of the Second Republic, both the socialist political programme and its legislative, educational and associative proposals attached importance to the politicisation and education of the female population, hoping that women would use their newly acquired rights in ways that were favourable to the interests of the Republic and the socialist cause. Many of these egalitarian and feminist proposals emerged fundamentally from a small but active group of socialist women which had been growing since the 1920s and saw the republican ‘hope’ as the ideal way to achieve its electoral and legislative aims, influence public opinion, and shape the views of organisations and associations.

Within the socialist movement, the strategic importance of giving women the vote was more widely appreciated after it became clear that universal male suffrage and electoral coalitions of the left had helped to improve the civil rights of Spanish workers. So much was achieved by the Republican-Socialist coalition before the advent of the Second Republic.Footnote 42 From that time onwards, democracy and socialism were increasingly seen as inseparable.Footnote 43 For socialism to achieve a strong position in parliament it was necessary to combat abstentionism and encourage political participation. As a result of these changes, the socialists gradually incorporated concern for the political mobilisation of the masses into their electoral strategy.Footnote 44

Thus socialist women, among others, came to realise that the vote was essential if they were to secure political, working and civic rights and participate fully in public life, bring about changes in the law or help consolidate the new political regime. It was no accident that socialist members of the Constituent Cortes voted in favour of women's suffrage; rather it was a response to the egalitarian discourse developed by socialist women from earlier times in their own political culture, and to connections with suffragist discussions and international women's organisations that took part in this movement.

Whatever their attitudes towards and criticisms of the republican regime, all socialist women saw the need for egalitarian legal changes and women's suffrage. In particular, several articles of the 1931 Constitution developed the principle of gender equality, because the transformation of the legal framework involved developing social reforms intended to remove the subordinate status of women in terms both of their access to the public sphere, education and work, and in terms of the model of marriage and the family. For example, María Domínguez, mayor of Gallur, the first woman mayor in the Second Republic (she was shot in 1936), asserted in 1933 that

It will mean little to our beloved Spain to have shaken off the oppressive yoke of the Bourbon family. It will be meaningless to have implemented the republican regime, if women are not trained to espouse all the reforms that are need to be implemented in our nation.Footnote 45

In this sense, it could be said that women who were active during the Second Republic were politically linked to socialism, basing their actions on their ideological and political referents, and that their actions had a number of objectives relating to class, gender and ‘national citizenship’. Hence they felt the need to politicise the female population and encourage them to exercise citizenship, defend their claims as women, mothers and workers, and finally become part of the socialist movement. To this end, socialist women deployed various mobilising strategies, both discursive and organisational.

One theme of their discourse was the control exercised by clergy over women's consciences in Spain, with the inference that this control would be exerted to make women vote against the interests of the Republic. Certainly, the conservative and the Catholic right were quick to define and implement a strategy for dealing with these new female citizens and voters, who were ripe for indoctrination and political mobilisation in the new public space. Conservative and traditionalist attempts to armour hearts and minds against ‘republican modernity’ became particularly intense and aggressive as half the population was transformed into new voters. In this ideological struggle, it was not accidental or insignificant that right-wing speeches repeatedly linked the growth of ‘anti-Spanish socialist doctrines’ with the growth of an ‘imported feminism’ and the appearance of the feminist femme fataleFootnote 46 as compared with the ‘femininity’ of the authentic Spanish woman, the real ‘womanly woman’ – a kind of woman, and a model of femininity, that had been cherished by romantic and positivist misogynists since the beginning of the century.Footnote 47

Women of the left, particularly socialists, were particularly aware of this ideological and propagandistic mobilisation of the Catholic right – unlike many of their male fellow activists, who misinterpreted the new electoral scene. They knew how far the left lagged behind the right when it came to female electoral mobilisation, given the social status of Spanish women and the extent to which ‘Catholicity’ and ‘tradition’ were assumed to be characteristic of ‘real’ Spanish femininity. This concern was present in all progressive women who tried to extend feminist approaches in those years, as in the speeches of Mary Lejárraga, Victoria Kent, Mary Cambrils, Margarita Nelken and, of course, Clara Campoamor. And it was present despite the diversity of their positions, and the lack of agreement between them, regarding the advisability of giving women the vote immediately. Margarita Nelken said as much in 1931 in the book Woman and the Constituent Cortes (La mujer ante las Cortes Constituyentes):

A few dozen college girls, a few dozen girls affiliated to socialist youth groups, acted accordingly, with great enthusiasm, in the last elections. Even a few thousand proletarian or peasant women who had been converted to leftist ideals by the difficulties of their lives on the one hand, and by a close identification with the nearest men on the other . . . They mean nothing in the face of the overwhelming majority of women directly and patently at odds with the ideals of their partners, parents or children.Footnote 48

Among other factors, it was the need to respond to the right on the new electoral scene, and offer their own alternatives, that encouraged politically active left-wing women to pursue a large and active ‘agenda’ of performance and discourse during the Second Republic. Moreover, they were acutely aware of the political and cultural ‘disadvantages’ from which they started: inequalities in outlook, education and influence. This can be seen repeatedly in their speeches and publications.

