Three ministers and from different parties –Miquel Iceta, Irene Montero and Félix Bolaños– to inaugurate an exhibition symbolized yesterday in the National Library of Madrid the consensus that the figure of one of the only two women who were deputies in the Constituent Courts of the República: Clara Campoamor, the dressmaker who became one of the first Spanish lawyers, who defended the right of women to vote and who achieved it after her fiery speech in Parliament on October 1, 1931.
A speech in which, curiously, she had to confront her dialectic – "I, Members of Parliament, feel like a citizen before I am a woman, and I consider that it would be a profound political error to leave out of that right the woman who waits and trusts in you." ”– to the other deputy of the hemicycle, Victoria Kent, the first lawyer in the country, who assured: “I simply believe that the female vote should be postponed”, because she believed that women needed to be educated before voting or they would endanger the Republic by choosing what their husbands or the Church said.
Campoamor was clear: “The only way to mature for the exercise of freedom and to make it accessible to all is to walk within it”. And she won: 161 votes in favor and 131 against incorporating women's suffrage into the Constitution, doing so 13 years before France, as the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, Fernando Martínez López, recalled yesterday when presenting the great sample that his department has co-produced with the National Library and Spanish Cultural Action: Clara Campoamor Rodríguez: woman and citizen (1888-1972), curated by Rosa María Capel.
An exhibition that until October 16 commemorates the 50th anniversary of the death of the feminist fighter and that presents 368 pieces. Including paintings by Maruja Mallo, Ángeles Santos and Sorolla –with Clotilde, his wife, reading the newspaper–, an urn from 1931, suffragist medals, suits and mannequins that show the change from the difficult fashion of the bustle to another of more comfortable lines, photographs –those of Campoamor in Parliament among hundreds of men but also that of a Galician comparsa from 1905 that proclaims “Long live free love” on the banner– and numerous caricatures and satirical vignettes that show even the eternal gender violence: “My husband has arranged to come and kill me at 12, I'm leaving, because I'm late."
Pieces that show the profound transformations of Spanish society at the beginning of the 20th century, with the incorporation of women into higher education and qualified professions and politics: orphaned by her father at the age of 10, Campoamor will contribute to the family livelihood as a dressmaker and clerk and will oppose the Telegraph Corps at the age of 21, living in Zaragoza and San Sebastián in humble pensions. With a privileged intelligence, it will be in 1922, at the age of 34, when she passes all six high school courses in one, and two years later she graduates in Law. With the Republic she believes it is possible to put an end to class and gender inequalities and she becomes general director of Welfare, fighting for access to education, the vote for women and the abolition of prostitution. She would leave Spain at the start of the Civil War, dying in Lausanne in 1972.
