Politicians, like any neighbor's son, blame others when things don't go well. The left had governed Spain since 1931 with a reformist program. Two years later, however, it suffered an electoral setback and the right took power. From the perspective of progressives, the disaster was difficult to understand. Why had the people turned their backs on them if they governed according to their interests?
To console the defeated, two complementary theories then emerged. It was said, on the one hand, that women – who enjoyed the right to vote for the first time in a general election – were to blame. They were supposedly more conservative than men because they were dominated by the clergy. According to this interpretation, they were simply submissive voters who obeyed the directives of the priests.
On the other hand, it was claimed that the anarchists were responsible for the adverse result. As they defended abstention for ideological reasons, they had caused a good part of the electorate to stay at home. This position would have taken away votes from the left and favored the victory of the conservatives. In reality, this was as false a myth as the one concerning women.
Mercedes Vilanova, in her Electoral Atlas of Catalonia during the Second Republic (La Magrana, 1986), questioned both legends. According to this historian, the topic about libertarians arose in the 1930s from various motivations. The CNT (National Confederation of Labor) was interested in having everyone believe it was capable of changing the outcome of elections through its slogans. Thus, by appropriating all the abstention, it became the most important political force. The Marxist left, in turn, could blame the anarchists for their poor results. And the right used the bourgeoisie's fear of CNT radicalism for its own purposes.
The thesis of abstentionism immediately jumped from the field of politics to that of historiography. According to the Hispanist Pierre Vilar, the failure of the left was due to a mixture of anarchist inhibition and bad electoral law. Jaume Vicens Vives also overstated the slogan of not going to the polls. For this great Catalan historian, the CNT had one and a half million members who followed its directives to the letter. This suicidal policy would have sunk the Republic, precipitating it into the abyss of instability. On the other hand, another important specialist, Isidre Molas, came to the conclusion that liberal abstention did not seem responsible for the setback suffered by progressive forces.
Mercedes Vilanova's contribution was in line with this skeptical position, although in her case it was supported by considerably broader empirical support. There had been a strong ideological abstentionism among CNT leaders and militants, but their influence could be ruled out due to their low numerical relevance.
The libertarian masses had voted or not voted with a behavior similar to that of the rest of the electoral body. Their actions demonstrated the existence of a fracture between the masses and the militant elites. In practice, despite calls for abstention, the majority of Catalan anarchists tended to vote for Esquerra Republicana.
Vilanova also destroyed another persistent stereotype, the one that blamed women for the failure of the progressive forces in 1933. Already at that time, comments had multiplied within the left that presented Spanish women as creatures without criteria, subject to reactionary manipulation. of the priests. A press article about it went so far as to proclaim that the world had been lost because of a woman, alluding to the biblical story about Eve's guilt in original sin.
The right, in turn, maintained the same version of events, although its assessment was the opposite: the citizens deserved all the praise for having contributed to the victory of order, religion and family.
The topic of the female vote, since then, has been repeated in countless academic monographs. However, as early as 1936, feminist Clara Campoamor proposed a refutation. If the results of the elections in 1931 and 1933 were compared, the data showed that the Spanish had not given victory to the right. Nor would they give victory to the left in the Popular Front elections in 1936. If the progressive parties had lost, the causes had to be sought in their disunity or in the wear and tear of two years of government.
Vilanova agreed on this point with Campoamor. Women, as quantitative data and oral sources demonstrated, had used suffrage in the same sense as men.
A few years later, the studies of other historians would reaffirm the inaccuracy of female “guilt.” This was the case, for example, of Pablo Villalaín, author of an investigation into the elections in Madrid during the republican period. Adriana Cases Sola, in her work on Alicante, shows that the left triumphed there in 1933 with a level of female participation very similar to that of male participation. In turn, Alejandro Camino Rodríguez points out that the right would have triumphed equally without the women's vote.
Historiography, as we can see, ended up denying the self-serving propaganda of the actors involved in the 1933 elections. The dissemination, however, continued for a long time with the stereotypes. It is always very difficult for what academics know to leave their restricted circles.
