Spanish Anarchism and Women's Liberation

Abstract

One of the chief ideological disputes between the Spanish anarchists and communists during the Civil War was the anarchists' insistence that social revolution should not be postponed until the war was won; without the social revolution (by which they meant the defeat of authoritarianism and the transformation of all social and economic relations and institutions to permit maximum individual freedom, self-expression, and spontaneity), the war would be just another changing of the guard, so familiar in Spanish history. Historically, Spanish anarchists had been concerned with changes in education and marriage relationships as means of social change. They opposed the authoritarian, patriarchal family, arguing that it was based on private property, on the father's ownership of his wife and children.1 They hoped to end the oppression of Spanish working-class women by ending formal marriage and substituting free alliances of individuals, and to eliminate prostitution by providing training programmes, medical facilities, and housing for the former prostitutes.2 In towns where the anarchists gained control, even for short periods, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they immediately attempted to abolish legal marriage, among other things.3 Again, in the first year of the Civil War, from July 1936 to the late spring of 1937, anarchists were able to put some of their theoretical ideas into practice. Visitors to anarchist collectives remarked on the efficiency of the communes. What most struck observers was the initial absence of oppressive bureaucracy in