CHAPTER 5 FEMINISM WAS BOURGEOIS...NOW IT HAS A DIFFERENT NATURE … I have been following your magnificent effort to make Free Women into one of the most beautiful magazines in the world with immense interest, and believe me I am not paying lip service. I have never been a feminist in the sense that the suffragettes gave to the word; but your movement really does come from pure social and human feminism, the type which tends to cultivate all the intellectual and moral qualities in women, which are frequently ignored by women themselves. Fragment of a letter sent by Emilienne Morín, Buenaventura Durruti’s partner, to Free Women and then published in the that organisation’s magazine (Iturbe, 1974:133). 5.1. Disagreement with the feminist movement of the time. Both Sara and Pepita said that the fact that they were members of Free Women did not mean that they identified with the women who at that time were recognised as being feminists, because they did not support the interests of worker women. The women involved in the feminist current were in a social situation which was very different to that of worker and country women. They also had more opportunities to participate in public spaces for debate because they had been able to have a university education. Being able to access education was a privilege which, at that time, was only available to the bourgeoisie or the upper classes. … At that time feminism had a higher nature, no? Women of another status…who had knowledge and could participate in places where we could not because we were not culturally prepared for that. Free Women always defended themselves from being classified as feminists. Today it has a different nature I always say that I’m not a feminist but I am a feminine woman, but not a feminist in the other sense (S). Mary Nash states that in a capitalist society such as the one which existed at that time, you have to talk about either bourgeois women or worker women and, therefore, bourgeois feminism and worker or proletarian feminism. Thus she indicates how the English and North American suffragette movements are typically bourgeois movements since, on the one hand, they were comprised of bourgeois women and, on the other hand, their demands did not go beyond female suffrage (Nash, 1981:15). 45 CHAPTER 5 In Spain there were no suffragette movements, but there were vindications by specific women who were able to have access to political responsibilities in the Republican Government. These women did not support the interests of worker women neither did they believe in the ability of all women to be able to freely decide what they wanted. As Lídia Puigvert states, within the framework of the debate on the female suffrage which took place in 1931 during the II Republic, we can see that only one out of the three women who were in Congress defended the right of all women to vote or, similarly, the approval of the right for every woman to vote. (Puigvert, 2001:30). This author presents this fact as one more historical example in which women from villages were excluded from decision-making spaces and from having their opinions made public because they did not believe in their capacity for decision-making and critical reflection. The three women who had the opportunity to participate in the debate on female suffrage were Clara Campoamor, from the Partido Radical [Radical Party], Victoria Kent, from the Partido Socialista [Socialist Party], and Margarita Nelken, from PSOE [The Spanish Socialist Workers Party]. These were the only women who were able to have a direct opinion on women’s right to vote, although a great number of worker women were outside the Congress building handing out leaflets in favour of their right to vote. Out of these three Members of Parliament, only one, Clara Campoamor, supported the right of every woman to vote. The other two thought it was dangerous to allow women to vote because they believed that women were not ready to vote. In the case of educated worker or country women they would have defended their right to vote, but the opinion of these two Members of Parliament was that, if the said women lacked education, they did not have “liberated minds” and thus had no ability to make decisions, and they could place the Republic in danger with their votes. Puigvert also indicates that these Members of Parliament rejected a democratic right to grant equality to women who they considered to be inferior to them. On the other hand, grassroots women, worker women and rural worker women with no education, a lot of whom did not know how to read or write, were organising themselves. One example of this is the Free Women movement, which would become a point of reference for future movements and women’s organisations. They wanted to differentiate themselves from other women’s organisations which they considered to be bourgeois and non-inclusive of the situation of worker women. They believed that worker women, in order to get out of the situation of triple discrimination which they found themselves in (for being workers, for being women and for having no education) they had to organise themselves based on their interests and demands. Pepita described it as follows: There were no university educated women, they were all worker women. This group was different to the women’s groups which were appearing precisely because in them all the women had university educations, or were members of the bourgeoisie and did not even know what work was. And, of course, we spoke the same language as worker women, because I have always been a worker for my whole life, I was a dressmaker and so as you can see that has 46 .