A Woman’s Struggle: The Changing Image of Womanhood on the Republican Side of the Spanish Civil War

In this thesis, I focus on two main identities and two main women’s organizations that I considered important for the development of a feminist challenge to the patriarchal society of 1930’s Spain. The two main identities and roles I focused on were the miliciana and the mother. Through an in-depth analysis of both roles, I explain how the war afforded women a new opportunity to challenge normative understandings of womanhood and how they performed their gender. Though seemingly at odds with each other, both the miliciana and the mother serve to further open society for women, allowing them to embody a new idea of what it meant to be a woman. In this thesis I also analyze two women’s organizations: the Agrupación de Mujeres Antifascistas (AMA) and the Mujeres Libres organization. By understanding and analyzing the main mission of both organizations, I explain how –like with the miliciana and the mother— women also had options in how and with who they participated. I argue that although these two organizations differed in their ideology –one for a social revolution now and the other for a social revolution later—their praxis was very similar and indicative of a communal effort by all women to challenge normative understandings of women’s involvement in politics, especially during this tumultuous time. In sum, this thesis approaches already established authors and their works in a way that explains how the image and practice of womanhood changed at the advent of the war.