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Spanish Women in the First International: Social and Political Profiles, Discourse and Affinity Networks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2026

Gloria Espigado
Gloria Espigado*
Affiliation:
Historia Contemporánea, Universidad de Cadiz, Spain
*
Email: gloria.espigado@uca.es
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Abstract

This article focuses on the pioneering Spanish women who embraced the internationalist movement that was newly introduced into the country following the Revolution of 1868. It seeks to reconstruct their life trajectories, forms of participation, and ideological commitments within an activism that contributed to the development of working-class culture in Spain. The city of Cádiz, a port city in southern Andalusia, was home to one of the first women’s sections affiliated with the Spanish Regional Federation of the International Working Association. It also produced pioneering figures such as Margarita Pérez de Celis and Guillermina Rojas Orgis, whose activism helped to shape female participation within the internationalist movement. This article examines their trajectories, both of which were previously linked either to Fourierism or to republicanism, affiliations that probably facilitated their subsequent involvement in the First International. Focusing on these women’s agency, I analyze the ways in which they publicly asserted their commitment to the dual emancipation of women and the working class. Their public meetings, speeches, and demonstrations, as reported in the press, brought them to the attention of a wider public that was not always willing to accept their presence or their demands. Conscious of the exceptional nature of their own position, they also demonstrated solidarity with other women activists, acknowledging and supporting their comrades. Their social feminism, situated at the intersection of gender and class, established a defining boundary for those women who forged their political identities within the emerging working-class culture of Spain.

Keywords

Republican and internationalist womenSpainDemocratic SexenniumFirst International

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Special Feature
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International Labor and Working-Class History , First View , pp. 1 - 17
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.

The Revolution that took place in Spain in September 1868 represented an opportunity for the liberal regime to expand freedoms and rights in the country. It ushered in six years that gave their name to the period known as the Democratic Sexennium (1868–1874), which, nevertheless, was characterized by political instability. Despite having driven Queen Isabella II from the throne, the monarchical solution under Amadeo of Savoy proved equally short-lived (1871–1873). A federal republic was proclaimed following his abdication, but it would survive for barely a year before being brought down by a military coup. Alongside the serious internal problems—the dynastic war between the Bourbons and the conflict among republicans, which came to a head in the cantonal uprising of the summer of 1873—there was also the colonial war in Puerto Rico and, above all, in Cuba. Yet, despite these challenging circumstances, the political and legal changes introduced during the period, including universal male suffrage, together with the significant social mobilization of both women and men, endowed the period with a distinctly radical character that continues to shape historical memory today.

Nothing better encapsulates this democratising impulse and the sensitivity to the serious social questions arising in the spheres of work and relations between the sexes that were extensively debated during the period than the arrival and expansion of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA). The First International reached Spain through Giuseppe Fanelli, a disciple of Bakunin, at the outset of the Revolution. From its earliest days—and this constitutes an important point of historiographical consensus—the IWMA found a preexisting space of receptivity among followers of utopian socialism and those republicans who advocated not only a change of regime but also the implementation of social reforms.Footnote 1 This preexisting milieu undoubtedly facilitated the entry of men and women familiar with both currents into the Federation of the Spanish Regional (FRE), the Spanish branch of the International.

Classic studies of the First International in Spain were slow to incorporate women’s participation in the organized labor movement, although some made pioneering attempts to do so, despite lacking an appropriate theoretical framework through which to interpret it.Footnote 2 Interest in ideological and organizational questions subsequently gave way to the study of the movement’s social bases. This approach resonated with the growing momentum of gender studies in Spain during the 1990s. New research began the task of reconstructing this history, confronting the difficulties posed by elusive and fragmentary sources, chiefly the minutes, letters and correspondence of the IWMA itself, the press across the political spectrum, and the memoirs of some of the Internationalists.Footnote 3

Identifying and reconstructing the lives of women who embraced working-class internationalism is difficult, since their status as women was compounded by their working-class social background. The women whose names we know have left no images behind, and their biographies contain numerous gaps that are difficult to fill, leaving much work still to be done. The FRE sources unequivocally identify two cities in which women’s sections were organized in Catalonia and Andalusia, namely Barcelona and Cádiz.Footnote 4 Yet it is clear that this was only part of the picture, and the affiliation of Spanish women is now being explored through new research.Footnote 5 It is equally desirable to have studies that broaden the scope to encompass other countries in Europe and the Americas, adopting a transnational perspective that would enable comparative analysis, as this special issue seeks to do.Footnote 6

In this article, taking the case of Cádiz as our starting point, we examine the experiences of several women affiliated with the IWMA, highlighting the significance of this southern Andalusian locality. In this regard, the biographical profiles of the two women examined here may serve as points of reference for comparison with other trajectories of women who played a significant role in the early stages of internationalism. Indeed, we address questions and female profiles similar to those explored by Antje Schrupp in a seminal study.Footnote 7 We share with this historian the need to take into account the experiences and influences that preceded these women’s entry into the IWMA, as they brought with them a background shaped by utopian currents and schools of thought that were attentive to women’s status. Likewise, as she concludes, these were women with a broad outlook who in no way subordinated their aspirations as women, which they regarded as fully compatible with the dual emancipation that would liberate both women and workers. There is little doubt that they laid the foundations for a strand of women’s emancipation that would prove particularly important to the subsequent development of Hispanic feminism: one that aligned itself with working-class parties and trade unions, while maintaining a distinct position from liberal feminism.

Rather than presenting them as unique and isolated individuals, we seek to emphasize their belonging to a collective of women committed to social change and to the advancement of their own sex, a commitment that led them to recognize one another and to establish networks of mutual support. Reading the sources closely, even in the few and brief references that attest to their presence, helps us to characterize the ways in which they contributed to and became integrated into a working-class culture that was only beginning to take shape. For example, as recorded in the memoirs of a prominent Internationalist leader during his propaganda tour in early 1872, we encounter them in the context of a customary form of assembly:

I arrived in Cádiz and was introduced to the International Centre while the women’s society was holding a general meeting. Despite my wish to remain unnoticed and to form my own impression at leisure of the character of the centre and of the meeting in progress, the working woman who was chairing the meeting, once the speaker who was addressing it when I entered had finished her speech, addressed a few fraternal words of welcome to me and invited me to speak to the assembly.Footnote 8

The IWMA’s documentation, for its part, has revealed the names and addresses of several women responsible for maintaining correspondence, receiving newspapers, and facilitating contacts, performing essential communication and liaison functions that, by virtue of their being women, attracted less suspicion.Footnote 9 It has likewise confirmed and identified the existence of women’s sections in several localities.Footnote 10

