Patriarchal Politics in Pre-Civil War Spain: Prostitution in Ángela Graupera’s Anarcho-feminist Novellas

Abstract

For anarchists and leftists in pre-Civil War Spain, prostitution epitomized women’s sexual and economic subordination under patriarchal, capitalist structures. Though both anarchist and Marxist discourses conflated gender and class equality, believing women’s emancipation to be an organic consequence of social revolution, the lack of focus on female-specific concerns in anti-capitalist ideations has attracted criticism from feminist scholars. Grounding an analysis within these theoretical and historical contexts, this article interrogates how Ángela Graupera, a little-known Catalan activist and writer, used the trope of prostitution to examine these issues in her novellas, published as part of the La Novela Libre and La Novela Ideal series that were printed by the anarchist magazine La Revista Blanca in the 1920s and 1930s. Through a close reading of selected texts, the examination explores how prostitution functions as a metaphor for female subordination, facilitating a critique of androcentric socio-economic discourses and hegemonic sexual politics in early twentieth-century Spain.