Women putting up posters

Women were one of the groups for whom the Second Republic awakened hopes of greater levels of freedom and equality. The government of the Republic did bring in a number of measures that were embodied in the Constitution and in reforms to the Civil and Penal Codes.

These reforms, legal equality with men, coeducational education, and the legalization of divorce, of which the granting of female suffrage, opened the possibility for women to participate in politics and increased their public visibility as, for the first time, many of them went into the streets to defend their rights and promote their ideas, as this photograph of Goya Telo, María Telo and Pilar Alonso putting up posters in Salamanca in May 1936 illustrates. Getting political citizenship strengthened women’s place in the public sphere and helped increase their visibility in the media.

The granting of female suffrage led all political parties to create women’s sections. This included even those parties that had been opposed to women getting the vote, as they were aware that they needed to appeal this group that made up half of the electorate. For many women, this was their first engagement with politics, although since the 1910s and the creation of Women’s Catholic Action, Catholic women had been encouraged by social catholic movement to go into the streets to defend their model of the family and society.

The work of the pioneering women who created women’s and feminist organizations must not be forgotten. One of the most noteworthy was the National Association of Spanish Women, founded in 1918, which demanded the end to legal discrimination against married women, Access to Jobs, and equal pay for equal work.  From 1924, it also advocated for the vote for women. The Union of Spanish Women, which was closer to socialist ideas, emerged at the same time. The women’s movement got new energy from the creation of the Spanish Women’s Crusade in 1921, which defended sexual equality, female suffrage, the end to legal discrimination against women, equal pay, and the legalization of divorce. The Crusade also organized the first public event of Spanish suffragists. After the passage of the Divorce Law in March 1932, Clara Campoamor, who had been its most outspoken proponent during the parliamentary debates, created the Republican Female Union, the only women’s group that was completely feminist and independent of all political parties.

This network of organizations and the democratic experience brought by the Second Republic resulted in an unprecedented mobilization of women, one that increased during the Civil War, which brought the creation of new associations and the involvement of women both on the frontlines and on the home front. 

ACS