Those anonymous and free women

In certain periods of recent history, the role of some groups has been as important as it is unknown. During periods of war, that anonymity has been even greater, passing through history so on tiptoe that in most cases it has never been recognized. In the case of women, it has been even more evident and clamorous.

The Spanish Civil War was a sample of this. Women suffered the consequences of the war as a direct witness, although the vast majority in the background. While men were mobilized to join the front lines, in towns and cities, women were left in charge not only of supporting families, but also of houses, land, livestock, shops, and a long etcetera. They became the quietest rearguard.

In the midst of this warlike panorama, an ideological movement arises which was fully in force between April 1936 and February 1939. It continued the path previously initiated by the National Labor Confederation (CNT), in defense of gender equality. The movement was organized under the name of Free women, in order for its members to develop their capacities and political struggle. According to the writer Martha Ackelsberg, author of the book "Free women. Anarchism and the struggle for the emancipation of women » (Virus, Barcelona, ​​1991)

[su_quote] «What differentiated them from other women's groups, such as communists or anti-fascists, was that their main objective, even in the middle of the war, was the empowerment of women, not just their mobilization in activities to support the war effort. They stressed that the participation of women in the labor market should not be a temporary change, due to the necessities of war, but a more permanent change. " [/ su_quote]

A feminism with identity

The name comes from the monthly magazine with the same name, whose first issue was published on May 20, 1936 and which was founded two years earlier by Amparo Poch y Gascón, Lucía Sánchez Saornil and Mercedes Comaposada. That publication, written under pseudonyms by and for women, served as a spokesperson for the Federation of Free Women that claimed the defense of working women. While its objectives might seem surprising for the time (the emancipation of women from the triple slavery to which they had been subjected: slavery of ignorance, slavery as a woman and sexual slavery), the Federation believed that, through education and professional training, working women achieved their rights in the scope of a libertarian training.

The best definition is made by themselves in number 1 of Mujeres Libres magazine:

[su_quote] «This is already more than feminism. Feminism and masculinism are two terms of a single proportion; (…) The exact expression: integral humanism. Feminism was killed by the war by giving women more than they asked for by brutally throwing them into forced male substitution. Feminism that sought its expression outside of the feminine, trying to assimilate strange virtues and values ​​that do not interest us; what we want is another feminism, more substantive, from the inside to the outside, expression of a way, of a nature, of a diverse complex compared to the complex and masculine expression and nature. " [/ su_quote]

[su_note note_color = »# f4f4f4 ″]

Automotive training

In order to disseminate the ideological project and carry it out, schools, institutes, conference cycles, special courses, etc. are established, aimed at achieving the greatest possible training of women. These programs included classes to eradicate ignorance and illiteracy, industrial and commercial apprenticeships, as well as awareness groups designed to give them the knowledge and confidence they would need to participate as full citizens in that society.

Already in 1938, in the mouths of the founders of Mujeres Libres claims such as "To equal work, equal salary" y "Men at the helm, women at work", the latter one of its most emblematic slogans. In October of that year, the Federation had more than 20.000 members and 170 local sections throughout the country, which did not charge any fees. Also in that same year, the magazine stopped going out after a short life of 14 issues.

The path taken by Mujeres Libres was opposed. It was argued that a woman's proper role was to be a mother and to offer support to her husband at home. Matilde Piller wrote in 1934 that «One cannot be a good mother and be a woman at the same time ... Perhaps one can be an intellectual and a woman at the same time, but a good mother? Do not". Other dissenting voices against the movement claimed that such organizations could undermine the principles of the anarchist movement, which was created to promote an egalitarian society where men and women could work together.

[/ su_note]

[su_note note_color = »# f4f4f4 ″]

Despite everything, as has already been verified, the movement is growing strongly in Madrid and Barcelona, ​​a city in which it is known as Women's Cultural Group. In September 1936 both groups merged under the name of Free Women's Association, diversifying the work between the two cities. In the House of the Working Woman of Barcelona collective canteens are established, driving and mechanics courses are organized, among others, and food is sent to an increasingly besieged Madrid. In the capital, meanwhile, classes are given to train women as tram drivers and the so-called School of Drivers is opened, whose main objective was for women to cover the health services of the rear.

From the classrooms of the CNT transport union academy women trained in driving and mechanics came out, whose training allowed them to take charge of transport vehicles that rolled around the city and their maintenance, almost handmade, in the few workshops that were still operating.

[/ su_note]

Forced into exile

However, the war began to cause the exile of many of the members of the movement. Some of them continued to maintain contact outside of Spain, and published several issues of a magazine called Free Women in Exile. The organization was doomed to disappear in 1939, with the end of the war. With regard to its founders, their lives passed outside of Spain without knowing in some cases details of their activities. Amparo Poch y Gascón went into exile to France, where he practiced medicine in Toulouse, treating Spanish patients. In addition, he organized free courses (run by the CNT in exile) by correspondence on Childcare, Human Anatomy and Physiology. He died on April 15, 1968 in Toulouse.

