—We went on washing clothes for the men; it seemed normal enough, especially when we had to do everything we could to help those at the front, remembered María SOLANA . I used to go to a socialist militia barracks. It got me into trouble with my fellow-communists; not because I went to wash clothes but because I was working for the socialists. They wanted to know why. ‘Because they haven’t got enough people, whereas our forces have. I’ll go where I’m most needed.’ The answer didn’t satisfy them at all …
In an anarcho-syndicalist collective in a small lower Aragon village, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a CNT smallholder experienced both the liberation of revolution and the frustration of the seemingly impermeable male-female roles.
BECEITE
—What joy, what enthusiasm we felt! The revolution had happened. One has to live through it to know what it’s like. Now we were all free, no one had to work for anyone else, when you went out to till the land you weren’t thinking of the cacique or boss …
It was marvellous, thought Pilar VIVANCOS, to live in a collective, a free society where one could say what one thought, where if the village committee seemed unsatisfactory one could say so. The committee took no big decisions without calling the whole village together in a general assembly. All this was wonderful. But the role of women – that hadn’t changed. There was much talk but little action.
—The men were sincerely dedicated to furthering the revolution, but they didn’t understand that the revolution had to be made in depth, at all levels. The revolution has to begin at home. In truth, the question of women’s liberation wasn’t posed as part of the revolutionary process, at least not in my experience. Perhaps things were different in Catalonia, but in Aragon the woman’s place was in the kitchen or working the land …
There were no women on the village committee. When the latter needed more hands in the fields, the delegate told a group of women to report the next day. Otherwise Pilar stayed at home. Sometimes the women would lend a hand on neighbouring collectives. In that way, a group of young girls from her village became friendly with the socialist youth girls in near-by Valderrobres. ‘How we were criticized and attacked in our village for that. The FAI was especially intransigent, sectarian, it didn’t want us to have anything to do with any organization that wasn’t anarchist.’
But, she felt, the women themselves were partly to blame for not pressing women’s liberation further.
—We women, who had to make the women’s revolution, in truth understood very little of what women’s emancipation entailed. We lacked the necessary education and culture …
Puritanism increased as a result of the anarcho-syndicalist revolution. A cousin of hers started to live with a woman in the village and came in for considerable criticism by the villagers. Not to get married was ‘living like animals’, they said. (The village committee performed marriages and burials, interring people in the cemetery without religious ceremony.) ‘They couldn’t see that my cousin and the woman had chosen freely to live together. And free union was what anarchists preached!’
—What criticism an anarchist’s wife or companion who wore lipstick had to face – ouf! And the husband – they would say he wasn’t a man to let his wife paint herself. Until the age of twenty I never wore lipstick. I remember going to the front once. An anarchist militant – a beautiful woman – who was there said to me: ‘Don’t take any notice of what they say about make-up. The men here only go after women who wear lipstick’ …
Soon Pilar had to confront this puritanism herself. One of Durruti’s companions of the Nosotros group, Miguel García Vivancos, was the commander of the 25th division, formed from anarcho-syndicalist militias, including the Carod-Ferrer column.16 Pilar’s brother-in-law, who was serving with the forty-two-year-old Major Vivancos, invited him to their house for a meal. Pilar served at table.
—I was just a village girl. All evening Vivancos kept looking at me. I went red as a beetroot. ‘Don’t blush,’ he said, and that made matters even worse, I blushed all the more. He was very good-looking, tall, thin, dark-skinned with striking blue eyes. He had a great, human vitality. After the meal he left. One day, some time later, my brother-in-law returned and said that Vivancos wanted to come for a meal.
‘He’s not coming because of me or you,’ he told my sister. ‘He’s coming for Pilar.’ The word went round the village and stirred up gossip. He arrived; he said that he wanted to talk to me.17 I agreed. I was in love with him. My parents were scandalized – but who could say no to Vivancos?
The CNT national committee had words with him, asking what he was doing with such a young girl. ‘At least be discreet about it,’ they said. ‘Discreet! You’re a bunch of reactionaries,’ he replied. ‘You’re worse than the Bolsheviks.’ ‘You must be mad,’ they said. ‘Mad – of course I’m mad. Haven’t you ever been in love? I’m mad about her and I’ve no reason to hide it.’ He knew they all had their mistresses. Here was this streak of puritanism again, and Vivancos attacked it for what it was – hypocrisy.
Whenever he had a few hours free, he would let me know and we would meet. I liberated, emancipated myself. We slept together, we became the couple we were to remain all our lives, for we never married. I believe that people respect each other more without marriage. Not being married is a freedom – not a freedom to do as one pleases but the freedom to be oneself in a human relationship …
MADRID
Many thousands of women and children were evacuated from Madrid; but many thousands also remained. Among the latter were great numbers of domestic servants who had been left behind when their masters set off, somewhat earlier than usual, for their summer holidays. To provide employment for them, and to assist the war effort, the communist-led Anti-Fascist Women’s Organization set up new workshops where they made uniforms and clothing for the militias and army. At the same time all out-workers were ‘concentrated’ in these new shops, the largest of which had between 2,000 and 3,000 women workers; they were run as collectives, with the full agreement of the communist leadership of the garment workers’ union, under workers’ self-management.