In addition, the press has revealed their presence at celebrations and commemorative events. The Paris Commune had become both an insurrectionary model and a symbolic milestone to be commemorated by the local federations of various cities across Spain. On its first anniversary, events were held in Valladolid, Valencia, and Cádiz, where a red flag bearing an inscription referring to 18 March was unveiled, together with the emphatic cry: “¡Viva la Comuna!”Footnote 11

These women were not merely present at celebrations; they also played a prominent role in critical confrontations with the forces of law and order. A propaganda tour undertaken by workers from Sanlúcar to the neighboring town of Chipiona, with the aim of encouraging local organization there, might have ended in tragedy had a courageous female comrade who was present not intervened.Footnote 12 Likewise, during the police dismantling of various federations following the outbreak of the cantonal uprising, three “female comrades” who were living on the premises of the Jerez Federation were subjected to verbal abuse after witnessing officers search and ransack the premises in search of incriminating evidence.Footnote 13

Nor did they shy away from the moment of insurrection. Their presence in the cantonal cities is beginning to attract scholarly attention, with women being recognized as active agents. Following the outbreak of the cantonal uprising in the summer of 1873, as Jeanne Moisand has shown in her study of Cartagena, some women chose to remain in the besieged city, convinced of the justice of the cause.Footnote 14 They even formed part of the revolutionary vanguard alongside their male comrades. In the town of San Fernando, a few kilometers from Cádiz, the fate of the canton proclaimed by the republican and Internationalist mayor Fermín Salvochea would be decided. A group of women attempted to secure the support of the Navy for the canton proclaimed in the town. One such woman was Francisca Gente, who was romantically involved with San Fernando’s republican and Internationalist mayor, Federico Mota, who was killed during the siege of the La Carraca Arsenal carried out by workers, many of them members of the IWMA, who had previously gone on strike. She was responsible for provisioning, ensuring the circulation of the cantonal vouchers required to obtain supplies once currency was no longer in circulation. She was also accused of participating in anticlerical actions carried out against the town’s churches.Footnote 15

In sum, they drew upon a broad repertoire of action that included traditional forms of protest, such as marches and riots, alongside newer forms of struggle, such as strikes. In addition to defending working conditions, they took part in food riots, demonstrations against conscription, antislavery marches, as well as anticlerical and secular campaigns, among other forms of mobilization. In this way, they helped sustain women’s mobilization in the streets, which remained a constant feature of these years. Likewise, sources relating to the republican year reveal the significant extent of strike activity among both men and women in the spring of 1873. The latter—spinners, textile workers, cigar-makers, street vendors, domestic servants, hat-makers, silk workers, and mat-makers—in cities such as Valencia, Valladolid, Seville, and Cádiz had gone on strike.Footnote 16 A novel form of action such as the strike coexisted with the Luddite response adopted by the Madrid cigar-makers during the dispute involving 5,000 women workers, who went on strike in June 1872 to defend their jobs, which were threatened by mechanization.Footnote 17 A feminized and politicized occupational sector, committed to the defence of the Republic, would later be immortalised in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s novel La Tribuna, published in 1883.

Nevertheless, all this information continues to leave many of the women involved anonymous, scarcely distinguishable from the crowd. In an attempt to address this gap in our knowledge, we examine here the lives and trajectories of two women about whom, fortunately, considerably more is known, in the hope that their experiences will provide insights into the commitment they undertook. We refer to Margarita Pérez de Celis and Guillermina Rojas Orgis. Both women, based in Cádiz, eventually joined the ranks of the International, having begun their political activism within Fourierism or republicanism. These two cases, which we examine below, may help to shed light on how, in each instance, this ideological journey toward internationalism unfolded. Although they belonged to different generations, with one older than the other, they nevertheless shared common ideals and supported one another in sustaining a women’s organization affiliated with the International, by transforming the Mariana Pineda Republican Club into a part of the FRE.

From fourierism to internationalism: Margarita Pérez de Celis

We do not know the exact date of birth of Margarita Pérez de Celis of Cádiz. We know that she was living with her widowed mother around the middle of the century. Shortly afterward, the writer and poet María Josefa Zapata joined the household, and the two women would remain inseparable from that point onward.Footnote 18 Alongside María Josefa Zapata, Margarita Pérez de Celis undertook sewing work and taught, eventually spending her final years as a cigar-maker. Above all, however, the two women shared a publishing venture driven by their commitment to social justice.

Both Margarita Pérez de Celis and María Josefa Zapata were driving forces behind the Pensiles series of periodicals and, subsequently, La Buena Nueva, newspapers published in Cádiz between 1856 and 1866 that openly advocated the theories of Charles Fourier.Footnote 19 The Fourierist school had taken root in the city several years earlier under the influence of Joaquín Abreu, a liberal who went into exile in France following the end of the Liberal Triennium (1820–1823).Footnote 20 During the 1840s, the circulation of pamphlets and works published either in French or in translation, together with articles and other publications in the press, consolidated a group of adherents. A few years later, the school gained renewed impetus under the leadership of these two women.Footnote 21 The newspapers they published were subject to censorship on account of their Fourierist and Spiritualist inspiration and were silenced by both the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Nevertheless, their columns celebrated Fourier as a major advocate of women’s condition, while denouncing the ignorance and subordination to which women were subjected within society and under the authority of their husbands in marriage. It is important to note that, under their auspices, one of the earliest essays published in Spain in support of women’s emancipation, La mujer y la sociedad (1857), was published, signed by “Rosa Marina,” possibly a pseudonym. Margarita herself wrote the preface, expressing a position fully consonant with the ideas advanced by the author:Footnote 22

Society may choose between two paths: either to embrace civilisation with all its consequences, or to reject it and favour barbarism. The former entails the realisation of the ideas set forth in this work.

Women’s education: freedom to pursue all manner of professions and the right to share in the civil and political advantages enjoyed by men.Footnote 23

This editorial group comprised María Josefa and Margarita, mentioned above, together with the homeopathic physician José Bartorelo Quintana, the latter being associated with the city’s democratic and republican circles. Indeed, a substantial proportion of the contributions published in these newspapers came from prominent members of the Republican Party, including Fernando Garrido, a republican and advocate of cooperativism with close ties to Cádiz, who would attend the first congress of the IWMA, held in Barcelona in 1870.

