A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantier #24: Mujeres Libres "Emancipate yourself from capitalist exploitation and patriarchal oppression" - Daniele Ratti (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In the twentieth century, Spain was not involved in the renewal of 
customs that occurred in the Western world, the country continued to be 
the bastion of the Catholic tradition, the faithful guardian of the most 
authentic patriarchy: God, homeland, family were the founding values of 
the national-Catholic tradition. In fact it was a remnant of the culture 
of the counter-reformation, which in the Iberian Peninsula was preserved 
almost intact from 1500 until the dawn of the twentieth century. The 
thought and behaviour, both of individuals and of a good part of 
society, did not know or were not able to practice, if not with 
difficulty, the exercise of doubt and the freedom of choices in the 
philosophical, political, scientific field that a large part of the 
Western world has given time he experimented. The Spanish legislative 
system placed men at the top of the social system and women in a totally 
subordinate position even within the family. The woman's task, if 
unmarried, was to take care of the original family unit, and if married, 
her own; only alternative: monastic life. There was another possibility 
to escape from family control or clerical prison, that of work, even if 
unlike other industrialized European countries - such as France, 
Germany, Great Britain - entry into the world of work occurred late. The 
majority of employed women were domestic workers: although there was an 
increase due to urbanization and industrialisation, in 1934 34% of the 
female population was employed within the home. It should be underlined 
that employment was an appendage of family authority, in fact it was 
strictly subordinated to marital control, whose consent was necessary to 
carry out any activity and to have the free availability of one's 
salary, which could be collected by the husband even in case of separation.

The condition of maids is particularly harsh, excluded from the 
eight-hour day, from unemployment and maternity contributions, and 
without accident coverage. Women's salaries were significantly lower 
than men's, half in agriculture, 47% in textiles and 41% in 
metalworking. The traditional cultural political magazines were the 
tools through which anarchist women approached politics and social 
issues; but the need for a specifically female form of aggregation was 
soon realized. It was therefore the historic militants and collaborators 
of the libertarian and anarcho-syndicalist newspapers such as 
Solidaridad Obrera, UMBRAL, CNT, El Libertario, TIERRA Y LIBERTAD, who 
took the initiative to give life to a newspaper that was not a mere 
appendix to the existing anarchist newspapers. However, it was the 
failure of the proletarian revolt in Asturias in October 1934, which 
determined a strong solidarity impulse within the Spanish left as a 
whole, facilitating revolutionary aggregations even in the libertarian 
world. In fact, it was precisely at the end of 1934 that a group of 
militant women of the CNT in Barcelona began to plan a women's group, 
eventually establishing the Gruppo Cultural Feminino in early 1935. The 
decisive step for the birth of Mujeres Libres occurred in November 1935, 
when the offer of the director of Solidaridad Obrera to create a women's 
page in that periodical was rejected, and therefore the decision was 
made to create a magazine for libertarian women committed first and 
foremost to women's emancipation. The decision was made following the 
difficulties that the companions encountered in their daily 
relationships with the male universe.

Explicit was the denunciation of the anarchist comrade Lucia Sancez 
Saornil of the problems that female workers encountered in the 
anarcho-syndicalist movement on the level of equality compared to their 
male companions, due to the relationships they had with them in their 
private lives.

According to her, her companions were chauvinists who wanted the woman 
to only take care of them and the family and who had no political and 
social conscience. In this way, patriarchy emerged within the domestic 
walls, even among anarchist families. On the part of the Mujeres Libres 
it was argued with extreme clarity that <the propaganda for female 
involvement must not be done among us women, but among our comrades, 
since if they maintain that all human beings are equal they must 
recognize that human beings include woman, although considered a passive 
being dedicated to household chores>. In summary, the question of the 
division of gender roles, in society and in the family, was decisive for 
the decision to create a specific organization for women. In other 
words, the political message was clear: what the comrade dreams of for 
the future, equality and justice, must be applied today.

