Luis Rubiales no longer rules football. A judge has just summoned him as under investigation to respond to the complaint that Jenni Hermoso has filed against him for the non-consensual kiss of the player in the World Cup final. He is accused of sexual assault and coercion. The feminist consensus that has overthrown the former president of the Spanish Federation has only been possible because of the wave of dignity that has swept across the world, not just Spain, in the streets, in politics, in justice, in the institutions. This time society has united against what Rubiales represents: that machismo that survives on a structure of privileges and where the abuse of power due to the simple fact of gender is not seen as a crime.
It's over (
Few slogans like the one launched by the national team's soccer players symbolize more clearly the social leap that has occurred in the recognition of women's rights. And in tolerance to certain attitudes. There is much left to do, but much has been done. “It's over, because I set out to do it and I suffered/like no one had suffered…”, sang María Jiménez with Triana arrests in 1978. Those seventies in which the new consciousness was born in women who wanted to achieve their personal autonomy, something achievable if they entered the labor market.
The death of María Jiménez at the age of 73 on the 7th awakened a grimace of sadness in all those Spaniards for whom she was her voice. She sang for them, for many who lived the life they did not want, locked in their homes, real prisons for some for years.
Jiménez's was the third wave of feminism, characterized by the fact that women began to organize and separate themselves from men in political decisions, to claim their role in the system and to have institutional representation. The fourth wave would arrive around the 1980s, which gained special importance due to issues such as birth control, the disconnection of sexual pleasure from reproduction and the law of divorce, among others. The demands focused on the right to abortion, the end of male privileges, gender violence, sisterhood and the fight against stereotypes. With Hermoso and “It's over” a fifth wave appears, more diverse in ideology and objectives, but all of it under the threat of the anti-feminist extreme right.
The first wave emerged at the end of the 18th century, when civil law considered women as minors. In the second wave (second half of the 19th century-second half of the 20th century) a great advance came thanks to liberal feminism: the right to vote. In Spain, the Cortes approved it on December 9, 1931. The Franco dictatorship disrupted everything, and relegated women to the home. Still, there was no going back.
The role of women in public spaces has been hindered (or directly excluded) in long historical periods. The social visibility of women is a requirement of justice, a basic condition for the quality of any democratic State. The contribution of the media is essential. In recent decades, the press has been forced to rethink the perspective with which it had drawn the female figure and, today, there are very good and widespread practices, although certain media are not interested or simply seek provocation. Stereotypes have fallen by which women were made to appear as victims, wives, mothers, maruja or superwoman, beautiful, sexual objects... to become protagonists, contributors and key. Regarding co-responsibility, more emphasis still needs to be placed on the inequality of care work that the pandemic accentuated.
La Vanguardia has accompanied social changes with the transformation of its own content, reversing a situation in which the work routines established for years – and the absence of women's signatures until the end of the sixties – gave rise to sexist or androcentric interpretations of the reality. The consolidation of a journalistic story in accordance with the social reality of women in Spain has had three key moments: the divorce law (1981), the abortion law (2010), the 8-M of 2018 and the visibility of sexist violence. . Without a doubt, today the head of the Godó Group is guided by the criterion of journalistic quality of the gender perspective, both transversally in all sections and from the direction of the newspaper.
María Luz Morales, pioneer of women's journalism, was the first woman in this country to direct a newspaper: La Vanguardia. In the turbulent years of the Civil War. That the 20th century was the century of women was already written by Concha Alós in 1965 in an article that would illuminate the trend, because in the 21st century they are also avant-garde. From Morales to Hermoso: behind the women, all the others follow.
