The Cinderella complex - narrating Spanish women's history, the home and visions of equality: developing new margins PDF

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The Cinderella complex – narrating Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. Spanish women’s history, the home and visions of equality: developing new margins Robina Mohammad This paper examines the development of feminism in Spain within the context of political transformations. It focuses on one particular stran...

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The Cinderella complex – narrating Spanish women’s history, the home and visions of equality: developing new margins

Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.

Robina Mohammad This paper examines the development of feminism in Spain within the context of political transformations. It focuses on one particular strand of feminist thinking: ‘equality feminism’. The paper traces the evolution of equality feminism and its institutionalization, supported by the production and dissemination of a feminist history of the Franquista dictatorship (1936 –1939). Yet, under scrutiny such narratives maintain a silence on the social, political and geographical diversity of women’s experiences prior to, during and beyond the Franquista dictatorship. Drawing on women’s oral testimonies (recorded in the city of Málaga, Andalucía) the paper animates the silences of this feminist history in Spain and the limits of state feminist ideology. key words

feminism

state

equality

hegemony

ideology

silences

Málaga

South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore email: [email protected]

revised manuscript received 22 December 2004

Introduction In Spain, a strand of feminism known as equality feminism has become institutionalized in the state apparatus. This paper considers the implications of this for working class women. In particular, it specifies equality feminism’s classifications of labour as paid and unpaid, public and private, masculine and feminine and examines their socio-spatial and political underpinnings and consequences. Equality feminism (or socialist feminism as it is sometimes referred to) developed in Spain in the late 1960s against the backdrop of the Franquista dictatorship (1939–1975) and was heavily influenced by feminist scholars Betty Friedan and Simone De Beauvoir. After the death of General Franco in 1975, the dictatorship evolved into a liberal democracy, a process which saw the curtailment of the most radical currents involved in the struggle for democracy and the reinstitution of the bourbon dynasty with King Juan Carlos as head of state. Under pressure

from equality feminists, the socialist government that came to power in a landslide victory in the 1982 elections established a state department for women. The Instituto de la Mujer (Institute for Women) was given the mandate to develop gender equality. Spanish State Feminism’s (SSF) governance of the gender ‘problem’ is coherent with the liberal1 ideology of the democratic state of which it is a part. Its location within the state has provided equality feminism with a powerful platform from which to disseminate (and universalize) its vision of what counts as women’s oppression, the conceptualization of women’s equality and how the latter might be achieved. The distinction of public/private, defined in spatial terms as ‘la casa o la calle’ (literally, the house or the street), that underpinned Franquismo’s gendered ideology is also key to SSF discourse. I examine how this distinction, aligned with the modern/traditional binary, became central to hegemonic feminist representations of the home. For

Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 30 248–261 2005 ISSN 0020 -2754 © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2005

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this I draw on two interviews with feminists working within the municipal state women’s office in Málaga, the Delegacíon Municipal de la Mujer, and two from the regional state women’s office in Andalucía, the Instituto Andaluz de la Mujer. I supplement these interviews with an extensive study of literatures (many of them produced and/ or funded by the state offices) that relate to and inform the production and circulation of everyday narratives about women’s place in Spanish society. Then, drawing on an in-depth intergenerational study of 44 working-class women aged between 19 and 72,2 located in Malaga Town (Andalucía),3 I consider the extent to which women’s subjectivities have been produced within SSF discourse with reference to understandings of gender equality, freedom, home and work. I show how SSF’s conceptualization of gender equality serves to valorize some women while marginalizing others. Pursuing what Squires (1999) refers to as a ‘strategy of inclusion’, SSF seeks to make women equal to men. In this vision, equality between men and women requires not only the development of equality of opportunities but also the production of a model of Spanish womanhood capable of taking up these opportunities. Thus part of its aim involves the transformation of women. However, this strategy leaves the structures within which inequalities are produced unquestioned. Retaining a centre supports a periphery. Those women who have the capacity for achieving equality according to SSF’s vision are centred, but those who refuse it or those less capable of this transformation, such as the infirm and/ or disabled women unable to engage in paid work, remain relegated to the periphery. I argue that in keeping with liberal ideology, SSF discourse on the one hand promotes women’s autonomy, freedom and liberty. Yet on the other hand, it limits and controls, by prescribing a particular model of womanhood and valorizing it over others. Finally, the focus of SSF discourse, in keeping with certain hegemonic strands of Anglo-American ‘second wave’ feminisms, has been almost exclusively on the inequities produced by gender. But as critiques of the latter have pointed out, the man/woman binary that this privileges has generated new oppressive fictions even as it has sought to address existing ones. The structure of the paper is as follows: I begin by tracing Friedan and De Beauvoir’s influence on feminist agendas in Spain (Amoros 1986; Folguera 1988) and the emergence and institutionalization of equality feminism. I then discuss

