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Title: Free Women of Spain
Author: David Porter
Date: 1992, Spring
Language: en
Topics: review, Spanish Revolution, anarcha-feminism, Spanish Civil War, Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #339
Source: Fifth Estate #339, Spring, 1992, accessed September 2, 2019 at https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/339-spring-1992/free-women-of-spain/

David Porter

Free Women of Spain

a review of

Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of

Women, by Martha A. Ackelsberg (Indiana University Press, 1991)

I write this review on the day George Bush officially declares his

intent to run again for president. Against the backdrop of this obscene,

insulting non-event, the positive image of grassroots politics evoked by

Free Women of Spain stands out all the more. Obviously, envisioning and

struggling toward fulfillment of people’s fullest capacities is far

removed from the media’s image of politics.

This new work by Martha Ackelsberg successfully conveys the intensity

and meaning of genuine politics, as experienced by anarchist women of

Spain the 1930s. It also consciously and convincingly overlays this

experience on our own contemporary scene.

The result is a powerful portrayal of revolution within a revolution and

clear suggestions as to where, by comparison, we stand in present-day

North America.

Ackelsberg focuses on the emergence and struggle of the independent

anarchist women’s organization, Mujeres Libres (“Free Women”). The

issues are presented within the intense context of the Spanish civil war

and revolution of the late 1930s. Her ten years of research combined

excellent, extensive archival inquiry with many interviews of Mujeres

Libres activists.

Founded in 1936 by anarchist women militants in Barcelona and Madrid,

Mujeres Libres attempted to recruit women to the anarchist movement. It

also articulated and gave women strength for their intense inner

struggle for self-worth and self-assertion.

At the same time, Mujeres Libres assisted the overall movement by

enlarging the definition of anarchism—through the voice of direct female

experience—to include new perspectives, organizing strategies and

important goals immediately beneficial for women. In Ackelsberg’s words,

it was founded “because too few women had experienced empowerment within

the existing organizations of the Spanish anarchist and

anarcho-syndicalist movements. It aimed to become a ‘community of

empowerment’ for working-class women and, at the same time, an

organizational context for women’s empowerment within the libertarian

movement as a whole” (pp. 163-64). “Its very existence…was a form of

direct action” (p. 177).

As repeatedly emphasized by Mujeres Libres activists, the organization

promoted not individualist or elitist feminism, but a social revolution

liberating men as well as women. It advocated not separatism from male

anarchists, but the autonomy necessary to develop massive and equal

female participation in defining and struggling for a common social

revolution.

The Mujeres Libres organizational network included close to 100 local

groups and over 30,000 women from all parts of republican Spain. Until

the final conquest by Franco’s fascist forces in early 1939, Mujeres

Libres engaged in a tremendous range of activities.

As described by Ackelsberg in some detail, these included local classes

in basic literacy, technical skills and general culture; widespread

publishing; professional apprenticeship programs; maternity clinics and

nursing schools; education on sexuality and contraception; support

services for refugees and those at the front lines; and even

pre-military training.

In one form or another, during the space of only two-and-a-half years,

such energetic activity no doubt reached millions of Spanish women and

men.

Many of the articulated impulses behind the founding of Mujeres Libres

sound strikingly similar to female activists’ critiques of experience in

SDS, SNCC, campus and antiwar movements of the 1960s. The author could

have strengthened her overall linkage of Spain to the present by noting

more explicit connections.

Statements which appear in this book as recollections by Spanish

anarchist women closely resemble those that abounded in U.S. movements

in the late ’60s. In movement activities, men were “always the leaders,

and we [were] always the followers. Whether in the streets or at home.

We [were] little better than slaves.” And this despite the libertarian

movement’s stated goal of full equality for women.

“One time a companero from the [anarchist youth organization] came over

to me, and said, ‘You, who say you’re so liberated. You’re not so

liberated. Because if I would ask you to give me a kiss [or more], you

wouldn’t.’ “

“The boys started making fun of the [female] speakers, which annoyed me

from the outset. When the woman who was speaking finished, the boys

began asking questions and saying it didn’t make sense [for women] to

organize separately, since they wouldn’t do anything anyway.”

It was impossible for women to help teach workers at union meetings

“because of the attitudes of some companeros. They didn’t take women

seriously. There is a saying: ‘women belong in the kitchen or darning

socks.’ No, it was impossible: women barely dared to speak in that

context.”

Harassment by many male anarchists continued once Mujeres Libres was

underway. One supposedly sympathetic top-level male leader explained

that since people naturally try to hold on to whatever privilege they

have, it was unrealistic to expect males in the anarchist movement not

to do the same: women will have to struggle for equality on their own.

At the same time, though favoring sexual freedom in principle, anarchist

men typically “ridiculed or denigrated those women [as opposed to men]

who practiced it.”

In organizational terms, Mujeres Libres was criticized for diverting

women’s commitment to the anarchist cause into separate and, by

implication, less significant “personal” struggles. It naturally

followed that the three large male-dominated organizations of Spanish

anarchists (FAI, CNT, FIJL) never recognized Mujeres Libres as a group

equally important to their own in shaping the direction of Spanish

anarchism and in sharing movement resources.

