“You gave life to a child, save a man from death”

Getting blood to wounded soldiers quickly in order to perform transfusions near the front was one of the most significant medical advances of the Spanish Civil War, but to be effective it required large numbers of people to donate their blood.  “You gave life to a child, save a man from death”, the caption on this postcard issued in Valencia by the Medical Division of the Republican army’s Hospitals Service, casts blood donation as a women’s task, a continuation of their traditional role as mother. In this, it was in line with other propaganda messages in the Republican zone which pushed women away from the non-traditional roles, including bearing arms, they had assumed in the revolutionary impulse of the initial weeks of the conflict, and back into traditional ones. 

Nor was this idea limited to the Republic. Pilar Primo de Rivera, head of the Women’s Section of the Falange, described giving blood as the “silent labour of those who… as women have been unable to give it at the front”. And Russell Palmer’s pro-Franco film Defenders of the Faith, contains a sequence showing young women donating blood as the narrator says: “although not everyone can give their blood … for these young ladies it is the fifth contribution of this kind”. On the other hand, in November 1936, Franco himself ordered that everyone in the rearguard should donate blood.

The short 1937 Catalan-language film Transfusió de Sang [Blood Transfusion], about the Barcelona-based transfusion service established by Dr. Frederic Duran i Jordà, gives a different vision, however. The opening scene shows the service’s van with a man giving blood painted on the side, and while both men and women appear as donors, although only the former are seen actually giving blood. The service takes blood, we are told, from everyone “independent of age, sex, or political beliefs” who wants to help the cause. Who the donors actually were is not known, but with so many men at the front, it is likely that many were women. Volunteer donors also received coupons for foodstuffs such as cans of chickpeas, olive oil, and sugar, which may well have enticed women, responsible for feeding their families, to donate.