Gender violence is not something new, although some sectors try to dilute it as a pseudo-invention of today's women to achieve more rights. Since time immemorial, these have been considered second-class citizens (or not even), which has allowed mistreatment, humiliation, rape and any other aberration on the part of their partners, without them having to respond because it was understood that they were matters private, which only concerned marriage and in which no one could interfere. What happened to an abusive husband? Well, he was going to suffer with him all his life, if he didn't take it away himself.
But there have always been women who have rebelled against that injustice. A minority, but they existed. This is the case of Francisca de Pedraza, a poor woman who obtained the first documented conviction for gender violence. She obtained a divorce from her abuser, who was given a restraining order and the return of her marriage dowry. It happened in Alcalá de Henares, birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes, on May 24, 1624. That was 400 years ago.
It was the professor of Legal History at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Ignacio Ruiz Rodríguez, who discovered Francisca de Pedraza in 1995, while he was writing his doctoral thesis. He delved into thousands of files from the University of Alcalá de Henares (formerly the Complutense University, a title that he sold to the University of Madrid due to financial problems) in search of legal acts carried out in the 17th century by the university itself, founded by Cardinal Cisneros. in 1499 and through whose classrooms the most important figures of the Spanish golden age passed.
“Among those thousands of papers, I found a file that said 'matrimonial', which caught my attention. The university then had jurisdiction over the teachers, the dicentes (students) and officials, and I was surprised that they dealt with a matter of those characteristics in 1624. It was a file of about 500 pages that told the story of Francisca de Pedraza, an orphan. poor woman raised by the Complutense nuns, and her fight for ten years against the ordinary and ecclesiastical courts to end the brutal mistreatment she suffered at the hands of her husband, Jerónimo de Jaras,” explains this doctor of Law.
From the beginning of his life with Jaras, Pedraza knew what hell is. Beatings happened for any reason, including rapes. She even had a miscarriage after her husband kicked her in the middle of the street. But Francisca was not satisfied and with her bruised body she went to court on three occasions, once to the ordinary court, which was shelved claiming that they were private matters, and twice to the ecclesiastical court, where witnesses appeared to support her complaint. The answer in both cases was for her to hold on and for him not to hit as hard.
But in life you have to be lucky, and Pedraza was lucky. “It seems that the planets conspired,” says Ignacio Ruiz. In 1624, the young woman went to the Pope's nuncio, Inocencio Maximo, who had come to Madrid to accompany the future wife of Philip IV, who surprisingly asked the University of Alcalá to take charge of the matter.
And that is when the rector Álvaro de Ayala, an expert in civil and ecclesiastical law, appears, who turned the matter around. This rector, the son of a jurist, listened to the victim, as well as the aggressor, analyzed the evidence and listened to the testimonies (even the town's mayor testified on his behalf). On May 24, 1624, the sentence was made public: divorce, restraining order for the victim and return of the dowry. The appeal filed by the abuser was rejected.