Socialist politics, when aimed at the female population, depended heavily on the women who, in their various different ways, were passionately involved in political, civil and cultural action in the republican public sphere. María Lejárraga is perhaps the most paradigmatic example, but not the only one. In these years she and the other socialist deputies – Margarita Nelken, Matilde de la Torre, Julia Álvarez, Veneranda García Manzano – and many other women involved in associations, unions and parties acted, perhaps for the first time, as ‘voices of female authority’ in the new institutionalised spaces of political power. Their proposals and discourses became legitimised, visible and socially widespread.Footnote 49

It has sometimes been claimed that Spanish women did not show much interest in voting. That is untrue. On the contrary, female strategies of discourse and association were extensive. Thus, on 1 October 1931, when the assembly voted on Article 36 of the constitution which granted political citizenship to Spanish women, women filled the public gallery, demanding an interview with the Speaker, Julián Besteiro, and gathering together at the doors of Congress to hand out leaflets to members, in which they said:

Spanish women expect the deputies of the Republic to give them their first lesson in political ethics by upholding the laws voted in Parliament, granting the right to suffrage on an equal footing with men. Deputies! Be consistent! Do not disappoint the hopes of republican women wishing to serve the Republic with a full sense of responsibility! Do not despise their loyal participation!Footnote 50

By that time most Spanish socialists (unlike most Spanish republicans) were in favour of women's suffrage, both for ideological and electoral reasons and because it was likely to swell the socialist vote. Contrary to the opinion of Margarita Nelken in 1931, before the calling of the election in 1933 María Cambrils argued that working-class women were likely to vote for the left, since workers, whether female or male, all had the same class-related problems.Footnote 51

Other named republicans, who pretend they agree with the democratic slogan of equality, argue that women voters will vote for conservative candidates because they are subservient to the Church. This assumption is a deceit, if not a slander, and we protest against it on behalf of all Spanish women of liberal beliefs. Don't most of the men standing for election claim to think differently from the pro-monarchist gangs in their frock-coats or their priestly skullcaps? . . . Socialists deserve the gratitude of Spanish women, because they have elevated them to the deserved rank of citizen . . . Equal citizenship is a real achievement by socialists in Spain, an achievement for which international feminism has been battling against brutal opposition from all faiths which are implacably opposed to equal rights and social duties for both sexes . . . One thing is certain: no socialist home will send forth a woman who votes for the reactionariesFootnote 52

After the elections of November 1933 and the triumph of the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas, CEDA) and the Radical Republican Party, various female socialist voices joined the republican voice of Clara CampoamorFootnote 53 in refuting a deluge of accusations blaming women for the outcome of the election and attributing the success of the right to the mobilisation of conservative women and non-participation of working women. Although this view has become a historiographical commonplace, it is necessary to insist that tensions between women's suffrage and political citizenship were, in practice, resolved through the general behaviour of the electorate – both female and male – in response to the general political situation in November 1933, which pitted a right-wing coalition against a disunited left, a weak government, abstentionism, and so on.Footnote 54

Socialist culture and maternalist discourse before the Republic

Socialist proposals during the republican period intertwined egalitarian discourses on political citizenship with maternalist speeches. Motherhood, one of the most powerful symbols in Western thought, invokes ‘women's power’, but concedes the biological ‘difference’ which underpins patriarchy. Its symbolic reference is never irrelevant.Footnote 55 Inevitably, it featured in socialist discourse, as in other political cultures, and always with a positive connotation. It became even more insistent in the socialist discourse of the Second Republic: as an element of identity, but also as a powerful stimulus to mobilisation. Appeals to motherhood are often heard when women are being asked to act politically. For example, during the November 1933 election the Lugo-based socialist newspaper El Momento exhorted:

Vote, women! Vote for the socialists, because if you vote for them you are saving your children from being sent to the slaughter, that is, to war. Vote, working woman! Vote for the socialists, because if, some unhappy day, your husband has an accident that prevents him from working, he will not end up as a limbless beggar on the streets, because a socialist law will protect you from destitution. Vote, mothers! Vote for the socialists, because in that way you will save your children from having to emigrate, as in the dreadful days of the monarchy, in order to get the bread denied to them in Spain.Footnote 56

During the Civil War maternalist discourse became more prominent in the messages both of the Republican government and of women's organisations such as the Antifascist Women's Association (AMA). In time of war, no doubt, mothers were more mothers than ever, in both the biological and the social sense. Naturally, the same discourse was used by all female republican organisations in exile, including the Antifascist Women's Union (UMA), the name adopted by the AMA in 1945.Footnote 57

