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The Rewards of Female Fascism in Franco's New State: The Recompensas Y of the Sección Femenina de la Falange, 1939–1945

2013; Routledge; Volume: 90; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14753820.2013.847159

1478-3428

Julia Biggane,

History of Education in Spain

AbstractThe Recompensas ‘Y’ (the decorations awarded to the Sección Femenina of the Falange (SF) members for their work before and during the Spanish Civil War) were part of the apparatus of medals and insignia in the New State's politics of reward. The ‘Y’ award documentation gives a greater sense of the diversity of early female Falangists’ lived experience than hitherto available, and adds to our understanding of pre-war female fascism. The documentation suggests the significance of the 1937 Unification of Nationalist forces under Franco in terms of gender history and the impact it had on SF members’ lives. It also allows us to nuance—and in places constructively problematize—the at times rather homogeneous, defensive later self-representations by SF members.Keywords: female fascismFalangeSección FemeninaSpanish Civil WarNew Stategender historyRecompensas ‘Y’ Notes* I gratefully acknowledge the generous assistance of The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland which awarded me a grant to consult the SF archives in the Real Academia de Historia in Madrid during the preparation of this article. I am also indebted to the archivists of the Academia, particularly Don Julio García González, Da Asunción Miralles de Imperial y Pasqual del Pobil, and Da Montserrat Calvo Rodríguez, for their advice, great helpfulness and efficiency.1 Real Academia de Historia (hereafter RAH), Archivo Documental de la Asociación Nueva Andadura (hereafter ADANA), Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Document 17, 09.03.1942. Where documents are dated, the date is provided at the first citation only.2 The expense of the decoration speaks to the comfortable economic status of many SF members: 90 ptas was a considerable sum at the time—in 1942, a copy of ABC newspaper cost 25 céntimos; a large loaf of bread less than 1 pta. Nevertheless, at least one member claiming hardship was permitted to pay by instalment (RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 2, 08.10.42).3 Kathleen Richmond, Women and Spanish Fascism: The Women's Section of the Falange 1934–1959 (London: Routledge, 2003), 40.4 In the early postwar years, there was an almost complete absence of accounts of first-hand experience by members who did not occupy the highest reaches of the Delegación Nacional in the material published by the SF. This is true even of the most divulgative and innocuous material. For example, in the organization's magazines, Medina and Revista Y, the various consultorios—specialized regular advice columns (on matters as diverse as marriage, graphology and even beekeeping) in which readers’ concerns or queries were addressed, would never include the reader's letter itself—only the answer, from which the question could be inferred, along with the reader's initials and place of residence. And there is little detailed chronicling of members’ pre-war or wartime experience in any of the SF publications, either from a first-hand perspective or otherwise. The only sustained account of the SF's activities from its formation in 1934 is the serialized ‘Historia de la Sección Feminina’ written by the organization's leader, Pilar Primo de Rivera and published in the Revista Y in fifteen instalments between March 1938 and May 1939. Towards the end of the history, there is incorporation of brief accounts by other members of the organization in different areas of Nationalist territory, but it is a highly controlled and limited plurality: there are no more than four such accounts, and all are by very senior regional leaders, at least one of whom, Ángela Ridruejo, was a longstanding friend of Pilar Primo de Rivera. Their accounts are entirely consonant with Primo's, and add little discursive variety or substantive difference of perspective. The overwhelming characteristic not just of this history, but of the representation of SF experience as a whole in its official discourse during the first decade of its existence is a striking univocity, partly a function of its dominance by a small number of tightly inter-connected senior women.5 This is not to denigrate such studies, which have been valuably reflexive and insightful about the limitations of their sources. The first histories of the SF to draw substantively on oral testimony did not begin to appear until the late 1990s, at least twenty years after the organization had been dissolved by the post-Franco state. The cadre of available interviewees was relatively small, and was composed largely of by then elderly women who had occupied senior positions in the organization over many years. They were an intensely loyal and not uncommonly defensive group, largely already known to each other. Many were accessed via the SF's civil-association successor, the Asociación Nueva Andadura (ANA), which, as Kathleen Richmond notes, exercised careful control of encounters with researchers. In addition, ANA had by this time recently published its own history of the