Female Sentinels of Occident: The Women’s Section of the Spanish Falange and the Struggle for Women’s Rights in the Postwar West
Kathryn L. Mahaney, The Graduate Center, CUNY
The Seccion Femenina is well-studied by scholars of 20th century Spain. Historians have debated whether the organization’s fascist affiliation condemned it to being an arm of repression, or whether the leadership’s push for greater female participation in the public sphere made the group more complicated by, perhaps, being progressive in some limited ways. Moreover, each of these historical arguments is tinged with the great historiographical preoccupation of Spanish historians: was the nation truly backward, as many have perceived it to be (including Spaniards themselves), or was it on par with the rest of Europe?
Yet despite the established debate about how to understand the Seccion Femenina, and despite a recent crop of historians studying the internationalist aspirations and ties of the late Franco regime, scholars to date have not viewed the Seccion Femenina itself through a similar comparative or transnational lens.
This paper seeks to rectify that omission by placing the Seccion Femenina, and particularly the expansion of women’s rights it championed and oversaw in the 1960s and 1970s, in international context. In particular, I contrast the 1961 Law for Political, Professional, and Labor Rights for Women in Spain with the equality legislation promoted and mandated by international bodies like the United Nations and regional bodies like the European Economic Community, and with equality legislation in place in other Western nations. Using this metric, I argue that Spain had one of the most progressive legal conceptions of women’s rights in mid-20th century Europe and North America.