Embroidering the Nation

Abstract

This chapter contributes to a well-grounded scholarship on Spanish domesticity ideologies as well as challenges that analyze the process of nation building, which have made relatively small efforts to incorporate gender as a category to understand the ways in which identities have been shaped. It also asks how the past is remembered and seeks to bring to the surface everyday symbols and images that represented female-centered day-to-day activities during the 1940s and 1950s. Aurora Morcillo, for example, illustrated the standardized civic gender roles under Franco's dictatorship, imposed primarily through education, government legislation, and everyday life. Sewing knowledge, and thus the values that society expected of women, was passed from mothers to daughters in the household. The chapter shows that more than a return to traditional female activities, the Seccion Femenina reshaped the female's eternal private sphere using the notion of outside work pejoratively for women. Keywords: Aurora Morcillo; Franco's dictatorship; Seccion Femenina ; Sewing knowledge; Spanish domesticity ideologies