Nevertheless it was during the republican period that this view of motherhood coexisted and merged with egalitarian demands.Footnote 58 A paradigmatic example is Maria Lejárraga (María Martínez Sierra, if she signed with her husband's surname). In her writings she uses a number of discursive strategies to promote the feminist agenda, incorporating elements of both gender and class. Not only was she a writer and active member of the PSOE: she also pioneered feminist thinking in Spain from the early years of the twentieth century, although (perhaps paradoxically) her feminist writings appeared in the name of her husband, Gregorio Martínez Sierra.Footnote 59 From the proclamation of the Second Republic Lejárraga, as a socialist, was aware of the importance to women of the first regulations and emergency decrees issued by the new government in April and May 1931:

In two weeks the provisional government of the Republic has done more for women than all the monarchic governments since the reign of Alfonso X the Wise.Footnote 60

As a socialist and a feminist, the advent of the Second Republic meant for her the greatest joy of her life: ‘In 14 April I was given a new lease of life and rushed excitedly into the street to witness the emergence of the people.’Footnote 61 Her activism was expressed in Women in the Republic (La mujer ante la República), the published version of five lectures she gave at the Madrid Atheneum in May 1931.Footnote 62 In her proposals for inducting women into the political scene of the nascent Republic, she uses a twofold feminist language, egalitarian and maternalist at the same time.Footnote 63 She aims to mobilise women through her discursive strategy, dignifying them and recognising them politically as (biological and social) mothers and educators, linking them to the Republic in order to advance towards feminist and egalitarian objectives.Footnote 64 Thus she refers to women not only as ‘mothers of citizens’ but also as ‘mothers of the Republic’. In other words, her feminist strategy was to appropriate, and appeal to, elements that had traditionally shaped female identity.

Thus socialist discourse included powerful symbolic representations of motherhood as an identity, but it also sought to build a female identity from an egalitarian perspective. In short, if women were to be mobilised politically, and induced to adopt republican and socialist principles, they must first acquire a new identity as citizens of the Republic. The answer to the traditional configuration of public sphere and citizenship lay in the realisation that politics, as an abstraction, has never been neutral (as is sometimes been claimed) but invariably male.Footnote 65 It was an approach that might solve the tensions between women and public space, between citizenship and gender in the 1930s.Footnote 66

Conclusions

In the early 1930s with the beginning of the Second Republic, the emancipation and political mobilisation of women occupied a key place in political debates, in both left and right-wing proposals and discourse, despite the persistence of patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes and political practices. In the new context, the lessons derived from the democratic exercise of citizenship by women, and the need to attract women, mobilise them electorally and politically, and counteract the Catholic right, favoured the dissemination of egalitarian proposals and of female collective action.

At the beginning of the twentieth century these discourses were already being reformulated in egalitarian terms. This process was to be particularly important in socialist culture; it also linked to socialist concerns about electoral turnout. Socialism was able to embrace this process despite the obvious persistence of hegemonic gender models and antifeminist attitudes within its own political culture.Footnote 67

Many of these egalitarian proposals, discourses, organisations and strategies for the mobilisation of women came from just a few – but highly significant– women who engaged in active militancy in the Spanish socialist movement of the 1930s. These voices, these gendered discourses, these organisations and these strategies for women's mobilisation exercised a highly dynamic and educational function during the Second Republic, both in the new political spaces and in their own political culture. Socialist representations of women, always rooted in history but always changing, shifted decisively in the direction of egalitarianism, thinking of women as significant subjects and agents in both social life and the public sphere.

Political activism, with an increasing awareness of gender, was the common factor uniting the small but active group of socialist women who developed strategies on several fronts in the new political context. These strategies were very diverse and heterogeneous, using both formal and informal channels, from direct militancy to civil association, making use of speeches, lectures, articles in the press, manipulation of public opinion and direct participation in election campaigns.

This process of identity construction was directly linked to the development of collective action, new spaces of sociability and increasing exploitation of civil, social and political associations for women, all of them run by women. As we have seen, these were women with a socialist political culture, which they drew on and adapted, changing the significance of conceptual referents to fit with a feminist viewpoint.

In this sense, as had happened at other historical moments in different social movements,Footnote 68 the new female identity was constructed dialectically through speeches, performances, pictures, experiences and social practices. The new context added egalitarianism and maternalism as basic components of socialist discourse as it related to women.Footnote 69

To sum up, the Republic saw a progressive reformulation, in feminist terms, of the discourse of socialist political culture, not only generating demands for equality and political rights but also – and this is crucial – allowing women to use their own discourse and experience as a basis for developing a new, self-referential symbolic order, a gender identity.Footnote 70 In short, it redefined a ‘we’ that included and intertwined a multiplicity of identities as women, mothers, workers and citizens, together with elements derived from citizenship, social class and sexual identity. Years later, distanced not only chronologically but culturally, the second wave of feminism revealed the ‘essential paradox’ of those feminist socialist women. It lay in the way they combined egalitarian discourse with the discourses of identity and differentialism, transcending labels and categories to transform women into legal subjects of citizenship.

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