Women and fiction in post-Franco Spain

Abstract

When the Franco dictatorship ended in 1975, the time was ripe for the revitalization of women's literature in Spain. Spain's transition to democracy led to a so-called boom in women's narrative, with the emergence of a new group of women writers who began to publish at that time: among them are Rosa Montero, Lourdes Ortiz, Soledad Puertolas, Marina Mayoral, Cristina Fernandez Cubas, Carme Riera, and Esther Tusquets. Still others such as Carmen Martin Gaite, Ana Maria Moix, and Montserrat Roig, who had already published during Francoism, started to write more self-consciously experimental works in the late 1970s, thus departing from the predominantly neorealist aesthetic of their own and other women's works in the earlier decades of the post-war period. Without attributing homogeneous characteristics to this group of women based on strictly chronological or historical criteria, it would not be inaccurate to claim that the literary techniques and preoccupations of post-Franco women writers generally constitute a break from the previous generation of writers. A brief overview of women’s social, political, and cultural history should serve to contextualize twentieth-century Spanish women’s literature and literary history. In Spain, the women’s movement not only arrived late, in comparison to other Western societies, but was also slow to develop within strictly women-centered, feminist organizations.