Franco's Female Prisoners

Franco's Female Prisoners

Thesaurus room, La Nau

5^th June – 5^th October

From Tuesday to Saturday, from 10 to 13.30 and from 16 to 20 h.

Sunday, from 10 to 14 h.

Ministerio de Cultura. AGA. Sección Cultura. IDD: (03)084.001. Signaga 33/F/00750. Vista interior de una galería de la cárcel de Ventas, 1933.

Curators: Sergio Gálvez and Fernando Hernández

Organised by:  Fundación de Investigaciones Marxistas  and Universitat de València

Women like Tomasa Cuevas, Manolita del Arco, Juana Doña, Nieves Torres, María Salvo, Trinidad Gallego, Soledad Real, Leonor Estévez, Mari Carmen Cuesta, Carlota O’Neill, Concha Carretero, Maruja Borrell, Matilde Landa, Ángeles García-Madrid, Josefina Amalia Villa and many other are members of a generation –that of the 2^nd Republic and the Civil War- whose remembrance and history are slowly being acknowledged. This first generation of female political prisoners of Franco's regime is well rooted into the "democratic substrate" of 20^th century fights, demands and disputes in Spain which queried the domineering society model of the time with greater impact than what we commonly assume.

Today we talk about the “historical failure of Franco's period", not because of the "democratic conversions" of a number of his follower “intellectuals” or the internal evolution of power clans during the dictatorship or international democratising waves, as argued by some elite views of the past and society. The real characters that help explain the failure are much lesser known; no streets, squares or parks are named after them. We refer to grass-root movements against Franco chased by the dictator and, more particularly, to female political prisoners from the regime’s first two decades. Politically active via Republic reforms, these young women were punished with long-term imprisonment and even the death penalty not only for their courage to stand up against Fascism but also for their belonging to a patriarchal society with secular roots.

Ministerio del Interior. Biblioteca de la DGIIPP. Prisión Provincial de mujeres de Valencia, s/f.

In spite of this starting point, the dual repression suffered by this generation must be borne in mind: they were both rojas (red: communist) and women. All this in a context marked by a totalitarian dictatorship with clear Fascist elements in the first years, one that followed archaic patriarchal and misogynous traces, one that imposed the wife-mother woman model confined to the household, marginalised from the public realm and subjected to male authority.

In this environment, the struggle, commitment and in many cases sheer survival of "Franco's female political prisoners" both inside and outside the “penitentiary” refer us to stories of pain, sadness and fear rather than to a heroic, often glorified past.

We should not forget, anyway, that this relevant fact –the imprisonment of the ‘rojas’, of that first generation of women found guilty for “war and post-war crimes” taken to prison for being relative to male militants or union leaders, or for being feminist or members of a party- has been concealed for too long or subsumed into their peer male generation, on which we have at least some general knowledge. Thus, if the testimony of these militants is now essential in determining the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of Franco's repression, we must remember how they were hidden and silenced for years or overlooked by the academics or the institutions. Premises, party orders, specific political situations and, why not, the reminiscence of too strong a past were some of the elements behind the construction of the so-called “pact of silence”. Among the causes of that highly frequent omission in the construction of the history of this militant experience is also the patriarchal bias of the socioeconomic and cultural system of relations, which, as far as its cross-cutting nature is concerned, does not know of classes or ideologies.

ARCM. Fondo Santos Yubero. 45581. Fiesta infantil en la cárcel de San Antón (Madrid) con motivo de recibir los reclusos la visita de sus hijos, 5 de noviembre de 1939.

Basically, we are dealing with historical realities of female repression under Franco’s regime -the experience of prisoner mothers raising their children in prison, women working in jail to support their families, the special “prostitutes’ prisons”, and women working to support their imprisoned partners- which have traditionally been either removed from or not duly acknowledged by not only the institutional discourse but also the antagonist one. Our collective memory does know something about resistance against Franco at the Burgos male prison but very little is known about their female counterparts, namely the central prisons of Segovia, Ventas or Palma.

As a consequence, invisibility has remained, as proved by the absence of this historical experience in institutional recognition processes -unevenly distributed in Spain- and academic ones, particularly as a very poorly explored object of study, at least up to the late1990s. The gaps in historical generational collective memory range from the absence of recognition and signage of "memory sites" (walls, prisons) to the clear lack of interest in unravelling the story of its male and female players.

Archivo personal de María Salvo. Taller de la prisión de Alcalá de Henares, 1956.

The exhibition Franco’s female prisoners contributes to visualising women's prison experiences over the first decades of Franco's dictatorship based on an ongoing dialogue between memory and history in which images and documents come together with the memories and testimonies of the prisoners. Documents and photographs of different origins, from personal and public files, live together with the recorded and transcribed memories of the exhibition’s main characters. At the same time, a tour around different thematic axes –children and work in prison, organised resistance- includes the individual treatment of the most significant prisons -Ventas, Saturrarán, Palma, Les Corts-, a particular universe within a broader framework, that of Franco's female repression.

Our aim is to continue reconstructing a period in contemporary history marked by the trauma and terror of the Civil War and, more particularly, by Franco's dictatorship in which the voice, testimony and memory of those excluded from the “great stories” are at last present as main witnesses and players. At the same time, the exhibition seeks to show audiences a historical human, social and political experience, one which is as singular as fundamental to the settlement of the "democratic substrate" mentioned earlier. Indeed, what is really at stake is the construction of a democratic and social memory, which always calls for new contributions and views.

ARCM. Fondo Santos Yubero. 38127. Prisión Especial de Calzada de Oropesa, 1941. La de Calzada fue la primera prisión especial de regeneración y reforma, ampliamente publicitada por el régimen. La imagen recoge la “misión” realizada por el Padre jesuita Martínez Colom con motivo de su fundación.

The exhibits come from the following public and private archives:

Archivo General de la Administración (AGA), Archivo General de la Guerra Civil, Arxiu Nacional de Cataluña (ANC), Archivo Histórico del PCE (AHPCE), Arxiu Fotogràfic de la Ciutat de Barcelona, Archivo Regional de la Comunidad de Madrid (ARCM), Arxiu Històric de Les Corts (AHLC), Archivo Museo Reina Sofía, Archivo Alfonso, Archivo Agencia EFE, Archivo Militar de Segovia, Archivo del Centro Penitenciario Victoria Kent de Madrid, Archivo de la Prisión Provincial de Segovia, Archivo Asociación de Ex-Presos  y Represaliados Políticos Antifranquistas, Archivo General de la Primera Región Militar, Arxiu Històric de la C.O.N.C. / Fundació Cipriano García, Biblioteca de la Dirección Gral. de Instituciones Penitenciarias, Biblioteca Nacional, Biblioteca Fundación de Investigaciones Marxistas, Centro de Documentación Asociación Matilde Landa. Personal archives: Carmen Rodríguez Sánchez, Matilde Landa, Blanca Brissac, Carlota O'Neil, Manolita del Arco and Martina Barroso.

Ministerio del Interior. Biblioteca de la DGIIPP. Prisión de Sevilla, s/f.

AHCB-AF. Pérez de Rozas. CG/24-09-1952. Solamente en tres ocasiones especiales, Navidad, Reyes y la fiesta de la Virgen de la Merced, patrona de las prisiones -el 24 de septiembre- se permitía la visita de niños durante varias horas en el recinto carcelario. En la imagen aparecen varias gitanas, disfrutando de la visita de sus hijos en la prisión barcelonesa de Les Corts.