The vanguard of the Sección Femenina: gender and emotions in the creation of a mythic narrative (1934–39)

The Vanguard of the Sección Femenina: Gender and Emotions in the Creation of a Mythic Narrative (1934-1939) BEGOÑA BARRERA LÓPEZ Departamento de Historia Contemporánea Universidad de Sevilla https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5574-8479 Esta es la versión aceptada del manuscrito publicado por Taylor & Francis en Hispanic Research Journal, en el volumen 21, 2020 - número 2. Disponible en: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682737.2019.1673061 The Vanguard of the Sección Femenina: Gender and Emotions in the Creation of a Mythic Narrative (1934-1939) Abstract: The objective of this paper is to examine the collective identity constructed by the Sección Femenina of FET-JONS (SF) in the period before it became the organization responsible for educating Spanish women. Both gender and emotions are the categories used to examine two aspects of the discourse that these Falangist women constructed: the mythification of their origin as the female Falangist vanguard and the shaping of a female paradigm compatible with active involvement in the Civil War. This approach will show how this short period was crucial to the invention of an ‘identity canon’ that formed the basis on which the model of womanhood that the organization imposed during the dictatorship was set up. Key words: Sección Femenina de FET-JONS, Second Spanish Republic, Spanish Civil War, Femininity, Gender, Emotions. La vanguardia de la Sección Femenina. Género y emociones en la creación de un relato mítico (1934-1939) Resumen: El propósito de este trabajo es explorar la identidad colectiva que la Sección Femenina de FET-JONS construyó en el tiempo previo a su conversión en la organización encargada de la formación de las españolas. Las categorías de género y emociones serán empleadas para analizar el discurso que las falangistas confeccionaron en relación a dos aspectos: la mitificación de su origen como vanguardia femenina y la elaboración de un paradigma de mujer compatible con la implicación activa en la Guerra Civil. Esta aproximación permitirá comprobar cómo este breve periodo de tiempo resultó fundamental para la invención de un canon identitario sobre el que se erigiría el modelo de feminidad que la organización impondría durante la dictadura. Palabras clave: Sección Femenina de FET-JONS, Segunda República, Guerra Civil, Feminidad, Género, Emociones. The vast majority of the historiographical studies of the Sección Femenina (henceforth SF), the Women’s Section of the FET-JONS [Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista], an organization responsible for educating and training women during the Franco regime until the Movement was dissolved in April 1977, have selected the period of the dictatorship as their object of analysis.1 During this four-decade period, the SF wielded more political power than any of the other women’s groups that were recognized by the regime. In consequence, the years between 1934—when the Women’s Section of the Falange was constituted—and December 1939—when the Decree entrusting it with ‘the political and social education of Spanish women’ was promulgated—remain relatively unexplored territory. These years, however, turn out to be absolutely essential for understanding the later development of the Falangist organization. The objective of this article, therefore, is to examine how this small group of women who gathered around Pilar Primo de Rivera after the foundation of Falange Española gradually shaped its early administrative structures and political hierarchies, while at the same time starting, in an intuitive way, to develop its own discourse on the identity of Falangist women, one in 1 Among the works that deal with various aspects of the history of the organization, those by the following authors stand out: Gallego Méndez (2011), Sánchez López (1990), Richmond (2004), Ofer (2010), Rodríguez López (2010) and Marías Cadenas (2011). Except for the first one, these works have mainly concentrated on the post-war years, whereas this article analyses the pre-war and war years. which the intertwining of emotional precepts with gender guidelines created an increasingly dense and structured existential code. Finding out how this network of meanings about gender-emotional difference was generated is a task that historiography has not yet addressed. It is nevertheless essential, not only for discovering the internal dynamics that helped mould this original collective of female Falangist leaders into a cohesive group identity, but also for being able to gain a deeper understanding of the discourse on femininity that the Falangist women went on to develop during the dictatorship, since it is precisely in the web of attributes and definitions woven by the original SF during the years of the Republic and the Civil War that the roots of this discourse are to be found. This article makes original and innovative use of both the history of emotions and gender theory, two proven theoretical tools able to dismantle all those narratives that seek to naturalize sexual or affective attributes. Whereas gender theory helps take apart the fiction that all individuals categorized as women (or men) have static, unchanging female (or masculine) natures, the history of the emotions challenges the view that feelings are an invariable dimension, separate from those