Imagining Female Citizenship in the ‘New Spain’: Gendering the Democratic Transition, 1975–1978

Abstract

This article analyses the contestation over female citizenship in Spain's transition to democracy in the mid 1970s. It posits that the transition opened up a discursive space for the construction of a new concept of female citizenship, which was filled with competing images of female citizens, from the Francoist housewife to the consumer activist to the feminist. Through a close reading of the democratic press, the article explores the contradictions and tensions involved in imagining a new female citizen for a democratic Spain. With a focus on the representation of feminist citizenship, the article argues that the central tension surrounding female citizenship was the contradiction between new modes of female participation, new sets of rights and a framework of meaning which could not make sense of these changes. As a result, there was no comfortable place for the female citizen in the emerging master narrative of the transition.