Waves of antifeminism in Spain in the Second Republic, Civil War, Franco’s dictatorship

Abstract

From the recent investigations, the main target of this article is to explain the leading features of the gender discourse, built both by the intellectuals such as by the conservatives, traditionalists and confessional Spanish political cultures, during the first three decades of the twentieth century. This mentioned discourse was inserted in the profound political, social and cultural changes that were in course of implantation those years, both in Spain and in the countries of their geographical environment. With that discourse a wide range of liberal, anti-liberal, Catholics or traditionalist thinkers and politicians were seeking answers to the unrest which the movements and social practi- ces perceived as threats to the virile superiority, or to the validity of the manliness values, produced to all them. Both the Spanish conservatives as the Rights in general showed clear affinities in their efforts toward the discursive construction of women. The main theorists of the traditionalism, the monarchism and the fascism created a gender discourse and a symbolic reconstruction of the values of masculinity and femininity that were forged in the reactionary and anti-liberal ideologies of the nineteenth century, as in the new currents of illiberal thought that emerged from the beginnings of the 20th. In the following years, the above mentioned gender discourse would be assimilated by the Franco´s dictatorship.