In the pages of these newspapers, Margarita advocated for women’s dignity within marriage, their access to education and their labor rights, explicitly including equal pay:

… for the present, our demands are limited to ensuring that the usefulness and nature of women’s work be taken into account, in order to determine whether it is worthy of standing alongside and competing with that of men; and, once the question has been answered in the affirmative, that it be remunerated on the same terms as men’s work.Footnote 24

Her writings pursued a broader quest for greater justice for women and for working people as a whole, as she also used her pen to denounce the abuse and exploitation endured by men who struggled to earn a living through the labor of their hands. Before long, her words would alarm both the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, who became concerned about the dangers posed by these ideas and consequently moved to denounce and suppress these newspapers. A decade later, around 1866, they resumed publication with a new newspaper, significantly entitled La Buena Nueva, which survived for only a few issues as the country grappled with both an economic and a political crisis that would, within two years, culminate in revolution.

The September Revolution of 1868 proved a turning point for this censored writer. Margarita’s name reemerged when she took charge of the Mariana Pineda Women’s Republican Club, which had been established in the city in 1869, after its president, Guillermina Rojas, moved to Madrid. Margarita had already made her republican convictions known by dedicating a poem to two martyrs of the “republican-socialist” cause who had fallen during a federalist uprising in the mountains of Cádiz.Footnote 25

The contemporary press attests to the affinity and friendship between the two women, making it reasonable to assume that their affiliation with the International was a shared undertaking, embraced by both at some point during 1871.Footnote 26 Thus, at the beginning of 1872, the launch in Cádiz of a newspaper significantly entitled La Internacional was announced, under the editorship of Rafael García Rojas and Margarita Pérez de Celis herself. The newspaper began its brief run on January 7, 1872. No copies have survived, although an extract written by Margarita is known to have been reproduced in the contemporary press.Footnote 27 Margarita expresses her opposition to the established structures of authoritarian power—political, economic, and religious—which permeated institutions of all kinds, and portrays women as victims of this deception:

We ourselves have shared in this illusion, and when we sought to examine it through reason and to touch it with our own hands, we confess that we could not suppress a smile of bitter disdain upon our lips …

We shall therefore be impartial, and, more than that, we intend to be indulgent; it is in the nature of women to be indulgent when considering the other sex, and, in judging the services rendered by the authoritarian powers, we do not believe that we are passing judgement upon ourselves.Footnote 28

When the Republic was proclaimed in February 1873, the Mariana Pineda club joined in the popular jubilation, and it is likely that the scene was repeated following the proclamation of the federal republic in June. In the meantime, the circle then led by Margarita Pérez de Celis mounted a republican and secular response to the mobilization of Cádiz’s Catholic women, who had publicly protested against the religious policies pursued by the republican and Internationalist mayor, Fermín Salvochea. Salvochea, for his part, had ordered the demolition of a convent of nuns with the aim of providing employment for the working classes.Footnote 29 This clash between women, politically aligned around the religious question, foreshadowed developments that would become increasingly pronounced during the Restoration, following the return of the Bourbons to the Spanish throne, when this female resistance to the power of the Church found its clearest expression in the voices of late nineteenth-century freethinkers.Footnote 30

Beyond this, we know nothing of her during the Republic’s brief existence: how she might have reacted to the cantonal proclamation made by the mayor, or what became of her following the restoration of order by General Pavía’s troops and the subsequent banning of the International under the Republic led by General Serrano. Her name reemerges some time later, in 1875, when she composed an ode to Allan Kardec, the founder of the new Spiritualism, which was published by the Seville newspaper El Espiritismo.Footnote 31 It should not be forgotten that Spiritualism constituted a new form of spirituality that conveyed a message of salvation for humanity, and particularly for women, who would be admitted and recognized within the movement. At that time, she was still sharing a home with her inseparable companion, María Josefa Zapata. Thereafter, we know that she worked as a cigar-maker until her death, alone and in complete anonymity, in 1882.

From republicanism to internationalism: Guillermina Rojas Orgis

Guillermina Rojas Orgis was one of the key figures in understanding the beginnings of internationalist activism in Spain.Footnote 32 Although of Canarian origin, having been born in 1849, she spent her childhood and youth in the city of Cádiz, where she grew up in a working-class family with republican ideals that had moved to the Andalusian capital in 1854. Her father, of Galician origin, was a shoemaker, while her mother, also from the Canary Islands, was a seamstress. They had three children, two sons, and a daughter. Guillermina trained as a teacher and qualified as a schoolmistress, subsequently working for a short period as an assistant at a public girls’ school in Cádiz.Footnote 33 Whereas Margarita was probably self-taught and sought to carve out a professional role for herself in the publishing world, Guillermina, already holding a formal teaching qualification, sought to transform society through education. It was against this backdrop, while still in her youth, that she witnessed in Cádiz the revolution that would ultimately drive Queen Isabel II from the Spanish throne.

In the months that followed, Guillermina played a pivotal role in organizing the Mariana Pineda Republican Club, established in the summer of 1869 and named after the celebrated liberal heroine who had been executed in 1831 for her opposition to absolutism. The club was modeled on its Madrid counterpart, which had been established under the name La Fraternidad. Its rules were approved by the competent authorities in 1870 and set out, albeit briefly, its twofold purpose: to work in support of the federal republic and to promote women’s education. To this end, Guillermina herself had established a school for adult women.Footnote 34 Like other “federalas,” Guillermina had, despite her youth, established herself as a gifted public speaker. She demonstrated this both at the founding of the women’s club and at various events reaffirming republicanism held among the city’s popular circles, where the first affiliations with the International may well have taken place.

Before long, the Cádiz milieu proved too constraining for her, and she decided to travel to Madrid. There, she left teaching to work in a well-known tailoring establishment in the capital, a trade she had presumably learnt from her mother. She would later explain that this decision was dictated by the demands of her conscience, as she did not wish to contribute to instilling in girls ideas with which she herself did not agree.Footnote 35 Thereafter, the Catholic press would refer to her in disparaging terms.Footnote 36 She regularly attended and delivered speeches at republican clubs in the capital, including Antón Martín and La Emancipación Social. The Canarian writer Benito Pérez Galdós portrayed her, alongside another prominent associate and friend, the Zaragoza-born Modesta Periu, in his Episodios Nacionales.Footnote 37

It is possible that she joined the International at some point during 1871, as, by the end of that year, she delivered her most notable speech at a meeting held at Madrid’s Rossini Theatre.Footnote 38 It was a meeting convened in defense of the IWMA, which was under threat from a government seeking to declare it illegal, alarmed by the experience of the Paris Commune in the spring of that year.