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SSF’s post-dictatorship re-narration of Franquista history, within a liberal framework, against which women’s equality has been conceptualized. Drawing on interview data I examine the extent to which this history as a collective memory has been productive of women’s subjectivities. From the basis of respondents’ experiences I highlight the partial nature of this collective memory.

Puertas adentro4 (behind closed doors): queens and/or slaves of the home. Equality feminism in Spain [The] existence of a regime which denied citizens virtually all forms of meeting and association made it . . . [difficult to organize resistance movements in the late-1960s and so] much more difficult for the ideas and actions launched by women in other parts of Europe and North America to catch on in Spain. (Threfall 1985, 45)

Equality feminism developed within the women’s movement gathered pace as part of an oppositional movement in Franquista Spain in the late 1960s. Although the anti-democratic environment aimed to inhibit all forms of opposition, socio-economic transformations encouraged the new generation of women to question their own position in Spanish society. As Escario et al. note: For the first time, women were reflecting more on their rights than their duties and obligations. (1996, 50; see also Morcillo 1988; Scanlon 1990)

Internationally, in the Anglo-American world a second wave of feminism was at its height. In the United States civil right struggles were being fought and won; closer to home students were agitating in Paris, France. In Spain, the numbers of feminist texts that had been filtering in and circulating illegally since the early 1960s (Borreguero et al. 1986; Morcillo 1988; Scanlon 1990) were on the rise, encouraging women to recognize as illusionary the choices offered them by the Franquista regime (López-Accotto 1999). These texts were to have an important influence not only amongst feminists but all women who in those years began, for the first time, to feel a sense of rebellion against their traditional role. (Escario et al. 1996, 50)

Most notable of these texts were Betty Friedan’s The feminist mystique (first published 1963) and Simone De Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe (The second sex, first published in 1949) (Thornham 2001). A Spanish copy of the latter found its way into Spain from Argentina

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in 1962. Circulating clandestinely, as Cañas notes in an article commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the book, it quickly became known as the feminist bible. It was passed from hand to hand. [I]n it many Spanish women encountered a profound reflection (with respect to the condition of women) on what they already knew intuitively. (1999a, 32; my translation. See also López Pardina 1999)

What was already known intuitively was further developed and formulated through the lens offered by Betty Friedan. Friedan’s The feminist mystique (1963), focusing on the experience of housewives in the United States in the 1950s, argued that patriarchal American society saw the roles of housewife and mother as the ‘natural’ destiny of women because of their biological capacity for reproduction. This destiny is further naturalized by the seductiveness of the ideologies of love and romance circulated through the media, promoted by capitalist consumption as well as by ‘experts’ in medicine and health guiding women towards particular feminine ideals (see Jacobs Brumberg 1998). Friedan (1963) argued that this undermined women’s ambition to excel in the public, professional worlds, drawing them instead towards the limited and alienating private domain of the home through marriage and motherhood. Writing at the height of Fordism when the distinction between the spaces of paid and domestic labour was most marked, Friedan contrasts both the forms of labour – domestic and paid, as well as the sites in which these activities are undertaken. She points out that against the tedious monotony of domestic labour, undertaken for love and largely unrecognized or recognized in ways that do not count, paid work is mentally stimulating. Moreover, it has marked temporal boundaries, offers a wage and financial autonomy, promotion and a recognized status. Yet for Friedan crucially the site of domestic work itself – the home – is particularly alienating and disempowering. The home removes women from the apparently transparent public sphere and makes them less visible. They are disenfranchised by their exclusion and invisibility from the arenas of institutional politics and government, and the labour market, denying them full participatory citizenship. These ideas found resonance in a Spain in which a national form of Catholicism, as the state ideology, persuaded boys and girls towards separate destinies that were also spatialized. The ‘natural’ destiny for men was the public world, and for women, the pri-

