Women and Politics: Women’s Politics in the Second Spanish Republic and Civil War

Abstract

In the early decades of the twentieth century, and particularly the thirties during the Second Spanish Republic and the Spanish Civil War, a number of women burst into the public arena in order to confront their secular exclusion from the political sphere. Drawing on an analysis of autobiographies by Dolores Ibarruri, Federica Montseny, Irene Falcon, Clara Campoamor and Victoria Kent, our main purpose in this paper is to identify the different approaches to politics by the so-called revolutionary feminism and bourgeois feminism. We also aim to render visible the contributions of political representatives of these feminist trends, which, as we shall argue, laid the foundations for a new political culture.