Lesbians in Francoist Spain had to contend with a culture where a fascist state met with a form of conservative Roman Catholicism to impose very rigid, traditional gender roles. In the immediate post-Civil War period, the new regime was not concerned with homosexuals in general, but instead were focused on changing laws to enforce restrictive gender norms like repealing divorce. While original laws banning homosexuality were on the books and enforced using a 1933 law, they were changed in 1954 and 1970. Unlike male homosexuality, lesbians were less clearly addressed by these laws and were much less frequently prosecuted for the crime of homosexuality. Lesbians from that period are hard to identify because they were not identified as such, and often identified as prostitutes instead.
Lesbians were repressed in Spain, using cultural, religious, psychiatric and medical institutions to facilitate this repression. During the Franco period, lesbians were forced into an inescapable closet that sometimes led to suicide. Consequently, lesbian culture was pushed underground. Women had to meet clandestinely and use code words to identify each other. They created their own unique family units, married men or had fake marriages to gay men. Some entered convents. Being outed posed dangers, including that they would be subjected to electroshock treatment as part of conversion therapy. Still, lesbians threw parties, went to the movies, and, starting the year Franco died, they created their own bar scene. Oculto sendero by Elena Fortún and the lesbian poetry of Lucía Sánchez Saornil were the most important works of early lesbian literature of this period, before the lesbian literary movement really began to take off in 1964 with works like Ana María Matute's 1964 novel The Soldiers Cry at Night ()
An independent history of lesbianism as a political movement in Spain does not begin until 1975, the year Franco died, as lesbian voices had been intentionally silenced prior to this. In this early period a transition to democracy, the voices of gay men were often louder with lesbians playing important support roles because of historically greater past gay male visibility and continuing patriarchy. In 1977, Barcelona-based Front d'Alliberament Gai de Catalunya (FAGC) became the first gay men's organization to have a lesbian section. The first lesbian organization, Grup de Lluita per l'Alliberament de la Dona, in Spain would not be founded until 1979 in Barcelona. Political tensions would see lesbians split from gay men by 1981 and they would not join together again until the early 1990s.
Francoist definitions of womanhood
Anyone who did not fit into traditional gender norms and who expressed any deviance from Roman Catholic sexual norms was viewed as a sexual pervert. While some women quietly questioned their biologically determined place in society, male intellectuals provided rationals to support Francoist policies that used medical and biological sciences, along with anatomy and physiological studies. These works often drew on phrenological works by doctors such as Franz Joseph Gall that were later translated into Spanish. Carmen de Burgos Seguí published one such translation in La inferioridad mental de la mujer which said, "Many female characteristics are very similar to those of beasts; mainly the lack of a main of their own. Since the beginning of times they have functions like that, hence the human race would be stagnated in its original state if there were only women."
Misogyny and heteronormativity where linchpins of fascism in Spain, where the philosophy revolved around patria and fixed gender roles that praised the role of strong male leadership. While not putting women in prison, this ideological position effectively made women prisoners of their home, with imprisonment aided by the Catholic Church and Spain's educational system. The ideology of Francoism was opposed to gays, lesbians, transgender people, asexuals and anyone who did not fit into neatly constructed and enforced ideological gender roles. Lesbians were a particular threat because lesbian women remove themselves from the process of biological reproduction.Platero, R. (2009). "Apuntes sobre la represión organizada del lesboerotismo y la masculinidad de las mujeres en el período franquista". En VVAA. (2009) Homosexuales y Transexuales: Los otros represaliados del franquismo, desde la memoria histórica. Barcelona: Bellaterra. Participa en el proyecto I+D+I Ref 140/07
The Catholic Church in Spain in this period continued to perpetuate teachings that subjugated women. This included a belief that women should be covered up, chaste and virginal. Any women who broke this mold were evil temptresses in the vein of Eve. Women were encouraged to model themselves after Mary, the mother of Jesus. Women were taught to be asexual beings. Women in Francoist Spain had problems meeting their own heterosexual desires, required through state indoctrination to forgo female sexual expression. Heterosexual female desire represented for men an undesirable and perverted female attribute. Lesbians faced this and more, with a reality that for most, there could be zero expression of any sexual desire, let along for that of other women unless they wanted to put themselves in opposition to the regime.
Starting in the 1950s, Spain started adopting a more consumerist economy. This would continue on into the 1960s and would play a role in introducing Spanish women to the new modern Western woman. This introduction would result in the eschewing of the concept of True Catholic Womanhood. By the end of the 1960s, the destiny of lesbians in Spain was changing as women increasingly began to express their dissatisfaction with state imposed patriarchy. Their dissatisfaction would play a large role in the later collapse of the regime following Franco's death.