We know the content of her speech through the commentaries published by newspapers across the political spectrum. They consistently portrayed her as an opponent of both civil and religious marriage and as an advocate of women’s emancipation.Footnote 39 This association between free love and women’s emancipation raised concerns among certain sections of public opinion. The sexual disorder with which Guillermina was associated was understood as a challenge to the existing social order, founded upon property and the family—the two pillars of bourgeois society. It was also noted that her words aligned her with the defence of freedom of conscience and opposition to the control exercised by the Church over women. These positions represented early steps toward the freethinking that would develop during the Restoration and would include several prominent female figures.Footnote 40

The attacks against her eventually descended into personal defamation, associating her with women of dubious repute. She was accused of being a female hawker who traveled the roads in the company of a Communard. It should be recalled that, at the time, another Guillermina, in this case bearing the surname Puccinelli, was living in Spain and traveling throughout the country. A Garibaldian republican whose real name was Wilhelmine Müller, she was also a Communard and Internationalist. Dressed in trousers and carrying a saber, she was often present during urban disturbances. The press frequently exploited the confusion between their names.Footnote 41 She was also associated with the American Victoria Claflin Woodhull, an Internationalist and admirer of the Commune who went so far as to stand as a candidate for the presidency of the United States in the 1872 election.Footnote 42

She was treated with little courtesy by the republican politician from Málaga, Francisco Flores García, thereby contributing to the stigmatization of the Internationalist.Footnote 43 Seeking to explain her position in her own words, Guillermina had published one of her few articles in which she reaffirmed her belief in a form of family life not subject to the oppressive rules of either canon or civil marriage (in 1870, the State had enacted the first Civil Marriage Act). She expressed her views as follows:

I aspire to see the family founded upon what I regard as the firm bonds of love, believing this to be the most natural and truthful basis. When a union is founded upon such a basis, it is indissoluble; no force is strong enough to sever this mutual sympathy …

And it is here that I find the fatality of the chains of marriage, above all for us women …

I do not deny that marriage should be legal, but it must be reformed; the contract between both spouses must be free and spontaneous, and whenever either of them finds themselves weary of, or deceived in, their feelings, they should be able to separate and form new bonds more in harmony with their hearts.Footnote 44

Dismissing her as immoral, her interlocutor contributed to the stigma attached to her as an advocate of “free love.” Guillermina was subsequently compelled to address the defamatory reports concerning her and to clarify her position in an article submitted to the press in response to the accusations leveled against her.Footnote 45 Accused of traveling through Extremadura as a female hawker in the company of a French Communard and disseminating propaganda, Guillermina rejected this deliberate misrepresentation, presenting herself instead as the teacher who had resigned her post as a matter of conscience, repudiating the “mystical” and “meager” education provided to girls. She now described herself as a seamstress, “a humble daughter of labour who earns her bread at the expense of her lungs, working in one of the best-known tailoring establishments in this town.” She bitterly lamented that men sought to besmirch her reputation rather than engage with her ideas.

By this time, Guillermina was playing a prominent organizational role within the Madrid section, serving as secretary of the Federation—a position unprecedented for a woman of her time.Footnote 46 Amid the European controversy between the authoritarian and anti-authoritarian factions, intensified in Spain by the arrival of Marx’s son-in-law, the Cuban Paul Lafargue, a division took place within the Madrid International, with part of its membership aligning itself with the latter position. According to Lafargue’s own account, Guillermina initially hesitated over whether to associate herself with this faction. The evidence nevertheless suggests that she ultimately aligned herself with the anti-authoritarian, Bakuninist position and played a significant role in discrediting the authoritarian, Marxist tendency.Footnote 47

Guillermina was undoubtedly at the center of internal developments that were crucial to the organization’s future, yet this did not prevent her from attending meetings with representatives of the Republican Party. Her presence at a political meeting in early 1872 appears to have been motivated by this engagement, and she was subsequently disavowed by the Madrid Internationalist leadership. This provides further evidence that the boundary between the two movements remained blurred.

At the end of that year, in December 1872, violent disturbances took place around the Chamber of Deputies in connection with the campaign against slavery, in which she may have participated. It is also possible, however, that she was confused with her namesake Guillermina “Puchinella,” since the description of a woman wearing trousers and carrying a saber would seem more appropriate to refer to the latter. At the beginning of the Republic, Los Descamisados, a newspaper of uncertain Internationalist affiliation, listed the “citizen Guillermina” as a contributor and published a poem significantly entitled “Free Love.” The poem appeared in one of its issues, although it bore no signature.Footnote 48

In the minutes of the IWMA, she is listed as corresponding secretary for the Murcia region on the eve of the cantonal uprising.Footnote 49 Little is known about what became of her in the following months, and she may have been subjected to reprisals following the military coup that brought the federal republic to an end. A press report places her, together with three other female companions who had likewise suffered persecution, in the penal colonies of the Philippines, although there is no evidence that she was actually deported to the islands. She may have escaped or been released shortly afterward, as one source places her speaking at a political meeting in Madrid in 1874. She probably lived abroad following the restoration of the monarchy. There are also indications that she passed through Bordeaux around 1886.Footnote 50

We encounter her again in the 1890s, in Mexico City, where she probably lived for many years, as it was there that she published a pamphlet, significantly entitled El anarquismo, in 1903.Footnote 51 Beyond this, nothing more is known of her, although research is still tracing possible connections with a Cádiz-based anarchist publication in the early 1920s and with a seamstresses’ union in Mexico in the 1930s, when she would have been approximately eighty-four years old.Footnote 52

More broadly, in the historical memory of the First Republic, she came to exemplify perceived transgressions of gender norms which, by extension, were taken to epitomize the disorder and chaos with which this political experience was remembered during the Restoration.Footnote 53 The invocation of her name after the First Republic served to repudiate and denigrate the sexual politics she had advocated at the time. Opposed to the family and marriage as conceived by the Catholic Church and the propertied classes, her memory was invoked to reject divorce and to highlight the dangers supposedly inherent in women’s legal equality and emancipation. In more positive terms, the only reference we find is the fleeting recollection offered by the anarchist Teresa Mañé (Soledad Gustavo), which falls short of constituting a substantive recovery of her life and political trajectory.Footnote 54 This forgetting echoed the way in which subsequent anarchism preserved the memory of the First Republican experience.Footnote 55

Discourses and networks of affinity

The lives of Margarita and Guillermina provide two examples of early engagement with internationalism, a development that ran parallel to and was symptomatic of an incipient political awakening in republican clubs. Many of these women formed part of the organisational culture of both movements, participating in their rallies and meetings, commemorating their martyrs, celebrating their festivals and symbols, declaring their affinity with republican and internationalist ideals, conflating the two, or moving from one to the other.