sociocultural circumstances that we nevertheless know underlie their expression and help us to understand them.2 From the vast field of theory that this second historiographical approach offers, this article uses specifically the categories of ‘emotive’ and ‘emotional community’. The first concept refers to the speech acts used by individuals to express their emotional experiences, 2 The lines of study developed since the so-called “emotional turn” in historiography, which occurred at the change of millennium have been summarized in Plamper (2015). utterances that are somewhere between the performative and the constative and help the one who utters them to manage, explore or shape their own feelings (Reddy 2002: 100– 102). The concept of the emotional community refers to the shared ‘system of feelings’ by means of which a group of people define their own emotions and those of others, the emotional ties that bind them and the modes of sentimental expression that they encourage, deplore, recover or set aside (Rosenwein 2002: 821-845; 2007). Using these theoretical tools and starting from the premises outlined above, the pages that follow cover the period from the foundation of the SF until the peak of the organization’s power in the new regime at the end of the Civil War. This period is divided into two: the first deals with the period before war broke out, when the Falangist women started to make themselves known and to represent themselves as part of a political elite, defined by its behaviour and by its experiments with the expression of a characteristic set of emotions; the second, begins with the outbreak of war and concludes with its end, and deals with the period when the organization gained control of the women in the rear-guard and hence the authority to interpret the identity that these women would acquire under its supervision. In this new scenario, the women of the SF occupied a hegemonic position that gave them the opportunity to go beyond identifying themselves as a small exclusive group and to acquire the privilege of representing others outside the group. The main issues that will be dealt with in the following pages include: the set of cultural operations that were set in motion at different points in time; the transfer of characteristics from what seemed at first only to apply to the model National Syndicalist Woman, but ended up applying also to the ideal Spanish woman; and the way in which Falangist women gained access to the true exercise of power by drawing up and imposing emotional and attitudinal standards. A community of women founders In the years before the Falangist SF became a mass organization, the discourse of the first group of Falangist women linked to the party concentrated less on a complex account of the meaning of the term ‘woman’ than on defining what functions and attitudes were expected of the National Syndicalist woman. Hence the few documents produced by the women’s branch of the party during those months were issued, as one might expect, by the organization itself and were aimed at their members for the purpose of defining the competences of these women, and thereby their identity. The two programmatic texts with which the organization started out as one more branch of the Falange in 1934—the first Manifesto and the first SF statutes—were written with this purpose in mind. Together with its Oath (which was the same as the one sworn by their male comrades), these documents formed the conceptual pillars on which the first model of the Falangist woman was constructed. The Falangist Oath, attributed by Francisco Bravo (1940:18–19) to Sánchez Mazas, could be found everywhere in the early years of the party, since it was printed on every membership card. Its bombastic rhetoric, typical of these writings, included the key attitude that connected members and those close to its political cause: the constant spirit of service to their idea of nation, expressed through respect for hierarchy and joy in the fulfilment of this duty. The women in the Falange swore their loyalty in the same terms as their male colleagues in the party, that is, by expressing duty towards their country [Patria] and highlighting the joyful spirit of sacrifice that identified the Falangist, although the oath said nothing about them as women that distinguished them from their male colleagues. Indeed, as this article seeks to show, the first element in the set of qualities that comprised the ideal Falangist woman did not come until they were given a place of their own in the party and their first responsibilities to it were put in writing. Whereas the 1934 Manifesto, written by José Antonio Primo de Rivera himself, had authorized the participation of Falangist women in certain rather vaguely defined party duties, such as those associated with spreading the word, disseminating propaganda and setting a good example, the Statutes of December specified the responsibilities of the SF, assigning it the twofold task of disseminating official policy and helping militants and their families. This provided a means of transitioning from a militancy that was in name only to active involvement in party affairs, in other words, as far as social mobilization and the conquest of spaces and activities that were new to these women. This move into the public arena by the Falangist women was certainly not especially exceptional in the context of the parties of the Right in the Second Republic, since several