—We always insisted that the workers should run their own workshops, unlike the CNT which tried to impose union control, explained Petra CASAS, communist secretary of the UGT garment workers’ union. Self-management was our principle for the collectives. It was not the union which gave the orders. Each shop elected its own management council, and each council was represented on a union coordination committee where joint problems were thrashed out. But each workshop was autonomous. The communist party was in complete agreement with this; it believed that each collective should be free to manage its own affairs …
As soon as the garment collectives were operating successfully, they were told to open their own bank accounts and to negotiate their own contracts with the army’s purchasing department. All money left over after wages and payments for raw materials was to be placed in the banks so that it could be used for the war effort. The collectives were profitable enough to set up their own canteens and libraries, and to pay sick pay. Each canteen had its own van which went round the villages looking for food to supplement the rations.
Petra CASAS was called one day to the biggest of these collectives in the Calle Abascal: a strike had broken out. A great number of teenage girls worked in the collective, and they had gone on strike, claiming that the food was bad and that a woman sent by the union had been seen wearing a religious medallion. When the collective had opened, CASAS had told the workers that they were the owners, there were no other bosses.
—Now they were turning up for work late, taking time off when they wanted, because they felt they were the bosses. I told them they were striking while men at the front died to save the country from fascism; if they had been working for a capitalist boss they wouldn’t have been able to take time off …
This was their factory, she continued; how could they know who had earned her wage if some took time off whenever they felt like it? They should sta
rt a record of hours worked. As to the woman with the religious medallion, she was a member of the union’s secretariat, a Catholic and an excellent worker who enjoyed the union’s full confidence. Finally, the workers had to realize that each factory was responsible for organizing its own food supplies and that, in wartime, these were bound to be irregular. ‘They accepted what I said and returned to work.’
At the start the union took over all factories and workplaces whose owners had disappeared until a workers’ committee and a manager had been elected by the shop-floor. Thereafter these factories, usually the bigger ones, operated with much the same autonomy, according to union leaders, as the collectives, although they were not given that name. Where owners had not fled, workshops were placed under workers’ control – which the communist party interpreted strictly as control, not management, which remained in the owners’ hands.
—The communist party gave us strict instructions from the beginning, remembered Julián VAZQUEZ, a communist member of the union’s leadership. The union was not to carry out any arrests – that was a matter for the police; it was not to take over the whole industry – that was a matter for the state; it was not to take over small owners – for that was to expropriate the petty bourgeoisie. These instructions we faithfully carried out … 18
* * *
1. See pp. 175–6.
2. See pp. 161–3.
3. ABC (Seville, 23 June 1937).
4. The company employed 2,500 workers and was capitalized at 3,500 million pesetas in 1973.
5. See R. Whealey, ‘How Franco Financed His War – Reconsidered’, Journal of Contemporary History (January 1977). Also G. Jackson, pp. 414–17, and R. Tamames, La república, la era de Franco (Madrid, 1973), pp. 345–8.
6. See J. de Ramón-Laca, Cómo fué gobernado Andalucía (Seville, 1939).
7. For a view of international capital’s reaction to the Popular Front zone, see Appendix, A.
8. According to de Ramón-Laca, op. cit.
9. See p. 202.
10. For a description of the settlement, see Points of Rupture, A.
11. ‘It served also to even out the supply of wheat. Previously, prices would be forced up after a time by the non-sale of the crop by those who could afford to store their wheat, thus ensuring the better-off a bigger profit in the end. The trap of borrowing money at high interest rates to finance storage in the hope of getting a better price in the end – a price that often didn’t cover the interest – was eliminated by the new wheat service … ’ (José AVILA).
12. See also p. 84. The village, with a population of some 2,500, had ten large-holding landowners, fifteen medium-holding peasants and about 130 small-holding peasants owning between 25 and 30 hectares – the amount of land one pair of mules could till. Most small peasant owners were also renters or sharecroppers, adding to their smallholdings by leasing land. The relatively high proportion of day-labourers for a Castilian village added to social unrest.
13. It was not until 1938 that Franco, dubious of their political reliability, used ordinary conscripts in major battle; even then, the Galician and Navarrese divisions, with the Foreign Legion and Moorish regulares, remained the army’s vanguard force (see S. Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain, p. 389).
14. ‘A job I’d had to take when our attempt to collectivize the fashion house failed.’ On the pretext that the situation was ‘precarious’, the owner sacked forty dress-makers, seamstresses and apprentices after the uprising. Margarita BALAGUER suggested getting the garment workers’ union to collectivize it and to make clothes for the militia. ‘At the CNT union they gave us a bit of paper. None of the other girls wanted to confront the señorita, the owner, so I went. She turned red with anger and said it was an impudence that one of her seamstresses should do such a thing to her. She refused to have anything to do with it and simply closed down her business. There was nothing we could do.’