In addition to engaging in collective repertoires of struggle, these women did not miss opportunities to assert their individual presence. The solidarity and mutual recognition displayed among the most prominent women leaders is particularly evident, as they supported one another even when active in different cities: María Rodríguez Fernández of Madrid encouraged the organisation of her fellow dressmakers in Palma de Mallorca, who were members of the La Virtud Social trade union.Footnote 56 The Catalan Elisa Huigón reported on organisations in Palma, Madrid, Zaragoza, and Granada, naming their respective leaders: Josefa Sánchez, María Rodríguez Fernández, Modesta Periu, and Narcisa de Paz y Molins, placing her hopes in the development of a program for women’s emancipation through collectivism.Footnote 57 Narcisa Paz y Molins, a native of Granada and founder of the newspaper La Voz de la República, praised the figure of Magdalena Bonet.Footnote 58 The latter, whom we can associate with the organisation in Mallorca, expressed her appreciation for Modesta Periu, the republican activist from Zaragoza.Footnote 59 Guillermina Rojas also held the Aragonese woman in high esteem, who died in 1872 after being released from prison for attacking the monarchy.Footnote 60 The press eventually reported on the friendship between Guillermina and Margarita Pérez de Celis.Footnote 61

In their speeches, as reported in the press, they link the fate of the working man to women’s emancipation, referring to them as “the two disinherited classes of society,” as a leader of the Madrid-based republican women’s club La Fraternidad put it.Footnote 62 However, the Internationalist congresses held in Spain (Barcelona, 1870; Zaragoza, 1872; and Córdoba, 1872) had scarcely made any explicit reference to the condition of women, with the exception of the opposition to women’s work expressed by the leader André Bastelica at the first Barcelona congress, a position that was duly corrected by the resolution adopted at the Zaragoza congress, which stressed the just and emancipatory nature of such work.Footnote 63 Apart from this, and with regard also to the defense of women’s education, little more was said about the specific situation of women.Footnote 64 For this reason, the words they themselves devoted to assessing their own condition acquire particular significance.

María Rodríguez Fernández is presented as a working woman belonging to the Madrid local section who addresses the inequality to which women are subjected, arguing that their emancipation is more urgent than that of the proletariat. For while the latter is a class “subjected to humiliation and oppression,” the emancipation of women is even more necessary, “as they occupy an even more unjust position.” Living in a state of enforced degradation, women are denied the exercise of reason, and their minds are filled with all manner of superstitions and prejudices. The subordination imposed upon women by the institution of the family, as daughters or wives of men, determines the sphere in which their oppression is exercised. Added to this is the sexual double standard that condemns in women what it celebrates in men. The woman from Madrid calls upon her peers to study social questions and to demand their rights. Education and emancipation are two sides of the same coin: “Without the emancipation of women, without their entry into the life of reason and the movement of ideas, any aspiration to major reforms is almost impossible.”Footnote 65

For her part, Elisa Huigón, a member of the Ateneo Catalán de la Clase Obrera, addressed a letter to La Federación in which she expressed her opposition to religion and to the family in its present form, denouncing the exclusion of women from social affairs and encouraging her female comrades to take part in this debate. Once again, the family was placed at the center of the discussion: “another of the principal causes of women’s enslavement is the shameful and insignificant role she plays within the family, where she is the first to suffer the consequences of the head of the household’s adverse circumstances and ill-treatment.” In promoting the IWMA, she issued a collective appeal:

I call upon all those who sympathise with the workers’ movement now unfolding within the International Workingmen’s Association, whether or not they are workers, and whether national or international, to confer with the undersigned on the system of propaganda best suited to be adopted in each of their respective localities, in order to rouse our sisters from indifference and their wretched condition, without compromising, and always remaining within the purity of, collectivist principles.Footnote 66

Shortly afterward, a group of fellow Catalan women addressed French and Prussian women, urging them not to support the conflict between their two countries, in a text published in the press that was clearly antiwar in its inspiration. Invoking a form of social motherhood—“women are, collectively, the mother of society”—they rejected encouraging men to take up arms, arguing that this would play into the hands of “nationalities.”Footnote 67

This is not the only reference to women’s affiliation with the IWMA in European countries. The conversion of the Geneva ladies’ section into a women workers’ section is also praised as an expression of fidelity to the internationalist principles that, however, were not being observed by Irish women, who had been seduced by the false promise of defending inheritance and the vote, thereby setting themselves apart from the rest of their enslaved sisters, those who belonged to the working class.Footnote 68

Some women did not dare to reveal their names, fearing discredit at the hands of the opposition press. An article entitled “Woman,” published in La Emancipación under the pseudonym “a woman,” was explicitly anticlerical and critical of the manipulation exercised by the Church over women, with the complicity of men who claimed to be liberal themselves:

Christianity came, and in its mystical doctrine women found a source of support—a support that soon became a terrible weapon against them and against everyone else. For, since women are the mothers of humanity, the educators of children, and the powerful magnet that draws men through love, there can be no doubt that, if women are led astray, they will inevitably lead us all astray.Footnote 69

All these statements articulate a working-class culture experienced from a female perspective and give expression to the injustices they denounce. Together with the statements by Margarita and Guillermina discussed above, they share a demand for two necessary emancipations—the emancipation of the worker and that of women—to be achieved jointly and simultaneously. At the same time, they emphasize forms of female subordination that extend beyond the workshop or factory, identifying the Church, the school, and the family as sites of oppression.

Conclusion

Thus far, this has been a brief outline of some of the most prominent female figures of Spanish internationalism. The difficulty involved in reconstructing their history is evident, since subsequent accounts, including those produced within socialist and anarchist political cultures, scarcely preserved them in the collective memory. Reconstructing their lives and experiences requires extensive archival research and painstaking historical reconstruction; yet these are fundamental to understanding the associational drive of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In their speeches and writings, these women defended the cause of the working class and of women. They had few opportunities to publish their thoughts in their own voices, and more often than not, their interventions at public meetings were paraphrased in press reports. Nevertheless, a survey of their speeches reveals a recurring emphasis on the establishment of a Social Federal Republic that would emancipate the two oppressed classes: workers and women; on the denunciation of the oppression exerted by religion over women’s lives, which called for the defense of the emancipation of conscience; and, finally, on the pursuit not only of a new economic order but also of a new sexual order, entailing a rejection of marriage, whether civil or religious, and a denunciation of the oppression exercised against women within the family. Education, work, the Church, the family and marriage were therefore the central concerns of the discourse of these activists, whether republican or internationalist.