Societal views of lesbians For many in the Franco period, lesbians were considered straight women who sought needed sexual satisfaction from other women because their sexual needs were neglected by men. For others, lesbians were any women who challenged stereotypical culturally enforced gender roles. Society did not conceptualize lesbians in the same way as it did gay men. Psychiatrists espoused a belief that women were lesbians because of the everyday desire to be a man in order to be with the mother. They also claimed it was a result of neurosis, narcissism, or immaturity. It was not a result of congenital or hereditary factors.
Regime fear of homosexuality would lead to carefully curated single sexed spaces that reinforced gender stereotypes. Sección Feminina encouraged women's sport but only some. Athletics were viewed as problematic because they encouraged a more masculine style of dress to compete. The organization feared this masculine dress style would lead young women into becoming lesbians.
With lesbian behavior being hard for militant patriachialists to conceptualize, it often meant it was harder for homophobes to attack them directly. While make it easier for lesbians to blend, broader cultural implications made it for this same culture to engage in widespread lesbian erasure. This erasure is expressed most clearly in Anna María Moix's 1969 work Julia.
Ahead of the Year of the Woman, the government created eight commissions to investigate the status of Spanish women. The government used reports from these commissions to produce two reports that were published in 1975. They were La situación de la mujer en España and Memoria del Año Internacional de la Mujer. Among the findings were that the number of lesbians was increasing as a result of a number of factors including "physical or congenital defects", the "affective traumas and unsatisfied desires", family being unable to prevent women's conversation, "Contagion and mimicry" and "[...] the lack of relationship with men as a consequence of an excess education rigidly rigid, the existence of institutions that by their very nature eliminate these relationships: prisons, hospitals, psychiatric, religious communities etc ..., the media, tourism, alcohol, drugs and desire of search for new sensations, prostitution, and vice." To tackle the problem of the growing lesbian population, the government commission proposed solutions like "early diagnoses and medical treatments and psychotherapeutics that [corrected] possible somatic defects", creating a sex education program and the promotion of the idea that both genders can peacefully co-exist.
Tourism and urbanization were two leading causes for greater societal toleration of homosexuality in the waning days of the Franco period.
Laws around women and homosexuality
In the immediate post-war period, the government's primary concern was removing political and armed resistance. LGBT people were not and would not be a major focus until they had eliminated these threats, and were able to force a form of conservative Catholicism on the populace. More pressing issues for lesbians included a return to a reduced legal status. The repeal of the law allowing divorce occurred on 23 September 1939, and severely restricted ways which in women, including gender non-conforming lesbians, could behave outside their homes by placing legal and cultural constraints on them.Daimon. Revista Internacional de Filosofía, nº 63, 2014, 207–222 ISSN: 1130-0507
The 1932 Penal Code with its concepts of “estado peligroso” and “defensa social” were re-purposed by Franco in 1954 to criminalize homosexuality as a sex crime. The 1933 Ley de Vagos y Maleantes was used by the Franco regime until 1970 to criminally punish homosexuals. The 1933 law meant the police could detain anyone they suspected of being a homosexual. The 1954 modification largely excluded lesbians from legal punishment as the law did not conceptualize that two women could have sex with each other. The 1933 constitutional replacement was the 1970 Ley de Peligrosidad Social, which labeled homosexuality as a mental illness. These laws would later be used to imprison women and to commit them to mental institutions. Under the 1933 era law, only two charges were against women. One of the woman prosecuted under the law was prosecuted in the period between 1971 and 1978. The other involved a woman named María Helena who was prosecuted in 1968. Under the 1954 law, only one lesbian was ever charged. Unlike gay men, lesbians were never legally assigned to specific penal colonies or mental institutions. Instead of using existing laws, lesbians in Francoist prisons were charged with prostitution instead of homosexuality, which makes it impossible to determine their true numbers when compared to gay men.Conxita MIR CURCÓ, Pobreza, Marginación, delincuencia y políticas sociales bajo el franquismo. Lleida, Ediciones de la Universidad de Lleida, 2005. This was because the regime had only two categories for women's employment: housewife and prostitute. Despite this, the Franco regime largely could not comprehend lesbian activism, and when they did, they took active steps to erase it. Because of a more active focus on the threat of male homosexuality as an affront to the regime, the number of prosecutions of women was always much lower than those for gay men, especially in the later years of the regime. This was also in part because lesbianism was never made illegal in the same way as male homosexuality as the regime never considered it to be a similar threat.