Robina Mohammad

vate space of the home and the twin roles of wife and mother (Riera and Valenciano 1991). However, feminist currents in Spain were divided over what counted as oppression. For example, in contrast to equality feminism, difference feminism views ‘the spaces of [women’s] personal, lived experience as the only legitimate starting-point’ (Brooksbank Jones 1997, 11). Difference feminism celebrates the spaces of the home, of the ‘vida cotidiana’ (everyday life), the very spaces that equality feminism sought to negotiate women’s release from. Feminist currents were also divided over the means for developing women’s empowerment.

From equality to state feminism McBride Stetson and Mazur reflect on how The most striking consequence of over 25 years of women’s movement activism has been the array of institutional arrangements inside democratic states devoted to women’s policy questions. (1995, 1)

However, feminists have been unable to come to any agreement about the role of the state in the achievement of their objectives. Marxist and Radical feminists view the state as an instrument of capitalism and patriarchy respectively (see Elshtain 1983; MacKinnon 1989). In the Spanish context, radical feminists regard man as the oppressor, rather than a patriarchal, socio-political-economic system, thus they ruled out the possibility of collaboration on projects of resistance that involved an engagement with institutional politics. Difference feminists, who privilege women’s knowledges and viewpoints, believed that any engagement with formal political structures would inevitably and irrevocably transform feminists themselves, compromising the commitment to their own and collective autonomy. By contrast, equality feminism’s liberal view does not see the state as an instrument of oppression, but rather as a facility that can be used by any group able to develop the political capital to promote its own vision of the world. State power can be harnessed to develop equality between men and women (Riera and Valenciano 1991). It is this position that enabled equality feminism to achieve hegemony over alternative feminist visions through its institutionalization with the establishment of the Instituto de la Mujer (the state women’s office) in 1983. Taking their cue from the national state, regional and municipal authorities also set up women’s offices.

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In Andalucía, for example, the regional state women’s department, the Instituto Andaluz de la Mujer, was formalized in 1988. Málaga’s Delegación Municipal de la Mujer was established more recently in 1994. At this point I should note that by SSF I do not simply refer to the formal political apparatus of the state, but to the network of agencies and technologies through which governance is achieved. Governance draws together and produces ‘a profusion of shifting alliances between diverse authorities’ (Rose and Miller 1992, 174), all those involved in knowledge production, including academics, journalists, teachers, medical and health authorities, experts on populations, the physical and social environment, industry and economy. Such authorities form a complex web that imbricates state and non-state actors in such a way that it blurs the distinction between state and civil society. Fentress and Wickham argue that ‘social groups construct their own images of the world by establishing an agreed version of the past’ (1992, ix–x) achieved through research and knowledge production. Thus funding research on gender issues and dissemination of the findings is key to governing the problem of gender inequality. So, Lambea Peña notes how the Instituto Andaluz de la Mujer started business ‘with a study of the social situation of Andalucían women in order to diagnose reality’ (1999, 24); the Instituto de la Mujer also stresses the need ‘to make a reliable diagnosis of the situation’ (1997, 17). Connected by a shared vision, and an informal commitment to cooperation and coordination of initiatives, state women’s offices have at their disposal extensive technologies to mould Spanish womanhood in ways that parallel the dictatorship. The Instituto de la Mujer’s Equality Plan stresses that education is the basic instrument to achieve equality of opportunity . . . an essential element for the autonomy of women, so they are able to develop their own opinions . . . (Instituto de la Mujer 1997, 15)

Women must develop their ‘own opinions’, but must do so in accordance with equality feminism’s vision, so the Proposal for Action 26 in the Instituto Andaluz de la Mujer’s (1995) Equality Plan (current at the time of writing) calls for: Campaigns of awareness and training in non sexist orientation [to be] directed to families and students with the objective of transforming their attitudes to their future choice of profession.

