Women geography teachers at the time of the reformist Spanish Second Republic persecuted during the first years of Franco’s distatorship. (1931-1943) Gloria Giner, Leonor Serrano, and sisters Comas Ros
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Abstract
The invisibility suffered by last century women geographers, educators, and professors as well as researchers, due to historical causes such as wars and post-wars, but also due to their gender condition, is beginning to be revealed in different ways and different countries. This text considers the double invisibility suffered by Spanish Republican women teachers of geography and history, as result of the devastating process of sanction and depuration to which all public servers were subjected in the first years of Franco’s dictatorship, as a counter-reform of all the pedagogical, cultural and scientific advances of the Spanish Second Republic. Four cases have been selected from the universe of teachers of the time: Gloria Giner de los Ríos, member of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and educator, Leonor Serrano, inspector of primary education and pioneering feminist, and two secondary school professors María and Joaquina Comas Ros. It is concluded that these and other teachers showed a culture and geographical sensibility that were very innovative for their time, depositing in geography with a feminine regard a capacity to better understand nature and protect it, to work for a less destructive exploitation of resources, environment, and landscapes, and to obtain relations more peaceful between peoples, in short, more natural and social harmonies.