Photo of the Wife of the Guerrilla Fighter Eulogio de la Torre

The guerrilla fighter Eulogio de la Torre carried this photograph of his wife inside his jacket. It was found by the Civil Guards who executed him in the mountains.

In many of the armed resistance movements in Europe, like the Greek and Yugoslav ones, women were fully involved, doing support work and even as combatants, although this was much less common. This division of tasks and responsibilities was also true of the Republican resistance.

The Communist Party of Spain continued to follow the line it had been using since the Civil War, presenting a virile image of guerrilla fighters while appealing to their maternal instincts when referring to women. Thus, women, who comprised half of the contacts,  came to assume an essential role at the heart of collaboration networks performing auxiliary tasks that allowed the anti-Francoist resistance to survive. There were thousands of women among the 20,000 people who were arrested in the postwar years for concealing guerrilla fighters. While there were only 700 fighters in the provinces of Almería, Granada, and Malaga, the Civil Guard identified 3,000 women playing support roles. In contrast, during the 1940s, the number of women fighters barely reached one hundred.

Women had been present in the guerrilla bands in Galicia, Andalucia and Asturias since 1936. They generally were women with a notable history of political militancy, and thus they had to escape not only for being the wives, mothers, or daughters of guerrilla fighters, but also for fear of being murdered, imprisoned or raped.

Sexual violence had started during the Civil War and continued for many years after it tended. Women experienced a double, or even triple, repression following the Francoist victory. Those who had been active were punished as “reds”, but also for having questioned traditional gender roles, betraying their feminine nature by abandoning their natural roles as wives and mothers. They were also punished for being relatives of “reds” or “wives, daughters, or sisters of guerrillas”, and persecuted, assaulted, imprisoned and murdered in order to punish the men as well as serving as a weapon of war as hostages of the dictatorship. It is impossible to estimate the number of women who endured bad treatment and abuse for their real or supposed connection to the guerrilla.

AFP