These glimpses from their testimonies and experiences reveal their concern for and commitment to the conditions of the poorest and most disadvantaged, and to the fate of the people—workers and peasants—in a common cause that included women as fellow outcasts deprived of freedoms and rights. Both republicanism and internationalism, upon their arrival in Spain, acted as catalysts for political consciousness and mobilizers of the masses in pursuit of an urgent vision of social justice, drawing on the preexisting substratum of utopian thought that had introduced many of these themes. Beyond suffragist feminism and the enshrinement of individual freedoms and rights, its advocates sought precisely to rectify the failings of the liberal, capitalist, and patriarchal system by bringing class and gender together. Flora Tristan had made this point unequivocally when she stressed the need to refer to both male and female workers, to move beyond the masculine universal through an explicit reference to women workers, guarding against their possible omission by those pursuing the utopian ideal of a better world.Footnote 70 A legacy that, despite the erasure of their names, would reach the freethinking, spiritualist, republican, anarchist and socialist women of the turn of the century, forging an intellectually cohesive community around the endeavor to develop a feminism that went beyond suffragist goals and challenged institutions such as the Church, the school, the family, and marriage, sites in which women’s subordination was determined.

References

Notes

1. Antonio López Estudillo, Republicanismo y anarquismo en Andalucía: Conflictividad social agraria y crisis finisecular (1868–1900) (Córdoba: Ediciones de la Posada, 2001).

2. Max Nettlau, La Première Internationale en Espagne, 1868–1888 (New York: Riedel Publishing Company, 1969); Clara E. Lida, Antecedentes y desarrollo del movimiento obrero español, 1835-1888: textos y documentos (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1973); José Álvarez Junco, La Ideología política del anarquismo español (1868–1910), (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1976); Temma Kaplan, Orígenes sociales del anarquismo en Andalucía: Capitalismo agrario y lucha de clases en la provincia de Cádiz 1868–1903) (Barcelona: Crítica-Grijalbo, 1977); Josep Termes, Anarquismo y sindicalismo en España: La Primera Internacional, 1864–1881 (Barcelona: Crítica, 1977).

3. Mary Nash and Susanna Tavera, Experiencias desiguales: Conflictos sociales y respuestas colectivas (siglo XIX) (Madrid: Síntesis, 1994); Dolores Ramos, “Historia social: un espacio de encuentro entre género y clase,” Ayer, Vol 1,, no. 17 (1995): 85–102; Ana Aguado, “Trabajo, género y clase: ideología y experiencia femenina en el primer socialismo,” in Aguado, A. (coord.), Las mujeres entre la historia y la sociedad contemporánea, (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 1999), 171–98; Gloria Espigado, “Mujeres radicales: utópicas, republicanas e internacionalistas en España (1848–1874),” Ayer, no. 60, (2005): 15–43.

4. Shortly after the establishment of the First Republic, the Federal Commission, based in the city of Alcoy, acknowledged the existence of two women’s sections, one in Barcelona and the other in Cádiz. It also highlighted the participation of women in the Catalan Manufacturing Union and estimated their membership at between six and eight thousand, of whom approximately four to five thousand adhered to the doctrinal principles of the First International. IWMA, Cartas, Comunicaciones y Circulares de la Comisión Federal de la Región Española: Colección de Documentos para el Estudio de los Movimientos Obreros en España en la época contemporánea. Transcripción, estudio preliminar, notas e índices por Mª Teresa Martínez de Sas, February 17, 1873, vol. III (Enero–Marzo, 1873), 175. The document is signed by the mason Francisco Tomás and refers to a letter addressed to the Women’s Section in Bologna, Italy.

5. Adriana Palomera, “La mujer anarquista: Discursos en torno a la construcción de sujeto femenino revolucionario en los albores de la ‘idea,’” Revista Izquierdas, Vol. 3, no. 24 (2015): 21–56; Catalina M. Martorell. “Les internacionals mallorquines i el somni de la revolució social, 1868–1874,” Humanitat Nova, no. 2 (2017): 42–5; Luz Sanfeliú Gimeno. “Luchadoras por la verdad y la justicia: Asociacionismo femenino, derechos y educación en el Sexenio Democrático.” Hispania Nova, 2nd series, no. 18 (2020): 450–85. https://doi.org/10.20318/hn.2020.5114; Ginés Puente Pérez and Manuel Vicente Izquierdo, “Escenarios de Resistencia, Educación y Empoderamiento: Presencia Femenina en la I Internacional en la Cataluña del Siglo XIX” forthcoming.

6. Fabrice Bensimon, Quentin Deluermoz, and Jean Moisand, eds., Arise ye Wretched of the earth”: The First International in a Global Perspective (Studies in Global Social History; Brill, 2018).

7. Antje Schrupp, “Bringing Together Feminism and Socialism in the First International: Four Examples”, in Arise ye Wretched of the earth…, eds. Fabrice Bensimon, Quentin Deluermoz, and Jean Moisand, (Studies in Global Social History; Brill, 2018), 343–54. A study on: Virgine Barbet, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, André Léo, and Victoria Woodhull

8. Anselmo Lorenzo, El proletariado militante (Memorias de un Internacional) (Madrid: ZYX, 1974), 230. The purpose of the journey was to establish the Defenders of the International as a means of countering the government’s campaign against the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA), which had intensified its vigilance in the aftermath of the Paris Commune. Anselmo Lorenzo successfully fulfilled his mission and was deeply impressed by the warm reception extended to him by “the working women and men of Cádiz” (231).

9. En Cádiz: Alfonsa Gallarda, widow of Vargas, Piquer antes San Rafael, 5 izda, bajo Cádiz. La Comisión Federal, Madrid, 16 de agosto de 1873. IWMA, Cartas, Comunicaciones…, vol. V (Junio–Septiembre 1873), (Universidad de Barcelona, 1979), 182; Carmen Franzón, Verstuario, 40, 1º. Comisión federal, Madrid, 24 de Febrero 1874, Ibidem, vol. VII (Enero–Abril 1874), 133 and vol. VII (Enero–Abril 1874), 244. En Jerez: Josefa Martínez Mena, C/ Juan Torres, no. 12. La Comisión Federal, Madrid, 5 septiembre de 1873. Ibidem., vol. V (Junio–Septiembre 1873), 241. En A.I.T., Actas de los Consejos y Comisión Federal de la Región Española (1870-1874), transcripción y Estudio preliminar de Carlos Seco Serrano, 1970, de August 22, 1873, se da la misma dirección, vol. II, 114. En Paterna de la Rivera: María García d O, Calle de la Cruz 6. Comisión Federal, Madrid, 8 de Abril de 1874, IWMA, Cartas, Comunicaciones…., vol. VII (Enero–Abril, 1874), 244. En Sánlucar de Barrameda: Carmen González, Cristo de las Aguas, no. 4, February 7, 1873, Actas de los Consejos…., vol. II, 43.

