Mujeres Libres
자유여성
An anarchist women’s organisation active in Spain from 1936 to 1939. Founded in Madrid by Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Mercedes Comaposada and Amparo Poch y Gascón, it pursued women’s liberation and the anarchist social revolution together. During the Civil War it ran education, vocational training, childcare and maternity care, and grew into a national federation of 20,000–30,000 members by 1938 before disappearing with Franco’s victory in 1939.
In depth
Mujeres Libres emerged within the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement of the CNT union, the FAI federation and the FIJL youth wing. That movement proclaimed sexual equality but did little to organise women workers, and its men were said to leave “the garb of lovers of female liberation” at the front door. Having seen the extent of sexism within the CNT, the poet and trade unionist Lucía Sánchez Saornil and the lawyer Mercedes Comaposada began discussing the issue in 1933 and by 1935 formed the first group in Madrid; with the physician Amparo Poch y Gascón they are counted as its initiators.
The first issue of the magazine Mujeres Libres appeared on 20 May 1936 and it ran to 14 issues. A separate Feminine Culture Group founded in Barcelona in 1934 joined at the end of 1936, and in August 1937, at a congress in Valencia, 90 local groups set up a national federation that aimed to become the “fourth branch” of the libertarian movement. Membership is recorded at 30,000 in the summer of 1938 and more than 20,000 in October 1938. Mujeres Libres held that women had to be freed from a “triple enslavement” to ignorance, to sexual inequality and to capitalism, yet it rejected the label of feminism, calling its ideology “humanism”, because sexual inequality could not be solved apart from economic inequality; it saw prostitution as exploitation born of poverty and answered it with women’s shelters rather than bans.
During the Civil War Mujeres Libres formed labour sections to bring women into workplaces left by men gone to the front, and set up schools ranging from literacy to technical training; one school in Barcelona had 600 to 800 women attending each day. It founded a nursing school and an emergency clinic, and in February 1938 opened the Louise Michel Institute of Maternal and Child Care in Barcelona, offering birth and postnatal care and education on maternal health, sexuality and eugenics. It supported the anarchist health minister Federica Montseny’s spreading of birth control information and her legalisation of abortion. It never won equal status with the other anarchist organisations, and with the Republic’s defeat in 1939 it collapsed as the whole movement was outlawed.