women’s collectives during this period initiated processes of public protest and defence of their social projects under the aegis of more or less apolitical associations and conservative parties. In the years of the Republic, Catholic women militants had already opposed the government’s secular measures, resorting to a kind of public political activity that identified them in a way that was quite at odds with the one that they themselves proposed for all other women (Blasco Herranz 2003; Arce Pinedo 2008; Ortega López 2010). It is highly likely that that Catholic mobilization and the subsequent restructuring of gender parameters served as a model of behaviour that gave Falangist women an opportunity to act in the political sphere with the (always relative) excuse that there were precedents that validated (also relatively) their initiatives in support of the Falange. It seems equally plausible that the rhetoric of exceptional and provisional circumstances employed by the Catholic women to try and justify the obvious contradiction between what they practised and what they preached also served as a stock of ready-made ideas that the Falangist women could draw upon to support their arguments. Hence, the demands of the Catholic women to be identified as ‘patriots’ and ‘anti-Republican’, along with interpretations of their activity as a ‘necessary evil’ triggered by the temporary need to take to the streets to support a return to social and religious order, constituted a precedent and most probably an (unacknowledged) model of legitimation for Falangist women. This, at least, seemed to be what was concluded from the first part of the 1934 Statutes of the SF (Sección Femenina de FE y de las JONS, 1934). Under the heading of ‘Ends’, these stipulated first, that Falangist women would act patriotically by ‘stimulating in the Spanish Woman love for the Patria, the State and the glorious traditions of our Nation’, secondly, that their activity was in no way comparable to that of the male leaders because the women would be entrusted with ‘providing support for the National Syndicalist militants in the fight against anti-Spain’, and finally, that their involvement was justified by the objective of ‘constructing the necessary solid foundation that only women can create in all spheres of life’. A similar argument would be used again in the 1937 Statutes (Sección Femenina de FE y de las JONS 1937), which referred to the incontrovertible rhetoric of the complementarity of the sexes and also arguing in the last resort, not so much in favour of authorizing women to join the movement, as underlining that their active involvement would be aimed at supplying the extra touch of ‘femininity’ that would complete the political project. In short, retaining the rhetoric of femininity was indispensable for balancing, or at least controlling, the discourse surrounding certain practices that brought the Falangist women into the political terrain, and was further elaborated with a set of arguments that often shared much in common with those of other women mobilized by conservative associations and parties during the Republic. Apart from this shared affinity and the debt they owed to other kinds of women’s social action, granting women Falangists a place within the Party, even if a subaltern one, had a decisive effect on the shaping of this group of women as a community and a female political elite. Hence, even if the birth of the SF as a political elite and its positioning as an entity in its own right in Franco’s Spain was a direct consequence of the Decree of Unification in 1937 (Ofer 2010), it seems undeniable, nevertheless, that ignoring the Republican years in the search for explanations about the formation of the Falangist women as an elite could lead to overlooking many events that became firm pillars on which a shared identity could be constructed when they were subsequently experienced and reinterpreted by the organization itself. This act of service that Pilar Primo de Rivera referred to not only justified the sacrifice but transformed it into a source of satisfaction at being able to use it to demonstrate their commitment to the political enterprise. For those male militants who found themselves caught up in, or who actively caused, violent clashes with leftist groups, that proof of devotion to the Falange had meant death. Pilar Primo de Rivera, the National Falangist Women’s Delegate, recalled it as follows: ‘And do you not remember, fellow comrades, when our first men fell, killed on the street corners? … Those hundred comrades who fell with such joy and eagerness before the 18th July’ (Primo de Rivera 1942: 3). So, if their male companions had surrendered even their lives ‘with joy’, Falangist women had to accept the risks of the tasks they had been given to do in the same frame of mind: ‘and how joyful that first danger that the Falange exposed us to turned out to be’, commented Pilar Primo de Rivera, highlighting once again the link between fearlessness, sacrifice and enthusiasm (1938, vol. 1: 35). The feeling of joy was prompted by the discourse. To use Reddy’s term, it became an ‘emotive’ that set out to regulate the emotional life of the Falangist women, inducing them to express, and so produce, this type of joyfulness as part of their life experience. Above all, however, it was an emotional code: Its roots lay, on the one hand, in the Falangist understanding of individuals and their destinies as