organization—the Crónica de la Sección Femenina y su tiempo, and Inbal Ofer speculates that this collective project to reconstruct and preserve a particular, revindicative version of the organization's past ‘unified’ the personal memories of the members concerned. She notes that her interviewees expressed a strong desire to tell the SF's story ‘in their own words’ but also notes that ‘ “their own words” bore a suspicious resemblance to the “official version” [the Crónica]’. See Richmond, Women and Spanish Fascism, 129–35; Inbal Ofer, Señoritas in Blue: The Making of a Female Political Elite in Franco's Spain (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009), 8–10. See also the highly valuable discussion in Inmaculada Blasco Herranz, Armas femeninas para la contra-revolución: la Sección Femenina en Aragón 1936–1950 (Málaga: Univ. de Málaga, 1999), 16–19. The Crónica de la Sección Femenina y su tiempo (Madrid: Asociación de Nueva Andadura, 1992) was written collectively by former SF members under the direction of historian Luis Suárez Fernández.6 The period explored in this study begins with the year in which the ‘Y’ awards were first instituted (1939), and ends when the last substantial number of awards recognizing pre-war or wartime service was made (1945). ‘Y’ awards continued to be granted for exceptional service to the organization until the early 1970s.7 At the end of the war total SF membership was estimated to have been approximately 580,000 (from a pre-war 1936 figure of around 2,500, and an estimated size in 1937 of 60,000) (Ma Teresa Gallego Méndez, Mujer, Falange, Franquismo [Madrid: Taurus, 1983], 47, 73). The actual number of women receiving a decoration between 1939 and 1945 was much higher than 6,000, as the majority of ‘Y’ awards were collective, granted, for example, to a wartime laundry or nursing unit, which not unusually contained at least several dozen members, each of whom, if she fulfilled the length-of-service requirements, was then eligible to apply to be included in the award and so to receive her individual insignia. In the case of the collective awards, these were cloth badges to be sewn onto the members’ uniforms rather than the more elegant enamelled brooches described by the head of the Asesoría Jurídica above. Nevertheless, members were still expected to pay for them (in this case 6 ptas rather than 90).8 The original statutes set out the following criteria for the awards of an Y de oro and Y de plata thus:Se concedera la ‘Y’ bordada en oro, cuando por iniciativa personal se haya realizado un hecho, con sacrificio y alegría extraordinariamente demostrativo el elevado concepto que se tiene de la Patria y sea tendente a producir un relevante beneficio, para que así sirva de ejemplo a todos y de exponente ante la Historia del heroismo racial de la mujer española. […] Se concedera la ‘Y’ bordada en plata: cuando la afiliada sin estar comprendida en el artículo anterior, se demuestre plenamente que ha realizado un hecho singular, revelador del más alto concepto de la Patria y de la Falange.Cuando por la realización de un servicio ordenado por las Jerarquías del Partido su hubiese sufrido prisión antes y durante el Movimiento, sin haber decaído el espíritu ni haber realizado hecho alguno que comprometiese el honor de la Organización.Cuando en función de un arriesgado servicio activo, ordenado por las Jerarquías de la Organización se encontrase la muerte.En idéntico caso que el apartado precedente, cuando se sufriesen heridas graves, y durante la curación se continuase acreditando un excepcional espíritu y fe en la Falange. The statutes were amended in 1942, most notably removing the categories of death and serious injury as eligibility criteria: it seems that the SF had overestimated the extent of personal injury to its members during wartime service (see RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 7, Doc. 1, 01.05.1939, and Carpeta 8, Doc. 3, 09.03.1942). Throughout this study, now-archaic accentuation norms, as well as typographical errors, syntactical, accentuation and spelling mistakes have been left unaltered as long as they do not impede comprehension; any necessary alterations are indicated in square brackets.9 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 8, Doc. 3.10 Absent such a senior SF member, a senior male Falange member would write the report.11 Although an award did not entail state benefits and employment privileges in the way that the status of ex-combatiente did, article 15 of the amended statutes lays out that it brought with it ‘La preferencia para cumplir servicios de elección o de confianza y desempeñar cargos de la SF’ (RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 8, Doc. 2, 27.10.1939).12 See footnote 5.13 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 4, 19.09.1941.14 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 12, Doc. 253, 16.08.1939.15 See, for example, RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc 12, 03.05.1939, where a referee writes of a candidate: ‘la lucha fue doble: por un lado la persecución de los socialistas, y por otro la frialdad o el miedo que todos tenían, presionados por las amenazas marxistas unos, y porque otros miraban a la Falange como cosa de chicos o de locos’.16 Some of these are studied in detail below.17 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 17, 22.08.1940.18 Some applications contain simple spelling or syntactical mistakes; others are unable to maintain a formal third-person perspective, lapsing into and out of first-person narration.19 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 20, 01.05.1941.20 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 57. 