Role of women in the 1930's in Spain

ROLE OF WOMEN



The woman is usually the great forgotten in the civil war in Spain.

Women did not participate in the culture, the economy or society, always reserved task the men, on the other hand they should be held in the privacy of the home and, if working, a classist and sexual division of labour.

Much of the blame must be attributed to the lack of opportunities that women receive a school education and its own culture. Public education was something rare in the early 20th century as education was monopolized by the Church, and this did much for educating women in a more practical sense than the be "the perfect housewife" and mother of his children.


The obstacles that the woman had was already in primary and secondary education were much larger when it came to higher education. Very few women came to the University and even at the end of the 1920s are more women in College almost none exercised his career after graduating.

Along with the difficulties of women to receive a proper education we have the discrimination they suffered at work. Unequal relations imposed him to occupational segregation and wage discrimination. Women had fewer career opportunities, received comparatively lower than men's wages and worked in non-specialized and therefore less paid tasks. At the end of the 19th century women only earned half of what a man doing the same work earned.

Finally we have the difficulties of women in the social victims of a patriarchal system that discriminated against them.

The failed uprising of July 1936 catapulted to the women of the Republican Spain into new activities in the social and political world.

In the signs of war were dominated by images of heroines fighters clad in their blue monkeys as a representation of the working-class feel of a people engaged in a struggle for freedom. Obviously these images broke with the traditional subordination of women.

During the first weeks of war, while most women agreed to channel their energy to the war effort in the rearguard, some few joined his fellow males.

It was the time of famous militants as Lina Òdena, Rosario Sánchez La Dinamitera, the Basque Casilda Méndez and many more.


    Lina Òdena