The Assosiación de Mujeres Antifascistas and the Mujeres Libres were vital in ensuring that women’s rights were adequately fought for in the anarchist movement during the Spanish Civil War.
In order to fully understand the extent of their involvement in the Civil War, it is important to first contextualise their actions with the society that they were living in prior to the revolution. Spanish society under Franco was deeply oppressive of women, both socially and economically. Unless they had permission from their husband, women were legally “prohibited from almost all economic activities, including employment, ownership of property, or even travel away from home” (Solsten and Meditz), and Bolotten cites an anecdote given in 1935 of a village
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Ackelsberg wrote on this in an article for the Feminist Studies journal in 1985, where she posited that revolutionary movements can only gain traction if they speak to specific realities of people’s lives. She feels this was particularly necessary for women, as their “daily life experiences” differ so wildly from those of men. However, it can generally be understood that the anarchist movement at the time was not fully catering to the individual lived experiences of women at all. The example Ackelsberg cites is that the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) fought primarily for workplace rights, whereas most women didn’t work in the factory settings that this aimed to help. In a separate work, entitled Free Women of Spain, Ackelsberg cites reports of women being disregarded as members of these movements, their contributions often getting laughed at and …show more content…
One of the first things the organisation did after publishing the magazine, according to Folguera, was to organise classes for those interested in improving their education. Aileen O’Carroll mentions “literacy programs, technically oriented classes, and classes in social studies” attended by between 600-800 women each day in December 1938. This was presumably to counteract the enormous gender imbalance that existed in the education system at the time - Folguera offers statistics that show while primary education was roughly equal in terms of gender, the number of women who then went on to complete secondary education was only 31% in 1936. This continued to drop as one progressed to university - only 8.8% of university students at the time were