10. The headquarters of the Cádiz section were located at the residence of José Casal, an Internationalist leader who would later become involved in the Cádiz Cantonal Committee. By early 1873, there existed in Cádiz a Women’s Miscellaneous Section (Sección Varia de mujeres), another in El Puerto de Santa María, and six women workers affiliated with the agricultural workers’ section in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, a number that was soon reduced to two. Actas del Consejo Federal, January 7, 1873, vol. II, 9.

11. At the meeting held late in the afternoon, both our male and female speakers weree said to have performed admirably, delivering addresses that commemorated the event and defended the International. La Emancipación, no. 42, March 30, 1872. They analyze women’s memories of the Commune: Ginés Puente Pérez, “La Commune ha muerto. ¡Viva la Commune!: mujeres anarquistas en las conmemoraciones y manifestaciones públicas tras la Comuna en España (1871–1899),” Cuadernos de Historia no. 64 (2026): 293–314; Lola Romieux, “Mémoires fémenines de la Commune de Paris. Les célébrations en tant qu’outil de militantismo internationaliste,” Source(s). Arts, Civilization et Histoire de l’Europe no. 23 (2025): 75–94.

12. The Carabineros sent to break up the meeting leveled a bayonet at the comrade secretary, who was saved by a brave female comrade. La Federación, no. 195, May 10, 1873.

13. La Federación, no. 220, November 1, 1873.

14. Jeanne Moisand, Federación o muerte. Los mundos posibles del Cantón de Cartagena (1873) (Madrid: Ediciones Los Libros de la Catarata, 2023), 129–60.

15. Nicolás, Muiños y Muiños, Reseña histórica de los sucesos ocurridos en el Departamento de Cádiz y defensa del Arsenal de la Carraca desde el 4 de julio en que comenzaron los trastornos en San Fernando, y pormenores de los servicios prestados por la Marina para contribuir a exterminar la insurrección cantonal de Andalucía (Cádiz, Imprenta de la Revista Médica, 1873), 36.

16. Mónica Burguera, “La formación de una identidad laboral femenina: las hilanderas en huelga, Valencia, 1873” in Mujeres, regulación de conflictos sociales y cultura de La Paz, ed. Ana Aguado (Valencia: Institut Universitari d’Estudios de la Dona, 1999), 109–15; Rafael Serrano, El Sexenio Revolucionario en Valladolid. Cuestiones Sociales (1868–1874) (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1986), 102–3 and 105; Diario de Cádiz, no. 1350, May 8, 1873; El Comercio, no. 10575, May 10, 1873.

17. La Emancipación, no. 53, June 15, 1872. The newspaper, while not endorsing the violence perpetrated by the cigar-makers, understood it as an act born out of desperation following the loss of their employment. It urged the workers to respond through association and the establishment of a strike fund, so that, in the future, they might resort to strike action, the genuine trade-union instrument for confronting capital.

18. Gloria Espigado, “Pérez de Celis, Margarita, Cádiz (1827?–1882)” and “Zapata y Cárdenas, Mª Josefa (1817–¿), in Beatriz Sánchez Hita and Marieta Cantos Casenave, Galería de periodistas de Andalucía en los siglos XVIII y XIX (Lausana: Peter Lang, 2024), 313–15 and 371–73.

19. Antonio Elorza, “Feminismo y socialismo en España (1840–1868),” Tiempo de Historia, no. 3 (1974): 47–63.

20. Antonio Cabral Chamorro, Socialismo utópico y revolución burguesa: el fourierismo gaditano, 1834–1848 (Diputación Provincial de Cádiz, 1991).

21. Gloria Espigado, “La Buena Nueva de la mujer profeta. Identidad y cultura política en las fourieristas Mª Josefa Zapata y Margarita Pérez de Celis,” in Pasado y Memoria, no. (2008), 15–34; Juan Pro, “Mujeres en un estado ideal: la utopía romántica del fourierismo y la historia de las emociones,” Rúbrica Contemporánea, no. 7, vol. 4, (2015): 27–46; Carolina Pecharromán, “El Furierismo feminista de los Pensiles de Cádiz en relación con otros socialismos utópicos europeos,” in La prensa en Andalucía en el siglo XIX. Cultura, política y negocio del Romanticismo al regionalismo, eds. Beatriz Sánchez Hita y María Román López (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Vervuert, 2022), 187–212.

22. Mª Dolores Rodríguez Almazán, “Rosa Marina, La mujer y la Sociedad,” en Donne, Società e Progresso, (Roma, Aracne, 2009), 10-40; Juan Pro, “Romanticismo e identidad en el socialismo utópico español: buscando a Rosa Marina,” in La historia biográfica en Europa. Nuevas perspectivas, eds. Isabel Burdiel and Roy Foster (Institución Fernando el Católico, Diputación de Zaragoza, 2015). 289–320; Gloria Espigado, “Un texto pionero del feminismo español: Rosa Marina,” La mujer y la sociedad (1857), in Crisol (2023) no. 30, 1-24 https://crisol.parisnanterre.fr/index.php/crisol/es/article/view/606.

23. Rosa Marina, La mujer y la sociedad precedido de un prólogo por Doña Margarita Pérez de Celis (Cádiz: Imprenta de La Paz, 1857), XV.

24. Margarita Pérez de Celis, “Injusticia social,” El Nuevo Pensil de Iberia, no. 7, December 10, 1857.

25. La Ilustración Republicana Federal, October 15, 1871. These were Rafael Guillén y Cristóbal Bohórquez.

26. La Emancipación, no. 26, November 11, 1871.

27. Diario de Córdoba, January 12, 1872. Under the title “Todos emancipados” (“All Emancipated”), the newspaper announced its inaugural issue, presenting Margarita as a friend of Guillermina Rojas and the author of one of its articles, in which she “advocates not only the emancipation of the working classes but also the emancipation of women from men.”

28. Salud y Fraternidad, no. 146, February 13, 1872. A Republican newspaper from Teruel reprints an incomplete version of this article, which was likely originally published in La Internacional. She is also likened to Guillermina Rojas and Modesta Periu.

29. El Comercio, March 27, 1873; March 28, 1873.

30. Dolores Ramos Palomo, “La república de las librepensadoras (1890–1914): laicismo, emancipismo y anticlericalismo” In Ayer, no. 60 (2005): 45–74.

31. El Espiritismo, June 15, 1875, 236–38.

32. Gloria Espigado. “Experiencia e identidad de una internacionalista: trazos biográficos de Guillermina Rojas Orgis,” Arenal 12, no. 2 (2005): 255-80.

