Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira

Independent activity Social Democrats Spain Spain 1914–1933 ✕ Killed by her mother

Teenage sex reformer and socialist writer, secretary of the Spanish League for Sexual Reform

Secretary of the Spanish League for Sexual Reform from 1932, she promoted contraception and sex education, but in June 1933 she was killed by the mother who had raised her as the “woman of the future”.

A child prodigy whom her mother Aurora Rodríguez conceived and raised as the “model of the woman of the future”. She read at two and at eighteen held a law degree, the youngest lawyer in Spain. Joining the PSOE and the UGT at fourteen, she became vice-president of the Socialist Youth, but was expelled in 1932 for an article criticising the party and moved to the Federal Democratic Republican Party. She corresponded with Havelock Ellis, Hirschfeld and others and in 1932 became secretary of the Spanish League for Sexual Reform presided over by Marañón. She left sixteen books and over 150 articles. On 9 June 1933 her mother, fearing that her daughter was slipping away from her, shot her dead in her sleep.

Activities and affiliations

Related historical events

The “Red Virgin”: sexual reform and death

She was conceived in Ferrol by her mother and Alberto Pallás, a military chaplain chosen only to father the child, and born in Madrid on 9 December 1914. She read at two, wrote at three, and at eighteen held a law degree with distinction, the youngest lawyer in Spain, while studying philosophy and letters and medicine. At fourteen she joined the PSOE and the UGT, as her mother had, won support among the rank and file and became vice-president of the Socialist Youth, though the leadership eyed her warily. In 1932 a letter in La Libertad attacking an alliance with a reactionary candidate got her expelled; she joined the Federal Party, attacked the “socialenchufistas”, grew critical of Marxism and moved closer to anarchism.

She was among the most active figures of the Spanish sexual-reform movement of her day. She corresponded with Havelock Ellis (who called her “the Red Virgin”), Magnus Hirschfeld, Norman Haire and Jonathan Leunbach, and when the Spanish League for Sexual Reform was founded in 1932 under Gregorio Marañón she was chosen as its secretary. Her Profilaxis anticoncepcional (1931) sold 8,000 copies in Madrid alone in its first week, and she left sixteen books, among them The Eugenic Problem, The Limitation of Offspring: a Duty of the Conscious Proletariat and The Sexual Rebellion of Youth, and more than 150 articles. She guided H. G. Wells around Madrid, and he wanted to take her to London as his secretary.

That offer and her attempts to become independent fed her mother’s paranoia. Aurora complained that she had brought her daughter into the world to deal with the condition of women, “not with the affairs of socialists and communards”, and answered every attempt to leave with threats of suicide. On the night of 9 June 1933 she shot her sleeping daughter three times in the head and once in the heart: “The sculptor, on discovering the slightest imperfection in his work, destroys it.” Her life has been retold in novels, plays and the films My Daughter Hildegart (1977) and The Red Virgin (2024).