Federica Montseny, Anarchism, Love, and Evolution

In nearly two hundred essays and twenty-eight works of fiction, the Spanish anarchist Federica Montseny's arguments gained a wide audience in the anarchist Atlantic before she was twenty-five years old.  Montseny participated in the Spanish debates on gender in the twenties with literally a novel approach.  She combined an anarchist understanding of humanity and science to argue for women's liberation as the crucial part of human liberation.  Throughout her fiction and journalism this liberation is portrayed as part of evolution.  Montseny used contemporary understandings to argue for the independence of women, including the right to not reject men who sought male dominance or argued for female inferiority.  I examine these arguments and the usage of evolution as a critique in responses on both sides of the Atlantic.  Science was an important concept in Spanish anarchism, both as an anticlerical tool but also in debates over gender, sexuality, and innate characteristics of men and women.  Attention to Spanish anarchism has traditionally focused on the Civil War and revolutionary romanticism, including Montseny's brief tenure as the first Minister of Health during the war - she was the first female minister in a Western European government, ironic for an anarchist.  Through her writings I seek to simultaneously place anarchists as active participants in the debates occasioned by the aftershocks of the First World War, even in a period of repression and dictatorship, and to demonstrate why at such a young age she became one of the leading anarchist militants during Spain's Second Republic.