Women in the Second Republic period were formally allowed to enter the public sphere for the first time in Spanish cultural life, where they had a number of rights they had lacked before including the right to vote, divorce and access to higher education. The Second Spanish Republic had three elections, ones in 1931, 1933 and 1936. Women were able to run in all three and vote in the last two. Clara Campoamor Rodríguez, Victoria Kent Siano, and Margarita Nelken y Mansbergen were the most important women to emerge in this period.

Spanish feminism in this period was typically about "dual militancy", and was greatly influenced by anarchism. It was about trying to understand what role women should play in Spanish life. Women were also politically active in large numbers in this period as a result of constitutional reforms. While allowed in, they were still underrepresented in labor and anarchist organizations like UGT and CNT, and these organizations would often reinforce traditional gender roles. To succeed in their social and political efforts, women sometimes created their own organizations like Mujeres Libres though such organizations still were often not accepted by their male run counterparts. Some organizations were more willing to let women join, including Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM). This organization provided women with weapons training during the Second Republic to prepare for the war POUM saw as inevitable. Communist women also faced internal discrimination, which Dolores Ibárruri successfully navigated to join the top ranks of Partido Comunista de España.

Women on Spain's right were also socially and politically active, with Sección Femenina representing Falange, Acción Católica de la Mujer representing Catholic women, and Margaritas representing Carlists.

Pre-war interactions with the Guardia Civil and Falange starting in 1931 and occurring regularly until mid-1936, coupled with the Asturian miners' strike of 1934, would set the stage for the start of Spanish Civil War.

Background One of the most important things about the Second Republic for women is it allowed them to formally enter the public sphere en masse. The period also saw a number of rights available to women for the first time. This included the right to vote, divorce and access to higher education.

Elections in the Second Republic

The Spanish monarchy ended in 1931. Following this and the end of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the Second Republic was formed. The Second Republic had three elections before being replaced by the Franco dictatorship. These elections were held in 1931, 1933, and 1936.

June 1931 elections

Following the failure of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, Spain set about writing a constitution. The initial draft did not give women the right to vote, though it did give them the right to run for office on 8 May 1931 for the June elections. The first women to win seats in Spain's Cortes were Clara Campoamor Rodríguez, Victoria Kent Siano, and Margarita Nelken y Mansbergen following the June 1931 elections, when women still did not have the right to vote.

1933 elections

For the first time, for the 1933 elections, women could vote in the national elections. CNT helped bring a right wing government to power after the 1933 elections by refusing to support the Popular Front alliance, and largely chose to abstain from the elections. They changed their positions for the 1936 elections, which assisted in bring the left back into power in the Second Republic. The victory of conservative factions in the 1933 elections was blamed on women, and their voting practices in that election. They were viewed as being controlled by the Church. The elections also saw conservative male leaders try to change the goals of the ACM. Rather than having the ACM try to accomplish political goals, they sought to direct participants to be more engaged in charity work and supporting working-class families.

Campoamor, along with Kent, lost her seat in the Cortes following the 1933 elections. The most active of the three women elected in 1931, she had been heckled in the congress during her two-year term for her support of divorce. She continued to serve in government though after being appointed the head of Public Welfare later that year, only to leave her post in 1934 in protest to the government response to the 1934 Revolution of Asturias.

Nelken faced similar problems in the Cortes. Her mother was French, and her father was a German Jew. As a consequence, before she was allowed to sit in 1931, Nelken had to go through special bureaucratic procedures to insure she was a naturalized Spanish citizen. Her political interests were looked down upon by her male peers, including Prime Minister Manuel Azaña. Her feminist beliefs worried and threatened her male colleagues in the Cortes. Despite this, she was reelected in 1933, and found herself subject to constant attacks in the media as she proved a constant irritant to male party members who sometimes resorted to racist attacks in the Cortes to shut her down. Still, she persevered, winning election 1931, 1933, and 1936. Disillusionment with the party led her to change membership to the Communist Party in 1937.

Matilde de la Torre won election in 1933, representing Asturias in the Cortes.

February 1936 elections

The Popular Front was a coalition of leftist parties created during the Second Spanish Republic ahead of the 1936 elections as a way of ensuring a left wing majority in the Congreso de Diputados.Payne, Stanley. Spain's first democracy: the Second Republic, 1931-1936. Madison, Wisconsin, USA: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. p. 267. The ability to do so was a result of a number of complex factors, but was assisted by the decision of the Communist Party of Spain to engage with the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and not dismiss them as irrelevant supporters of the bourgeoisie. Their goal was to win back government, after right-wing factions had won the elections in 1933. A previous attempt at an alliance ahead of the 1933 elections had largely failed because of opposition by the CNT.

