Spanish League for Sexual Reform
스페인 성개혁 연맹
The Spanish section of the World League for Sexual Reform, founded in 1932, with the endocrinologist Gregorio Marañón as president and the seventeen-year-old Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira as secretary. It advanced sexual reform, such as birth control and sex education, in the name of science, but as the most socially conservative of the national sections it left homosexuality out of its programme.
In depth
The Spanish League for Sexual Reform was the Spanish section of the World League for Sexual Reform, founded in Copenhagen in 1928 by Hirschfeld, Ellis and Forel. It was set up late, in 1932, with the endocrinologist Gregorio Marañón as president and the seventeen-year-old Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira as secretary. Hildegart corresponded with Ellis, Hirschfeld, Norman Haire and Jonathan Leunbach, linking the Spanish sexual reform movement to the European vanguard, and her contraception guide Profilaxis anticoncepcional sold 8,000 copies in Madrid alone in its first week.
The Spanish League for Sexual Reform was the most socially conservative of the World League’s sections and one of the few that left homosexuality out of its programme; in Spain homosexuality remained taboo until the Civil War. Its president Marañón, seeking to avoid conflict with Catholic morality, opposed artificial contraception and state sex education for children, which he left to parents, and took part in the First Eugenic Conference of 1933. In the same years the Second Republic carried reforms such as the Divorce Law of 1932. When Hildegart was murdered by her mother, Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira, on 9 June 1933, the league lost its most active campaigner.