24.06.1938.21 See Jo Labanyi, ‘Resemanticizing Feminine Surrender: Cross-Gender Identifications in the Writings of Spanish Female Fascist Activists’, in Women's Narrative and Fiction in Twentieth-Century Spain, ed. Ofelia Ferrán and Kathleen M. Glenn (New York/London: Routledge, 2002), 75–94; Nino Kebadze, ‘The Right to be Selfless and Other Prerogatives of the Weak in the Rhetoric of Sección Femenina’, Romance Quarterly, 55:2 (2008), 109–27.22 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc 20, undated. Where members’ names are already in the public domain (because they are well known through other studies of the SF, or because they appear in, or have themselves written, memoirs or biographies), this study has referenced them; the anonymity of all other members has been preserved.23 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 20. And indeed the initiative for which Viguri is best known—becoming the first female member of the SEU by enrolling under the name of Justino Viguri—was an act of audacity undertaken with the encouragement and co-operation of senior male members. This anecdote has been reproduced by Falange and SF members in several places; Viguri tells the story herself in her application.24 The fascist JONS party (Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista) merged with the Falange in 1934.25 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 17, Doc. 32. Date not recorded.26 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 17, Doc. 32.27 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 8, 11.03.1940.28 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 20.29 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 20.30 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 20. Viguri does not specify what these ‘servicios violentos’ were.31 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 20.32 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 20.33 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 8.34 Labanyi, ‘Resemanticizing Feminine Surrender’, 88.35 All the events described in Viguri's application end before July 1936; the leadership responsibilities described by Fórmica are all conferred on her before the war; Rosario Pereda's campaigning oratory takes place for the 1933 elections.36 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 3, 25.05.1935.37 Richmond, Women and Spanish Fascism, 7.38 Labanyi, ‘Resemanticizing Feminine Surrender’, 77–78.39 This practice was first officially acknowledged in Pilar Primo de Rivera's wartime ‘Historia de la Sección Femenina’ (see footnote 4), but was sanitized by sprightly illustrations of young women carrying fashionable bags to conceal the arms, or efficient housewives tidying away weapons into under-stair spaces or concealing them in blooming window boxes.40 But this opportunism may not wholly have been conditioned by its financial position: Sheelagh Ellwood has convincingly argued that opportunistic pragmatism was one of Falangism's most enduring features from its inception to its fragmentation in the mid–late 1970s (see Spanish Fascism in the Franco Era [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987]). And such pragmatism was not confined to the Spanish Falange, as scholars of other right-wing women's movements have noted (see, for example, Margaret Power, Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and Struggle against Allende 1964–1973 [Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State U. P., 2002]).41 Coincidentally, amongst these was membership of the ‘Y’ awards committee, responsible for adjudicating on the candidates’ applications examined in this study!42 See Mercedes Fórmica's memoirs, Pequeña historia de ayer, 2 vols (Barcelona: Planeta 1982–1984), II, Escucho el silencio (1984).43 Suárez Fernández, Crónica de la Sección Femenina, 76.44 Power, Right-Wing Women in Chile, 10.45 Victoria Lorée Enders, ‘Problematic Portraits: The Ambiguous Role of the Sección Femenina of the Falange’ in Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, ed. Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff (New York: State Univ. of New York Press, 1999), 375–97 (p. 386). Lorée Enders seems to have been the first scholar of the SF to have drawn on oral sources: her interviews were conducted in the late 1980s, though not published until a decade later.46 Hidden people ranged from Civil Guards to priests; objects from share certificates through arms to radio sets. See, for example, RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 12, Docs. 160 (date not recorded), 169 (09.10.1939), 232 (01.10.1939).47 See, for example, RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 12, Docs. 166 (15.09.1939), 181 (date not recorded), the unnumbered document between Docs. 192 & 193 (date not recorded), and 225 (date not recorded).48 See, for example, RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 12, Docs. 234 (date not recorded), 248, 29.09.1939.49 One Madrid member records the following: ‘sufrí varios registros de la policía roja, logrando no llegara a realizar los propósitos que en su vil corazón anidaban’ (RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 12, Doc. 153, 21.09.1939); another notes that ‘[p]ertenezco a una familia muy perseguida habiendo tenido también en mi casa a mi hermano político el cual fué sacado del mismo y asesinado por los rojos el día 21 de agosto de 1936’ (RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 12, Doc. 169, 09.10.1939).50 See, for example, the reference in Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (London: Harper, 2012), 261.51 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 12, 11.03.1940.52 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 12, 28.03.1941.53 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 12, Doc. 166.54 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 15, Doc. 47, 07.08.1940. Presumably the porter suspected her of trying to smuggle in prohibited items or disseminate information helpful to the enemy. The rest of the member's account suggests that this was not an unreasonable assumption.55 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 15, Doc. 47.56 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 15, Doc. 47.57 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 13, Doc. 47. 05.08.1939.58 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 15, number of document not recorded, 24.09.193959 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 17, Doc. 22, 29.05.1942.60 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 17, Doc. 21, 21.05.1942.61 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 17, Doc. 21. Undated.62 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 57.63 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 12, 23.04.1940.64 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 12, 03.05.1939.65 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 12, 23.04.1940.66 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 12.67 Richmond, Women and Spanish Fascism, 114.68 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 5, 31.10.1942.69 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 5.70 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 2. Date of letter not legible, but marked as received by the Delegación Nacional of the SF on 18.11.40.71 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 2. It is possible that it was her personal connection with José Antonio that gave this young woman the confidence to approach Pilar Primo de Rivera directly, and possibly that same connection ensured that she was subsequently awarded the ‘Y de plata’ she wanted.72 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 17, Doc 23, 03.05.1940. Like the violence in which Viguri was involved, this incident did not take place in the heat of war, but refers instead to an earlier period in 1936.73 RAH, ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 16, Doc. 12, 03.05.1939.74 See Pedro Laín Entralgo, Descargo de conciencia (Barcelona: Barral, 1976); Dionisio Ridruejo, Casi unas memorias (Barcelona: Planeta, 1976); Ellwood, Spanish Fascism in the Franco Era; Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain 1923–1977 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1999).75 A very small number of accounts appear only after the transition to democracy, and are written by the most elite or prominent former members. See Pilar Primo de Rivera, Recuerdos de una vida (Madrid: DYRSA, 1983) and Fórmica, Pequeña historia de ayer, Vol. I, Visto y vivido (1982) and Vol. II, Escucho el silencio (1984).76 See, for example, Ofer, Señoritas in Blue, 17–18; Richmond, Women and Spanish Fascism, 66–72.77 Ofer, Señoritas in Blue, 45–49. An earlier, excellent exploration of the unmarried status of SF members by Inmaculada Blasco Herranz had also framed its enquiry in terms of the opportunities and autonomy it offered members: see ‘Las mujeres de la Sección Femenina de Falange: sumision, poder y autonomía’, in Las mujeres y el poder: representaciones y prácticas de vida, ed. Ana I. Cerrada Jiménez and Cristina Segura Graíño (Madrid: Al-Mudayna/AEIHM, 2000), 253–68.78 The full text of the Fuero may be consulted at: (accessed 2 August 2013).79 RAH ADANA, Serie Azul, Carpeta 2, Circular 10 bis, 15.10.1938. Incidentally (or not), St Teresa was, famously, also revered by Franco. In co-opting the figure of the religious single woman, the SF also marked out a distinctive ground for itself in relation to the women's section of the civil association Acción Católica, which relied on the concept of the ‘madre social’ as the legitimizing model for its social activism.80 SF de la FET y de las JONS, Consejos nacionales (libro primero) (Madrid: SF de la FET y de las JONS, n.d.), 99.81 See Blasco Herranz, ‘Las mujeres de la Sección Femenina de Falange’; Ofer, Señoritas in Blue, Chapter 3; and Celia Valiente Fernández, ‘La liberalización del regimen franquista: la ley de 22 de Julio de 1961 sobre derechos políticos, profesionales y de trabajo de la mujer’, Historia Social, 31 (1998), 45–65, which provides a wider perspective than Ofer's account.