The February 1936 elections saw the return of a leftist government, with Popular Front aligned parties able to form a government. They replaced a repressive right-leaning government that had been in power for the two previous years. They ran on progressive platform, promising major reforms to government. In response, even as the left began reform plans to undo conservative efforts in the previous government, the military began planning how to overthrow the new government. Popular Front, in contrast, refused to arm its own supporters out of fear they would then use them against the Government.

During the elections, pamphlets were distributed in Seville that warned women that a leftist Republican victory would result in the government removing their children from their homes and the destruction of their families. Other pamphlets distributed by the right in the election warned that the left would turn businesses over to the common ownership of women.

Ibárruri campaigned for a deputy in the Cortes ahead of the 1936 elections as a member of the Popular Front. During her campaign in Asturias, she campaigned before groups of socialists, communists, anti-fascists, and Republicans. She used her experiences to improve her oratory skills that would serve her later during the Civil War by observing other speakers who managed to successfully engage audiences. Ibárruri won, and entered the Cortes as a member of the Popular Front, in the communist minority. Unlike some of their peers on the left, she and other communists advocated citizens taking up arms in preparation for what they saw as the coming conflict.

Campoamor found herself locked out of the political process for the 1936 elections, as she had criticized her Radical Party for not supporting women's issues and removed herself from their list. Serving as President of Organización Pro-Infancia Obrera, she tried to find another political party that would allow her on their list while also advocating for women's rights. Failing to do so, she tried and failed to create her own political party.

The 1936 elections saw Julia Álvarez Resano enter parliament as a member of PSOE. She came to the Cortes having previously served as a defense lawyer for the Spanish Federation of Land Workers. Matilde de la Torre won election again in 1936.

Feminism Feminism in the Republican and Civil War eras was typically about "dual militancy," and was greatly influenced by anarchism, and understanding the role feminism should play in society. The Civil War would serve as a break point for feminist activity inside Spain. There was little continuity in pre-war and post war Spanish feminism.

This period was dominated by a contest of wills between Partido Republicano Radical Socialista (PRRS)-aligned Victoria Kent and Partido Republicano Radical-aligned Clara Campoamor. They fiercely contested the topic of women's suffrage. PSOE's Margarita  Nelken supported Kent's position that women were not ready to vote.

Female Republican Union Campoamor, a centrist viewed by some of her colleagues in the Congreso de Diputados as right leaning, had created the Female Republican Union () during the early part of the Second Republic. Female Republican Union had the sole purpose of advocating for women's suffrage and did not support adding more rights beyond that. It was often polemetic in its opposition to Kent's group Foundation for Women, and its opposition to women's suffrage.

Foundation for Women Victoria  Kent  and  Margarita  Nelken founded the Foundation for Women () in 1918. Foundation for Women was a radical socialist organization at its inception, and aligned themselves with PSOE. The organization opposed women's suffrage, even as its founders sat in Spain's Cortes. The belief was if women were given the right to vote, most women would vote as their husbands and the Catholic Church told them to. This would fundamentally damage the secular nature of the Second Republic, by bringing in a democratically elected right wing government.

Women's rights

The founding of the Second Republic in 1931 brought in a five-year period that began to see both a change in historical gender roles and in legal rights for women. These changes were slowed in 1933, after a conservative block came into power. This group tried and succeed in rolling back many of the reforms passed in the previous two years.

The Second Republic brought in legal and cultural changes for women in Spain, with most reforms occurring within the first two years of its founding on 14 April 1931. The debate over women's suffrage began in the Cortes in 1931. This debate brought more attention to the legal status of women by Spanish Republicans. In turn, this led to many Republicans wanting to bring women into the public sphere, making women and their problems more visible, as a way to further advance the Republican political agenda. Women eventually gained absolute equality under the law during the Second Republic. Because of a deteriorating political situation and economic difficulties in the country, many of the rights attached to this were never fully realized or were later reversed.

Other laws passed during the Second Republic included maternity leave, civil marriage, and no fault divorce. Contraception was also legalized. Despite divorce being made legal by the Second Republic, in practice it rarely occurred and only generally in large, liberal cities. The first year divorce was allowed in the Second Republic, only 8 of 1,000 marriages ended in divorces in Madrid.

Many of the issues brought up by women were portrayed as the "women's question", which served to remove women's only policies from broader debates about societal needs. They removed them from context, and in turn served to reinforce societal views about gender.