33. Gloria Espigado, “La maestra Guillermina Rojas Orgis; formación para un internacionalismo feminista,” en Cuadernos de Investigación de Fondos del Archivo UCA, no. 3 (2021): 1-13. https://doi.org/10.25267/Cuad_investig_fondos_arch_UCA.2021.i3.01.

34. Reglamento de la Sociedad republicana federal de Mariana Pineda, Archivo Municipal de Cádiz, C.493, exp. 349.

35. El Combate, no. 20, February 20, 1872.

36. The Catholic newspaper La Época portrayed Guillermina Rojas as “a seamstress’s assistant, a club orator, possessed of a lively imagination and an easy eloquence, capable of stirring up a mob in times of revolution, and even of leading it on the barricades, like another Théroigne de Méricourt.” La Época, October 22, 1871.

37. ´Benito Pérez Galdós, Episodios Nacionales. Amadeo I, (Madrid: Alianza, 1980), 176.

38. La Federación, no. 116, November 5, 1871.

39. “She condemned private property as unjust; the idea of the nation as contrary to humanity; and the existing structure of the family as deficient in ensuring the physical and moral welfare of children and tyrannical towards women.”, Anselmo Lorenzo, El proletariado…., 185–186.

40. Dolors Marín, Espiritistes i lliurepensadores. Dones pioneres en la lluita pels drets civils (Barcelona: Angle Editorial, 2018).

41. “Citizen Guillermina, dressed in men’s attire, with riding boots and spurs, led a crowd while likewise crying, ‘Long live the Federal Republic!,’” La Iberia, June 12, 1873.

42. La Nación, April 5, 1872, presented the American woman as an alter ego of Guillermina, a defender of female suffrage and of “free love”; it was therefore claimed that she was already on her third husband.

43. La Federación Española, no. 79, October 5, 1871; no. 82, November 26, 1871; and no. 83, December 3, 1871.

44. Guillermina Rojas, “La Familia,” La Emancipación, no. 22, November 13, 1871.

45. La Emancipación, no. 37, February 25, 1872. The letter, signed by Guillermina in Madrid and dated February 19, 1872, was also published in La Federación, no. 132, February 25, 1872. She was also defended in El Condenado, no. 4, April 22, 1872.

46. Actas de los Consejos y Comisión Federal de la Región Española (1870-1874), transcripción y Estudio preliminar de Carlos Seco Serrano, 1970 dated around February 10, 1872 listed the respective secretaries of its organizations; Guillermina held this position for the Madrid Federation, which belonged to the Central District and was composed of six trade sections and one miscellaneous section. Vid. Max Nettlau, La Première…, 109.

47. La Emancipación, no. 40, March 16, 1872.

48. Los Descamisados, March 30, 1873 , and May 11, 1873.

49. Sesion CXXVII de la Comisión federal de 13 de Febrero de 1874, Actas de los Consejos y Comisión Federal de la Región Española (1870-1874), transcripción y Estudio preliminar de Carlos Seco Serrano, 1970, vol. II, 298. Vid.Max Nettlau, La Première…, 235.

50. El Corsario, no. 108, June 26, 1892. I would like to thank Professor Gérard Brey for the information.

51. Gloria Espigado “Guillermina Rojas y el anarquismo”, in Historia, espacio público y mujer (siglos XVI-XX), eds. Teresa Nava Rodríguez and Mª Dolores Ramos Palomo (Madrid: Ediciones Complutense, 2025), 447–68. https://doi.org/10.5209/his.003.18.

52. Ibid.

53. Gloria Espigado, “Guillermina Rojas Orgis (1848–¿?): subjetividad y representación política en femenino durante el Sexenio Democrático”, in Activistas, militantes y propagandistas. Biografías en los márgenes de la cultura republicana (1868–1978), eds. Eduardo Higueras, Rubén Trujillano, and Julián Vadillo (Sevilla, Athenaica, 2018), 137–58.

54. Soledad Gustavo, “Movimiento feminista,” La Idea Libre, no. 110, June 5, 1896.

55. Gérerd Brey, “La construcción de una memoria de la Primera República por los anarquistas españoles a finales del siglo XIX,” Cahiers de Civilisation espagnole contemporaine no. 33 (2024). https://doi.org/10.4000/13txf.

56. La Solidaridad, no. 10, March 19, 1870. In Mallorca, a section of dressmakers known as “La Virtud Social” had been established as early as February 1870. Pere Gabriel, El moviment obrer a Mallorca (Barcelona: Ciruel-Lavínia, 1973), citado por Isabel Peñarrubia, Entre la ploma e la tribuna: els origens del primer fememinisme (Mallorca 1869–1890) (Barcelona, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2006), 80–88.

57. La Federación, July 28, 1870.

58. Extracted from La Voz de la República, the newspaper edited by Narcisa in Granada, and subsequently reproduced in the Mallorcan press El Trueno, August 7, 1870. The Mallorcan newspaper also expressed praise for the woman from Granada. El Iris del Pueblo, May 6, 1870.

59. El Menorquín, May 17, 1870.

60. Carolina Pérez, “Modesta Periu,” La Ilustración Republicana Federal, June 21, 1872; Ildefonso Antonio Bermejo, Historia de la Interinidad y Guerra Civil de España desde 1868 (Madrid: Establecimiento tipográfico de R. Labajos, 1876), 479.

61. Salud y Fraternidad, February 13, 1872.

62. Statement by Carolina Barbano, vice president of the Madrid women’s republican club La Fraternidad, El Pacto Federal, July 2, 1869.

63. Josep Termes, El anarquismo……, 322. Anselmo Lorenzo points out that it stemmed from a proposal submitted to the Barcelona Congress which, under the striking rubric “the emancipation of women from all labour other than domestic work,” was left unresolved at that time, El Proletariado…, 247. This resolution would be published in full by the Madrid-based publication La Emancipación, no. 45, April 20, 1870.

64. José María Hernández, “La educación de la mujer en la Primera Internacional en España (1869–1881)”, en Mujer y Educación en España (1868–1975), VI Coloquio de Historia de la Educación (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1990), 185–193.

65. María Rodríguez Fernández, La Solidaridad, no. 10, March 19, 1870.

66. Elisa Huigon. La Solidaridad, no. 30, August 6, 1870.

67. Signed in Barcelona on August 7 1870 and bearing all the signatures at the foot of the document, it was subsequently published in La Solidaridad, no. 32, August 20, 1870.

68. La Solidaridad, no. 36, October 17, 1870.

69. UNA MUJER, La Emancipación, no. 5, July 17, 1871.

70. Flora Tristan, “Por qué menciono las mujeres,” Cap. III de La Unión Obrera, 1843 (Barcelona: DeBarris, 2005).