something extraordinary, which had meaning beyond the immediate act, and, on the other, in the precepts of gender pertaining to commitment, self-sacrifice and voluntary action that were also defining the essence of womanhood in this early Falangist discourse. In other words, joy was not an isolated emotion, but an element that profoundly resignified any activity that these women undertook—especially those that were linked to sacrifice—to the point that it became one of their distinctive characteristics. In this context, the brave, enthusiastic Falangist women began to form a group that was defined precisely by this singular way of facing political activity, and consequently life, during the years of the Republic. Even though it was only in 1937 that the organization would find itself in a sufficiently privileged position to assume a tutelary role over those Spanish women who were being left behind in the territory seized by the insurgent forces, the pre-war period was also a time of a burgeoning shared identity and elite consciousness: And the struggle went on, growing every day. Nobody understood us. For some, we were ‘crazy Falangist brats’; for others—what a shame!—‘murderers…’ Clever, learned men, versed in all the social and human sciences, maintained that we were nobodies, that we wouldn’t amount to anything, that we were doomed to fail… If only someone had told them that those little girls, so fragile, so ignorant and so simple, many of them almost children, with their limited experience, and in the bloom of youth, knew more about Spain and the world than those men did, and that their hearts had sensed so deeply what worthy but worn-out brains were incapable of understanding. The old times of struggle, hand in hand, with spirits high! In all our toils, we women marched smiling, steadfast, self-assured, without hesitation or fear, conscious of our mission (De Lara 1938, vol. 5: 24). The Falangist women presented themselves as victims of social exclusion, caused by the fact that other groups were ignorant of a ‘truth’ that they, on the other hand, could see with such clarity and foresight. They transformed what was, in reality, the outlawing of the Falange and the arrest of its principal leaders for violent crimes and possession of weapons into a palpable demonstration of the special mission and superiority of the political group that they belonged to. Consequently, consigning them to the margins of the political chessboard (in terms of legality, because it should not be forgotten that party membership increased after these events) provided the Falangist women with an opportunity to show that they were worthy of recognition as militants, characterized by ‘a joy and confidence in victory that only those of the Falange were capable of attaining when everything turned against them’ and that they were guided by the principle they had learned from the founder of the Falange: ‘Revolution is the task of a resolute minority impervious to discouragement’ (Sección Femenina de FET y de las JONS 1951: 14). In this way, the events that preceded the outbreak of the war were resignified and transformed into elements that bound them together and created an elite consciousness which, even if it did not have a counterpart in a context of real political power, laid the foundations of the Sección femenina identity in the post-war period: ‘They [the men] were incapable of understanding those things that were destined only for the chosen, and that was because their hearts were full of duplicity. And they treated you as silly women’ (Primo de Rivera 1938, vol. 3: 35). Nevertheless, ‘from that day on, we realized that that [group of women] would always be a magnificent Sección Femenina’ (Primo de Rivera 1938, vol. 9: 26). Women at war In the course of the three-year Civil War, the SF ceased to be a small group at the service of the party and became the most powerful women’s organization in Franco’s Spain. When the SF was granted the monopoly of organizing women for the rearguard in July 1937, the organization not only deployed its best resources in promoting entities that depended directly upon it, such as the Social Service,7 or in involving its members in institutions such as prisons and isolation hospitals, but also devoted its efforts to keeping a tight grip on the discourse on femininity and their differential attributes with respect to the model of masculinity being constructed in parallel. It was then that the issue of women taking part in the war (and the significance of this participation) took on special importance for the Falangist women. When the conflict broke out, the organization had 2,500 female members distributed across the eighteen provinces in which it was represented. This figure gradually increased over the following months as new Falangist women joined the work in hospitals behind the lines, in laundries, orphanages, and so on, so that, by 1939, according to official figures, the SF had some 580,000 female members, whose main reason for joining had been to help the war effort (Sección Femenina de FET y de las JONS 1951: 15-20). This made it all but impossible, or at least not exactly practicable, for the organization to develop a discourse of its own that ignored the new link that was being created between the notions of ‘woman’ and ‘war’. Hence, conscious that it was 7 During the war, Mercedes Sanz Bachiller promoted the creation of a women’s “Social Service” (Cenarro 2005; Orduña