When María Goyri enrolled at the University, no one knew how to act. She was the first woman to enter the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. The bewildered dean chose to receive her personally, put her in a room, and locked the door. He picked her up again when the bell rang and accompanied her to the classroom where the rest of the students, all men, looked at her “between amazement and irony.” The scene was repeated every day throughout María's career.
“Women's access to higher education was recognized in 1910, although a special permit had to be requested to be able to access the classrooms,” explains Carmen Domingo, author of With Voice and Vote (RBA), a tour of the situation of the woman in Spain between 1931 and 1939. Although Domingo's itinerary begins a little before the Second Republic in a country where women's rights were (almost) non-existent.
The situation of women until 1931 was characterized by a lack of education, the impossibility of entering the labor market, the obligation to assume domestic tasks and dependence on men due to legal imperative. “In 1930, 85% of Spanish women were workers and peasants and of these, 95% were dedicated to household chores,” explains Domingo in an interview with La Vanguardia.
“The illiteracy rate among these women was very high, higher than among men, and without education, it was impossible to prosper. Yes, there were some women who wanted to prepare among the wealthy classes, but they didn't have it easy either.” Concha Méndez, for example, recalled: “my parents wouldn't let me pick up a book, not even a newspaper. To read I had to borrow books and hide them under the bed.” Something similar happened to María Campo: “They don't want me to study or read or know anything about anything,” she lamented in her memoirs.
Neither education nor work: “Women had been relegated to the four walls of the home, dedicated to reproductive tasks and taking care of the house. Only in the event that the husband's salary could not support the family was it justified for the woman to go to work as a worker," says the writer.
In that Spain “being single or widow was a luxury, married women had no rights.” The differences between them were “abysmal.” “The married woman depended on her husband for everything and she lost her rights. The situation of the single woman was almost comparable to that of the man: she had the capacity to buy, lend and contract freely. The legal inequality between men and women was so brutal that if a man killed his wife, the penalty was exile. If she was the murderer, the sentence would be life imprisonment.”
At that juncture, women's civic rights were conspicuous by their absence. However, during the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, in 1924, there was a timid opening that allowed women to vote in municipal elections. Also in this slight advance, married women lost out: "Only widows and single women could vote. For married women there were many limitations. They were allowed to exercise the right to vote if they were divorced with a final ruling declaring the husband guilty, if the husband had been declared judicially absent or when the wife exercised guardianship of the spouse because he was crazy or deaf-mute".
With the arrival of the Second Republic there was a gigantic improvement: “The legislation, the most progressive in Europe, gave way to divorce, equal pay for both sexes, universal suffrage, dismissal for maternity was prohibited, the “right of a woman to have parental authority over her children…”
Incredible advances that disappeared with Franco's regime: “From 1939 onwards we returned to darkness, to housework and to the prohibition of working. There were women who lived in sin, because if they got married they would lose their jobs.” That veto was lifted in 1961, but it would not be until many years later, in the Transition, when feminism and women's rights experienced a new and slow momentum. But that is a story that Domingo will tell in the next installment of his x-ray of women in 20th century Spain.