In Madrid on 2 May 1936 - at the beginning of the revolution - the first 
issue of Mujeres Libres was published, which was then published until 
1938. The magazine was both the arrival and starting point of a series 
of initiatives, conferences and discussions , debates, in libertarian 
universities, in magazines, rationalist schools. Education courses, 
contacts with other women's groups and individual women were organised. 
At the outbreak of the civil war, in July 1936, there were direct 
contacts between the Madrid group, which had created the magazine, and 
the Gruppo Cultural Feminino of Barcelona. The military revolt did not 
put an end to the experience of the Mujeres Libres, in fact in the 
republican zone various groups came to life which took the name of 
Mujeres Libres, which took care of various tasks. The outcome of the war 
will have a decisive influence on the fate of the Mujeres Libres. In the 
first months of revolutionary enthusiasm, many militia women had left 
for the front. A great transformation occurred in the private sphere and 
in social relations.

Many anarchist women, as well as those of other political orientations, 
left their homes to live with their partners, whether male or female. 
The image of the woman with the rifle was the icon of the revolution, it 
also had a galvanizing character for women, it represented a complete 
split with the traditional Catholic "angel of the hearth", it was the 
end of the subordinate female role and represented the first steps of 
female autonomy, although, it is worth remembering, it did not concern 
the majority of women, who carried out their tasks behind the lines, 
employed in the traditional roles of assistance and care reserved for 
women. It is no coincidence that the republican "normalisation", after 
the first revolutionary months, "restored order" starting first of all 
with the militiamen, placing them in the "regular" republican 
departments. Even the practical activities organized by the companions 
were inevitably conditioned by war events. The activities were conceived 
and designed to have an immediate and positive return in the context of 
war events and it could not be otherwise. Courses were started for 
practical knowledge of agriculture and poultry farming, to then be used 
in agricultural communities, courses for professional categories that 
had always been considered masculine for use in the war industry, such 
as assemblers, welders, millers, in the railway and aeronautical 
sectors. In the field of urban transport, women became involved as 
drivers and ticket collectors. Among the various activities, it is worth 
mentioning the campaigns against prostitution, focused on female 
dignity, the "feminine prostitucion laboratories" were created, offering 
various possibilities for professional alternatives, a project that 
failed due to the difficult circumstances of the war. Beyond the social 
activism of the Mujeres Libres, their political weight was very modest 
and there was always a strong suspicion that the movement was something 
secondary to Iberian anarchism. For this reason, in October 1938 the 
companions asked the plenary general assembly of the Spanish libertarian 
movement for full recognition, which however never came, in fact they 
were never recognized as an autonomous group neither by the FAI nor by 
the CNT, nor by Juventus Libertarias, complaining that "our organization 
and our purpose have remained misunderstood.

They have been deaf to our every request for help." The outcome was 
negative and the request was rejected with the disconcerting reason that 
"a women's organization would be an element of disunity and inequality 
for the movement (...) and would have negative consequences for the 
future development of the interests of the working class". The story 
should not be too surprising, considering that for anarchists it was not 
obvious that they would distance themselves from a cultural context that 
for centuries had permeated Spain with a brutal chauvinism, supported 
and fueled profoundly by Catholic social values and practices, which had 
constituted the essence of Spanish culture, for which the division of 
roles between men and women was the foundation of the family and 
society. In summary, the concrete help from the libertarian movement was 
very limited: from an economic point of view it was limited to some 
space in the libertarian press or some meeting rooms.

In general the attitude towards the Mujers Libres was one of benevolent 
compliance, towards demonstrations considered lively, but of secondary 
importance. Above all, it was the widespread puritanism that was 
disconcerted by the disenchanted ways in which the companions addressed 
the issues of sexuality and was the real issue of conflict between 
companions and companions. Naturally, outside the anarchist universe, 
the movement was considered quite picturesque and the subject of various 
slanders. It seems appropriate to report Concha Liano's observations: 
...our aspiration was to be the female branch of the libertarian 
movement, in the same way that the youth were in the juventudes 
Libertaria. It is very painful to recognize it and even more so to 
express it, but our liberated anarchist comrades, who fought for the 
liberation of the proletariat, missed in the analyzes that the Spanish 
woman, as a worker, suffered like them from the yoke of capitalism, and 
even worse, for the same work he received a lower salary, and as a human 
being in society, his situation could not be more degrading and 
opprobrious: a minor adult being (...). So our companions did not want 
to recognize us as the female branch of the libertarian movement.