Prada 1996). After Sanz Bachiller fell from grace, the Social Service was taken over by the SF and ratified by decree on 28 December 1939. This Social Service became one of the key instruments (though not the only one) available to the SF for the training of Spanish women. necessary to justify, as well as promote, women’s mobilization, the Falangists used the pages of their official organ to develop a complex set of arguments that interpreted the activities of women in the war as a proof of patriotism that was compatible with true femininity. The organization tried to demonstrate that this form of patriotism had historical points of reference, that it was guided by contemporary models and antimodels, and that it was a way of experiencing and being part of the nationalist project. As far as historical models were concerned, Víctor de la Serna’s verdict was that ‘in Spain, women have always taken part in war and in a great variety of ways’, and after clarifying that it was not his intention to ‘deliberately refer to their specific pious mission as mothers and housewives to heal the wounded, pick up the children and do the soldiers’ laundry’ (1938, vol. 4: 6), he listed the three patriotic duties of Spanish women in times of war: ‘To work, pray, and fight. Work to keep the house in order; pray for the soldier of the faith and his victory. Pray for his soul if the soldier perished. And finally, to fight when all was lost. These are the three phases of women in the Spanish War’ (8). The argument of exceptionality, which had been used in the past as an excuse to justify women’s mobilization in times of peace, proved once more to be a useful discursive device to support a practice that was already being implemented and needed to be legitimized with a view to appealing to those women that they hoped to attract to the Falangist cause. It was, furthermore, reinforced by the paradigm of the warrior woman as represented by all the military heroines mentioned by De la Serna: the Amazons, the women of Orihuela who saved the city from Abdalacid’s siege in the eighth century, Joan of Arc, Isabella the Catholic, María Pacheco, Catalina de Erauso, and the women of 2 May 1808. References to these latter women, the women who joined the struggle, weapons in hand in the ‘heroic defence of Madrid on 2 May’ became a commonplace in the imaginary that the SF was constructing during those years. The nineteenth-century War of Independence has been one of most powerful myths in the construction of Spanish nationalism, and both sides in the Civil War of 1936 found ways to exploit the parallel with the cause against the French in their discourse (Álvarez Junco 2004); the heroines, Agustina de Aragon among them, became common devices used to foster a patriotic identification of the present cause with the past one (Romeo Mateo 2015; Ucelay-Da Cal 2009). The SF was part of this trend as it exploited, to its own advantage, the alleged similarity between the heroines of 2 May and the women on the side of the coup d’état. Thus, they appealed to the memory of that Madrid ‘with its selfless women who died in service, sacrificing themselves for their country, with its legendary soldiers and captains, its traditional, hard-working artisans, its joyful but highly virtuous women in the Christian tradition’ (Salaya 1939, vol. 15: 7). It was obvious that the qualities chosen for the ‘historical’ description of those ‘besieged women’ bore a close resemblance to the service, self-sacrifice, grace and devotion that had characterized that first emotional community of Falangist women, and that character would reappear as the ideal temperament to which that those involved in the war effort would aspire to. This retrospective identification was revealed when recounting ‘the grace’ with which the matrons resisted in 1808: One of the youngest, Manuela Malasaña, fought and died beside her father. Clara Rey, fought and died beside her husband and their three children. […] The great manliness of the Second of May was anointed from the first moment by the grace of the chulapas [Madrid women in traditional dress], by the maternal accent of the full-blooded Madrid female (Botín Polanco 1939, vol. 16: 26-27). 8 The same spirit of collective self-sacrifice that appeared as the best guarantee of Falangist womanhood was also attributed to the nineteenth-century women, those ‘sculpted for ever at the moment of their death and sacrifice, [who] chose the best of sexes. They perished in holy war, a ritual death, and did so with modesty and in obscurity, just as their lives as companions to man had been’ (Serrano 1942). The Falangist women resorted once again to attributes like grace, sentiment and modesty, which figured prominently in the history of their discourse, to show that masculine (‘virile’) actions could pass for feminine ones, as long as they were based on certain attitudinal and emotional principles when they were performed. Using the same line of reasoning, the SF’s insistence on looking for associations between the events of 1808 and the contemporary situation also led it to trace the ancestors of their members in search of family ties that would connect them directly to the heroines of 2 May. With this in mind, they rediscovered the figure of the Countess of Bureta, who was described as a ‘heroine, along with Agustina of Aragon in 8 A study of the figure of Manuela Malasaña in Peyrou (2009, 155–174). Zaragoza’ and represented—according