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State women’s offices draw on experts in a range of fields to direct women. Both the Instituto Andaluz de la Mujer and the Instituto de la Mujer publish extensive material to inform and guide women, ranging from books (produced from a variety of disciplinary locations) to free guides and booklets advising women on a range issues such as employment (for example, a guide to reconciling family and working life), domestic violence, sexual health and educational choices. At the same time, their involvement in the production of knowledges allows state women’s offices a privileged role in the production of a collective memory of women’s history which acts as a basis for the formulation of gender equality programmes and provides legitimation for equality feminism.

Re-narrating Franquista Spain: women as ‘other’ Fentress and Wickham argue that individual memory becomes transformed into a social or collective memory ‘essentially by talking about it’ (1992, ix–x). Yet it is not simply having a voice that is significant in this process, but being heard. It is the narratives of the privileged, of those who have the status and resources, to circulate, normalize and universalize particular knowledges or versions of the past. At the same time as Summerfield points out, local and particular accounts [of the past] cannot escape the conceptual definitional effects of powerful public representations . . . [thus p]ersonal narratives draw on the generalised subject available in discourse to construct the particular personal subject. (1998, 15)

Thus, for young women, public representations act as a memory of the Franquista years. Yet powerful public representations also work on the memories of older women who have lived experience of the Franquista years. The collective memory prompts and guides recollections, infusing and enhancing personal memories of lived experiences. It is able to animate and re-configure recollections into new constellations, endowing experiences with new meanings. At times it may even overwrite those memories. Thus the act of remembering is highly ideological. Lorée Enders, with reference to historiography, notes how after the end of the dictatorship hegemonic power belonged to the centre and liberal left. The ‘[f ]ormer winners were now losers, and their story rested in the hands of their political enemies’

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(1999, 389). It is in this context that re-narrations, whether self-consciously propounding equality feminism or otherwise, have a tendency to conceive the dictatorship as a regime that disrupted Spain’s ‘natural’ progression from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ with profound implications for women. Women’s distinctiveness and differences from men were reinforced by a dictatorship, ideologically committed to ‘tradition’. Under the command of General Franco, Nationalists seized power in 1939 and emerged victorious in a bloody civil war fought against the democratically elected, liberal left regime of the Second Republic (1931–1936). In this narration the Second Republic becomes a regime that liberated women from tradition to modernity. Alted, for example, notes the ‘favourable climate’ for women, during the Republic and even during the Civil War in the Republican zone. This ‘translated into a series of conquests on three fronts: juridical equality with men . . . equality of opportunities with respect to education5 . . . [and] protective labour legislation . . .’ (1991, 301). During this period women were granted suffrage. Moreover, they were to be liberated from the home through the divorce legislation (Moxon-Browne 1989). It is against these Republican reforms that the Franquista regime is constructed as a ‘return to the past’; ‘returning women’ (Aline Barrachina 1991, 211; see also Carerra Suárez and Viñuela Suárez 2001) to the home, pushing women, back from ‘modernity’ to ‘tradition’ given that the ideology of the [Franquista] regime with respect to women was based on the exaltation of their traditional roles of wife and mother confined to their homes. (Riera and Valenciano 1991, 40)

Thus the dictatorship reversed the progressive reforms made under the Republican regime. National Catholicism6 provided an ideological framework for the reproduction of the nation (Nash 2000). It put the Catholic family, characterized by gender divisions and hierarchy, at the base of Franquista society, as the vehicle for a conservative national regeneration. As the preamble to the L...