Sección Femenina

The Sección Femenina was founded on 12 July 1934 within the Falange’s student union, fully incorporated into the Falange later that year, and after the unification decree of 1937 became part of FET y de las JONS and an official body of the Francoist single party. It was led throughout by Pilar Primo de Rivera, younger sister of the Falange’s founder José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Under the Second Republic its members cared for imprisoned Falangists and their families, and in the Civil War they supported the families of Nationalist dead and the population of conquered cities. In 1937 Franco entrusted it with the women’s compulsory “Social Service”, the female counterpart of military service.

Pilar Primo de Rivera described its mission as “a silent, constant labour” that would make women cleaner, children healthier and houses tidier. The Sección Femenina taught that women were inferior to men and should remain subordinate to them, with marriage, children and housework as their main goals; Pilar said that “women never discover anything; they lack creative talent, reserved by God for virile intellects”. Women had to complete the Social Service to obtain a passport or a driving licence, join an association or receive educational titles. In 1939 the Republican women intellectuals’ Lyceum Club was dismantled and turned into the “Medina Club” run by the Sección Femenina. Historians note the contradiction that many of its officers were single women who worked outside the home. It was dissolved with the other institutions of the Movimiento Nacional on 7 April 1977, after Franco’s death.