15. Instituted in April 1937, this measure was later reversed due to the prevalence of bigamy. The first two measures were due to Federica Montseny as CNT health minister. The libertarian-influenced Mujeres Libres (Free Women), which grew to 30,000 members during the war, organized a women’s trade union in Madrid and Barcelona in public transport and food services. While its members saw themselves engaged in the struggle to liberate themselves from the traditional roles and oppression by men and capitalist society, the federation appeared rarely to challenge these roles in practice during the war (see T. E. Kaplan, ‘Spanish Anarchism and Women’s Liberation’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 6, 1971; also L. Willis, ‘Women in the Spanish Revolution’, Solidarity Pamphlet 48, London, 1975). The communist party organized a number of women’s organizations, including the Anti-Fascist Women’s Organization, the Union of Young Mothers, the Girls’ Union, etc.
16. See pp. 132–5. Carod’s column liberated Beceite on its march towards Saragossa in the first weeks of the war. Carod became a commissar and later the division’s political commissar.
17. The traditional formal male request to be accepted by the woman as her suitor.
Militancies 9
MIGUEL NUÑEZ
FUE-JSU education militiaman
The change in awareness revealed in the new attitudes towards women was reflected in another area also. Overnight, as though the revolution had unleashed the pent-up hopes of generations, education became a matter of pressing urgency, even in the front lines.
—It was quite remarkable to see peasants and workers devoting time and energy, even under fire, to learning to read and write; to see with what attention they listened to poetry and literature which we read to them. Most remarkable of all was the questions they asked …
Not yet sixteen when the war started, he had volunteered immediately. He belonged to no political organization, only the FUE, but it was not long before he became a member of the JSU (and later the communist party). Too young to fight, he was sent to an auxiliary service which, within a short time, became the culture or education militia where he became not just a teacher but also a combat militiaman. Teacher and student were both fighters.
—The fusion between culture and the army of the people was complete. Learning was not something exterior to the men or the struggle they were engaged in. At the beginning I used to ask myself what these workers and peasants were really fighting for at the risk of their lives. The only answer I could find was: all those things which the enemy, the reactionary forces of this country, have for so long deprived them of. And access to culture was one of these …
It was not a revolution that sought only justice, a settling of accounts with the exploiters, but a revolution which sought to conquer all that the people had been deprived of. Here, at last, was a people standing on its own feet. The movement of the masses was something magnificent.
When all the men in his unit had learnt to read and write – ‘which cost a number of them serious effort’ – it moved him to see with what excitement they picked up a newspaper and, almost spelling the words out, read it. It was as though they had crossed a tremendous barrier. Then they almost invariably sat down to write two letters. The first to their wives, telling them that they had learnt to write. The second to La Pasionaria, to inform her of the good news. ‘We are not only fighting the enemy, we are learning too, you can count on us –’
Classes were given when and where possible, usually in the mornings and in the rough shelters put up by the men. If he was lucky, he’d find a large piece of blackboard and some chalk, but if not, he would use large sheets of paper and draw or paint on them. Each time the unit moved, the equipment, however rudimentary, had to be left behind. Time and again, the men’s initiative – one of the revolution’s major revelations for him – was displayed as one found a couple of chairs, another a bit of chalk, another a piece of wood that would serve as a bench, or a bit of blackboard to set up the school again.
—It wasn’t a question of waiting for a superior to give an order, for instructions to come from an officer
or political leader. No, everything came from the people. It was fabulous. All the qualities and capabilities which capitalism prevents from developing were suddenly revealed by the revolution. Peasants who had never heard music listened to concerts in an impressive silence, or to the great poets like Alberti and Miguel Hernández reading their poetry. The immense strength of the people, their courage, fraternity, comradeship, appeared with overwhelming force …
An international delegation of writers and journalists visited his unit and wanted to attend the classes. They appeared impressed by what they saw, and suggested that, after the war, it would be necessary to continue the experiment with education militias going out into the countryside until not a single illiterate remained.
When one of his companions was killed, the other cultural militiamen gathered their units together to give a joint lesson – the fallen man’s last lecture, delivered from notes he had left, on the ‘golden era’ of Spanish history, the epoch of Philip II.
—It was an analysis of the period which, in school, had always been presented to us as ‘golden’ but which the dead man’s lecture showed had been based on the exploitation and misery of other peoples, something that had never been said before. But we said that the best lesson the fallen man had given was his personal example: in his death in combat the fusion of culture with the people in arms had been given true expression …
One of the education militiamen in his unit was something of a mystery. He taught grammar and geography, but refused to touch history, which the others found passionately interesting. One day it was revealed that the man was a priest who had fled his parish at the start of the war and had managed to hide out in the unit. It caused a certain commotion amongst the men. The education militiamen decided to take his case as the subject of a lesson, underlining two themes: the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s responsibility in siding with the fascist reaction against the people; and that they, personally, held no hatred for this priest. The themes were not received without argument. Not everyone was convinced by a long shot.
Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Page 43