1- From left to right: Amparo Poch y Gascón, Lucía Sánchez Saornil and Mercedes Comaposada
2- Several women put their shoulders together to move a truck (Courtesy of ABC)

Lucía Sánchez Saornil also went into exile to France at first but, to avoid her deportation, she returned to Madrid in 1942 where she was in hiding until 1954, when she traveled to Valencia. There, commissioned by a dealer, he devoted himself to painting pictures of well-known artists until his death on June 2, 1970. He never returned to journalistic activities.

Mercedes Comaposada went into exile in Paris, where she lived with her partner the sculptor Lobo under the protection of Picasso. He tried to make a book, after Franco's death, on Mujeres Libres. She requested the collaboration of the veterans to send her everything they remembered by letter. He came to write a manuscript that, along with the documentation, disappeared after his death in Paris on February 11, 1994.

Seventy-five years after the end of the movement, the vast majority of women in it have passed away. Their work has not yet been institutionally recognized.

Evelyn Hutchins' Testimony

Parallel to the Free Women movement, American, British and Australian volunteers arrive in Spain to collaborate, during the Civil War, with their Republican colleagues in relief tasks from fields other than battlefields.

The North American case is the one that has had the most study in subsequent decades. In 1936, the American Office to Help Spanish Democracy was created in New York (through the American Medical Bureau or AMB), integrated into the Abraham Lincoln International Brigade. On January 16, 1937, 116 people left New York, of which a minimum of sixty women were counted: 46 nurses, 10 laboratory technicians or assistants, two administrator-interpreters, a driver and a doctor. Most were single, aged between 21 and 49 years old, and with a minimum experience of between five and fifteen years in the tasks they were going to perform.

Evelyn Hutchins was one of those women. Born in Snohomish, Washington, in 1910, she arrived in Spain in April 1937 in the third group of the AMB.Expert in driving all types of vehicles, at first she was rejected to perform those jobs considered as masculine due to her small and fragile physical appearance. Finally he achieved his purpose, and began driving ambulances, but according to the needs he transported, in all kinds of vehicles, ammunition, provisions or troops.

For her extremely cheerful and jovial manner, she became known on all fronts, places where she met women who were beginning to perform tasks as drivers and mechanics. Hutchins emphasized, in an interview granted in 1938 to the American journalist Lelan Stowe for the Harper's Magazine the task of two drivers among many others: the Canadian Jean Watt and the Spanish Soledad, a twenty-year-old who drove eleven months during the war until she became part of the medical staff in a hospital in Tarragona.

[su_note note_color = »# e9e9e9 ″]

Some extraordinary girls

Evelyn recounted, in an excerpt from her interview titled by Stowe as Evelyn the Truck-driver: An American girl with the Spanish Armies, the meeting he had in Reus with a group of Spanish mechanics apprentices. The paragraph relates perfectly his admiration for these women:

[su_quote] «I have found some extraordinary Spanish girls. There are many in Reus. They are very young and very strong and they learn to be a mechanic in the repair garage.

They are greasers, you know. Their arms and overalls are covered in grease, but you would have to see their pride, dignity, and bearing. It's exciting just to see them so focused, helping to get engines, change wheels and clean spark plugs. If I break my leg and can't drive, I'll see if I can't do something similar. What a difference between the way these Spanish women walk and that of the normal girls in our country! They all have so much… elegance in bearing. And you see it in their eyes. »[/ Su_quote]

Evelyn Hutchins passed away from cancer in July 1982, at the age of 72.

[/ su_note]

Women at the forefront also in the United States

Also in other countries there were women's collective movements influenced by a war conflict. Without departing from the subject that has occupied us, we will only mention an example similar to the one that occurred in Spain that, although born a decade later, had a lot of influence in the aeronautical industry. This fact, albeit belatedly, was finally recognized and valued by the North American government.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which led to the entry of the United States into World War II, the lack of men to pilot airplanes was soon evident. The factories increased the production of new devices that were destined for the different fronts, but first they had to be transferred from the factories to the conflict sites and those that had received damage but were still in a position to fly and be repaired to return. to their destinations.

That function was handled by the W (Women Airforce Service Pilots, formerly WAFS, Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron), an organization created by the initiative of two women pilots, Jacqueline Jackie Cochran and Nancy Harkness Love, in the summer of 1941. Both created the foundations of what would become the civil service of the «Ferry pilots» that would be in force until 1944, year of the dismantling of the WASP. In that year, a total of 915 women ended their engagement, and 38 lost their lives in that engagement. They never participated in combat operations.

On July 1, 2009, President Barak Obama and the United States Congress awarded WASP the Congressional Gold Medal. A year later, the 300 survivors received this Medal, and public recognition of the task carried out more than six decades ago.