While silent on North American women’s experience in ’60s movements,

Ackelsberg does argue that the Spanish pattern was similar to that

experienced by women in the historical socialist movement more

generally. As she underlines, however, this contradiction in the

anarchist movement was especially glaring.

After all, the essence of anarchism is rejection of all hierarchy,

privilege and domination. In its unity of means and ends, it is

committed to revolutionary practice within and by the movement

consistent with social goals espoused. Liberation begins in the

immediate present or it will never emerge.

Liberation of women—psychologically, culturally, politically and

economically—can never be subsumed to an agenda of “higher priorities”

decided by others (the movement’s predominantly male decision makers).

Oppression is multidimensional; there must be progress toward the

liberatory goals specific to each component of the movement if common

overall movement objectives are to be reached.

According to Ackelsberg, many and perhaps most male Spanish anarchists

gave lip service to this perspective. A significant minority seemed

genuinely supportive of Mujeres Libres’ grassroots efforts and

propaganda. Yet, reading Ackelsberg and hearing the direct voice of

Mujeres Libres militants, it’s impossible not to believe that movement

males’ fundamental ambiguity on this point (despite their heroic

struggles in other realms) would have fatally prevented anarchist

revolution—even without the more obvious, deadly obstacles of

international hostility, ongoing war and the counterrevolutionary

attitudes and behavior of most non-anarchists in Spain.

It’s obvious to anyone active in recent North American anarchist circles

that a comparable pattern of oppressive male messages and critical

female response has been as common here as it was in Spain. In part

because of this, over the past twenty-five years there has emerged a

significant wave of movement activity defining itself as

“anarcha-feminist.”

Especially articulated during its earlier years in grassroots

publications and by local women’s collectives, the origins, perspective

and activities involved are in many respects quite similar to those of

Mujeres Libres. It is surprising, therefore, that despite Ackelsberg’s

clear effort to relate the experience of Mujeres Libres to contemporary

North American feminist theory and practice, I found no reference in the

book to contemporary “anarcha-feminism.”

It is certainly true (as Ackelsberg well demonstrates) that many of the

issues articulated and explored by Mujeres Libres in the 1930s have been

accepted for years as appropriate approaches in our own context by many

in the larger feminist movement. These include movement strategies such

as grassroots communication outside the workplace, personal

consciousness-raising, and autonomous “communities of orientation in the

process of consciousness change.”

They also include respect for and valuation of “difference” in the

movement. Much of this perspective came from women’s own direct

experience, including challenges from within the feminist movement by

working-class females and women of color. But my guess is that

“anarcha-feminist” writing and practice and/or exposure to anarchist

writing and models from the past have also influenced modern feminism.

Certainly Emma Goldman’s life and writings have been influential. And

Goldman was an enthusiastic supporter of Mujeres Libres. Ackelsberg’s

persistent linkage between the 1930s and the present certainly makes one

curious about the extent of such influence on the contemporary movement,

although that is not the subject of her book.

Another issue raised by the book concerns the dynamics of political

devaluation or neglect. This theme was played out repeatedly in male

Spanish anarchists’ attitudes toward grievances, issues, organizing

strategies and organization of female comrades.

At various points throughout the book, it struck me that the overall

attitude toward and treatment of anarchists generally by others of the

so-called “progressive movement” is often quite comparable. How many

times have the latter claimed that anarchists are hopelessly naive,

unrealistic, inappropriately combining long-range utopian demands with

immediate agendas for change, disorganized and overly spontaneous,

diverting movement energies into less important areas and splitting the

movement in the face of the enemy? In Spain, wasn’t the hostility of

most other “progressives” in the Loyalist camp to the revolutionary

agenda and activities of the anarchists similar to the reception of

Mujeres Libres within, the existing anarchist movement?

If it is true, as Ackelsberg asserts, that traditional political

discourse has excluded women from the classic liberal notion of “social

contract,” it is just as true that anarchists and those who share their

perspective without giving it a name have been excluded—by

definition—from any form of statist social contract no matter how much

“difference” it was prepared to tolerate. Traditional political theory

always assumes the need for a state and excludes participation by

anarchists in the “legitimate political community.”

Says Ackelsberg, many current feminist and participatory democratic

egalitarian texts point out the need to acknowledge, respect and be

enriched by “difference,” (the diversity of identities and various

“communities of orientation”) in every realm of society. She finds that

they have much in common with the writings and struggles of Mujeres

Libres. If so, and if they are joined to the now-acknowledged need of

many contemporaries to find non-hierarchical approaches to social

revolution in the wake of East Europe’s debacle, respect for and

influence by anarchist theory and practice may well grow in the coming

decade.

Ackelsberg gives the reader a fine explanation of the Spanish events,

the general perspective of anarchism and the inspiring goals and

struggles of Mujeres Libres. All this, combined with her skill in

relating them to present-day contexts and theory, make this a very

worthwhile volume.