to the Falangist women—‘the woman of nobility in the struggle against the French invader’. Immediately after these statements, it was claimed that: ‘our comrade Marichu Bureta [is] a descendant of the famous heroine’ (Ferrari Billoch 1941, vol. 40: 15). The interest of the SF in establishing a connection between the action and subjectivity of these women in the past and those who would have to fight on its side was a matter of public knowledge, not only because, as in this last example, their statements were based on life stories, supposedly with documents that proved a genetic relationship, but also because their account looked for ways, at every turn, to project the identitarian expectations that they had in the present onto the past, thereby constructing an idealized precedent that would serve as a guide for the future. This operation, which Scott calls a ‘fantasy echo’, enabled them to construct a transhistorical genealogy between those ‘warrior maidens’ actively involved in the war who returned to the established order when it was over without challenging it, and the women who were in their charge in the present, of whom it was being required that they participate based on the exceptional circumstances (Scott 2001). Another of the premises most used by those who helped to shape this discourse about women’s mobilization was that involvement in relief and welfare activities in the rear-guard would help transform women into useful individuals for the new society. The dimension of moral improvement appeared in those arguments that praised the active participation of women in the Franco campaign, especially those who had remained in Republican territory collaborating with clandestine networks that supported the Nationalist faction. Those women epitomized the transformation that was hoped for: What has come to be known as frivolity […] appeared to remove all possibility that they would be ready for the hard work and difficult situations that staying in the accursed zone would impose. And, yet, the transformation was easy, the habit became tolerable, and they were successful in their endeavour until the time came –almost three years, in the waiting– for the war to end. (Casares 1938, vol. 16: 34-35). The contrast between the trivial functions of women in the past and the important destiny to which they were now called—and which the war would give them access to—, was in short, one of the main pillars of Falangist discourse, and Y magazine took every opportunity to establish it as such in its editorials: ‘[Spain] no longer wants to see the frivolity of the well-to-do woman lost in the sterile pursuit of being concerned only with herself. Spain wants and needs joyful, determined women who will respond to the call of duty at all times’ (Ros 1938, vol. 13: 5-6).9 It was also stressed that ‘never were there women—in any war—so close to the firing-line to dress recently opened wounds’; women who ‘wash, scrub, cook and tend to the sick with the same joy with which they would go to the cinema, the bar, the tennis club or the dance’. In other words, the satisfaction that they used to derive from capricious activities, they would now find in collaborating with the Franco cause (‘Falange Femenina’ 1938, vol. 11: 28). Based on statements like these, joy returned to the discourse of the SF to consolidate its 9 One of the attitudes that the SF battled against most during the dictatorship was female frivolity. In her books, Carmen Martín Gaite recalled how the Falangist organization harshly censored romantic novels and American films on the grounds that they were “frivolous” (Martín Gaite 1987). In the 1940s, National Syndicalist femininity was often contrasted with the frivolity of those women given to “living in worlds of fiction” (Anon. 1941). position as an intrinsically feminine quality. Whereas, in the past, this attribute had only identified a small community of women committed to the Falange cause, henceforth, it was an emotional characteristic required of all Spanish women mobilized for the war effort. Just as common as the discourse on which attributes were appropriate for Spanish women involved in the war effort with Franco’s army was the line of argument about the women who were collaborating with or fighting alongside the enemy. The image of the Republican (or modern) woman was an absolutely essential ingredient for creating a collective emotional identity, serving as a negative otherness with respect to the one on which the Falangist discourse on femininity was built. Given that it would have been completely absurd to criticize the presence of the women in the enemy rearguard, any texts published in this vein concentrated less on taking issue with the activity of the women on the Republican front, and more on accusing them of being evil, masculinized, and Marxists. So, while the war was on, the SF launched defamatory messages in articles that defined Republican women as ‘harpies who surpassed the males in sacrilege and made a constant practice of mannish emulation and Marxist blasphemy’ or described them as ‘foulmouthed militia women in dungarees, with rifles […] attracted only by a clumsy thirst for revenge, their hearts devoid of ideals, where there was never any room for pity’ (Casares 1938, vol. 16: 34). These accusations were used to denigrate both women combatants and female intellectuals and politicians involved in the Republican project, who were often blamed for having promoted a