Broadcasting the ‘Spanish Woman’. Nationalism and Female Radio Programmes During the Franco Regime

Abstract

This paper aims to show how radio can be envisioned as a witness and agent of the transformations that operated during the forty-year Franco dictatorship in Spain. It analyses a number of radio scripts from the private station Radio Madrid to examine how the radio worked as a means to both affect and be affected by the sociopolitical events of the country. Its focus is on the discourse of programmes aimed at female audiences that exploited and re-educated housewives over the airwaves according to the regime’s interests. These programmes therefore served as a catalyst for state policies and the construction of the nationalist Project and also show the contradictions in the new femininity models manifested during the second Franco regime.