And this attitude caused us much amazement and resentment. We MUJERES 
LIBRES, presented our movement with an organization on a silver platter 
and they rejected us. The aid was very small sums, the bare minimum, but 
we appreciated them for what they were worth>. Mujeres LIbres was the 
first movement that clearly expressed the duplicity of the working 
woman's program of action: emancipation from capitalist exploitation on 
the one hand and from patriarchal oppression on the other. For this 
reason it distinguished itself from the women's organizations of the 
time, as a pioneer of subsequent feminism: although its militants did 
not accept the denomination feminist, because they considered it a word 
with bourgeois and suffragist reminiscences. In any case, with much 
shortage and with their difficulties, the girls of MUJERES Libres 
continued their fight on all fronts imposed by the dramatic situation of 
the civil war, and against the prevailing morality towards women. During 
the civil war the Mujeres Libres found themselves without support from 
the CNT on one side and on the other having to face the maneuvers of the 
Asociacion Mujieres Antifascitas (AMA) under the control of the 
Stalinist communists. The call for the merger of women's organizations 
was always declined. They never renounced their autonomy and never 
agreed to subordinate themselves to pre-existing anarchist and 
libertarian organizations, nor to act as a transmission belt for 
anything, maintaining the awareness of the fact that only if 
self-managed would female action allow the achievement of the goals of 
their battle. Autonomy that allowed the Mujeres Libres not to fall into 
the bourgeois and communist trap of anti-fascist unity and above all not 
to make the women's question an object of exchange, within the framework 
of political compromises.

The women who started Mujers Libres preferred to define their movement 
as "feminine" rather than feminist, in order to dissociate themselves 
from bourgeois feminist associations.

Integral humanism was the term considered most appropriate. Freedom and 
respect for the person operated as founding values, a woman's freedom 
was understood as the possibility of choosing what she wanted to be, 
outside of fixed roles or stereotypes, even those of the liberated woman 
or the revolutionary woman, so that all oppressive social theoretical 
models were questioned. This female solidarity with its forms of social 
assistance, such as taking care of the children of workers and the 
organization of popular refectories, was the concrete response to the 
selfishness and injustices of which the Spanish woman was the victim. 
The Mujeres Libres combined the women's question with the class 
struggle, within the framework of a solidarity that was characterized as 
integral humanism. In conclusion, judging the experience of Mujeres 
Libres only on the basis of what their short history has produced would 
be a gross mistake. Not only for the fact that this experience came to 
life for a short period, but above all because it took place in a 
troubled time to say the least, marked by the most tragic civil war that 
the West can remember. Therefore the actions were heavily influenced by 
the war events and it is objectively difficult to understand what the 
actual impact on the social body was.

Too often the "experiments" and projects have been short-lived, making 
it almost impossible to fully evaluate their effects and this applies in 
general to all the achievements that the libertarian anarchist world, in 
its brief Iberian "spring", has achieved starting from 
collectivizations. What was totally innovative, however, especially in 
the Spanish reality, was having simply imagined and created a totally 
feminine space starting from the aggregation of women, which was not the 
appendage of a political organization inevitably male-oriented but it 
was, for the first time, an organization designed, built and managed by 
women. This fact was never fully accepted by the male component of the 
libertarian movement and could not be, after centuries of ferocious 
patriarchy, further sanctified by the Jesuit culture of which Spain was 
the world standard bearer. The Mujeres Libres carried out a double 
revolution, the social one and that of gender and interpersonal 
relations: at the time, no one was capable of fully recognizing the 
value of this project. The dream was to solve the problems of women in 
their society, providing operational examples in a short time. The merit 
was that of insisting on the fact that the struggle of working women 
would not end with the disappearance of the capitalist system, but only 
when patriarchy and female subordination were suppressed, and above all 
the contemporaneity of their principles, struggle of gender and class. 
This principle was not understood at that time, neither by their 
comrades, nor by many anarchist militant women, nor by the workers' 
women's organizations that did not question patriarchy.

This is the legacy of Mujeres Libres.

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