‘The Falange Changed Our Way of Being Completely’ 1 : Women and Gender Identity in Spanish Fascism

Abstract

Women's and gender history has broadened our knowledge of the Franco dictatorship by incorporating new perspectives and categories of analysis. The Women's Section of the Falange, a topic that has attracted progressively greater attention since the 1990s, has been analyzed mainly as a mechanism of female subordination and as a differentiated sphere for women's agency. This dual approach follows to a great extent the ground rules established in ongoing debates on other European experiences of fascism. This article intends to offer ways of surmounting some dichotomies (e.g., subordinated/emancipated, victims/perpetrators) that have underpinned the analysis of women during the dictatorship. Accordingly, an attempt will be made to explore how the Falangists constructed a collective subjectivity from their own notions of their political culture – Spanish fascism – and a specific war experience that had shaped them as subjects. And, from this perspective, the article offers an understanding of their agency in a context in which the ‘victory’ of the military uprising had led to a process of reconstructing political and social power.