(en) Britain, The Anarchist Federation (AFED), RESISTANCE #157 - Free Women of Spain

The story of Mujeres Libres (Free Women) an organisation of thirty thousand women that 
emerged in the Anarchist movement in Spain in 1936. ---- Spain in the 1930s was a society 
riddled with ideas of male superiority and the cult of machismo.* ---- Spain had a mass 
anarchist movement organised in the Anarcho-Syndicalist union, the Confederacion Nacional 
del Trabajo(CNT) which at its height organised as many as two million members, the 
specific anarchist organisation the FAI ( Federacion Anarquista Iberica), the Libertarian 
Youth (FIJL) which organised many young workers and the various free schools and ateneos 
which organised literacy programmes, as well as free libraries, plays, and general 
education. The aim of the Anarchists in the Civil War was to emancipate all and institute 
a free society, without exploitation or hierarchy, where each person worked according to 
ability, received back according to need and had equal power and a direct say over social 
and political life.

Women entered the CNT when the CNT started organising in the textile industry. In 
addition, the CNT also began organising among domestic servants and maids, where girls as 
young as ten were employed by the middle classes and the rich. Some women came to the 
fore in the early days of the CNT and were inspiring figures for emancipation and for 
anarchism. However, traditional macho values were still very dominant in Spanish society. 
This included in the Anarchist and Syndicalist movement which, whilst it talked about the 
emancipation and liberation of all and the end of hierarchies, in practice held back the 
liberation of women. It re-created old structures which oppressed women without 
challenging them.

Illiteracy and lack of education were big problems for working class women in Spain as 
they were for the whole of the working class.

Triple Enslavement

Some women activists of the anarchist movement, including Lucia Sanchez Saornil, Mercedes 
Comoposada and Amparo Poch y Gascon did not want to wait for the Revolution to free 
everyone before they acted. They started a magazine, Mujeres Libres, which proved to be 
hugely popular. Its aim was to educate women ?and to provide them with information about 
politics so they could become involved in anarchist activities, and it also served to give 
women professional training so they would have better employment opportunities?. Soon the 
magazine linked up with other anarchist women in other parts of Spain and they began to 
think about creating a women?s organisation. Their aim was to fight against what they saw 
as the triple enslavement of women, enslavement to ignorance (lack of access to education 
and literacy), enslavement to capitalism and hierarchy, and enslavement to men.

One of the key ideas was the need for women to organise in a specific organisation to 
combat ideas of sexism and machismo in general AND in the anarchist movement. They 
concentrated on the connections between class, cultural and sexual oppression. They worked 
for integration of women into the workforce through apprenticeship and employment 
programmes, the education of women and consciousness raising so that women could feel 
confident and assertive, through propaganda tours, radio, travelling libraries, the 
struggle against sexist behaviour including in their own movement, the development of 
cr?ches and childcare centres in the neighbourhood and in the workplace, the development 
of hospitals with birth and postnatal facilities. The emergence of Mujeres Libres was an 
important development. All at once women began to question their role in an extremely 
oppressive society.

Mujeres Libres failed to have a complete view of sexist division of labour where often 
women were confined to domestic roles and the rigidity of sex roles where women bore the 
sole responsibility for raising children. Abortion and birth control were not discussed as 
much as they should have been, though if the Spanish Revolution had not been crushed by 
the forces of General Franco this might well have come more to the fore. They did insist 
on the need for an independent women?s anarchist organisation and refused to disappear 
into the various committees and sub-committees of the CNT.

The History of Mujeres Libres is extremely important if we want to move forward and 
destroy hierarchies in every sphere of life.

*Machismo - ?a strong sense of masculine pride...[with] the supreme valuation of 
characteristics culturally associated with the masculine and a denigration of 
characteristics associated with the feminine." Merriam -Webster Dictionary