When healthy Spanish women had no carnal desire

"Healthy women lack sexual desire," proclaimed Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, director of the psychiatric services of the rebel army.

"The sensual woman has sunken eyes, discolored cheeks, transparent ears, pointed chin, dry mouth, sweaty hands, broken waist, insecure step and sad all her being", Father García Figar described more prolixly in

magazine

, maximum exponent of the publications called to mold post-war Spanish women according to the submissive ideal and servant of the Falange.

In the "sensual" woman, the understanding "darkens", "only the imagination remains active, with the representation of lascivious images that fill it completely".

And if this demonic imagination pushed her to adultery, the female must have known that a 1942 law had returned the crime suppressed by the Republic to the Penal Code and that this new norm defended that "the seriousness of the damage" was "greater in the infidelity of the wife” than in the case of the husband.

“Don't complain if he's late, if he's going to have fun without you, or if he doesn't show up all night.

She tries to understand her world of commitments ”, the Falangist leader Pilar Primo de Rivera instructed the ladies.

Thus, as described by several researchers at a conference in Pontevedra on female sexual repression in the dictatorship, it is how a non-conflictive society for the State was built under Franco.

In it, the man, as taught in the classrooms, was "the head of the family" and had his particular corral inside the house in which to exercise his thirst for dominance (without having to quench it by rebelling against the authorities).

Meanwhile, the subjugation of women was entrenched in the pseudoscientific foundations of regime doctors, textbooks for young ladies, pamphlets, magazines, and Sunday homilies.

But above all thanks to the continuous work, for more than four decades, of the Women's Section and the Patronage for the Protection of Women, in practice a prison for unruly young people aged 15 to 25, sometimes more,

Under the title of

, the Pontevedra Provincial Council dedicated a day to reviewing, with several Spanish historians, what they described as gears of the regime to annihilate sexuality and in general any initiative of women beyond their domestic work.

This was defended, for example, in 1942 by Pilar Primo de Rivera, José Antonio's sister, from the top of the Women's Section: “Women never discover anything;

they lack, of course, the creative talent, reserved by God for manly intelligences”.

Or her close collaborator Carmen Werner: "Nothing pleases masculine psychology as much as the submission of women and nothing pleases feminine psychology as much as submissive surrender."

Pilar Primo de Rivera among young Nazis.

Bettmann Archive

The Women's Section or the "denial of sexuality"

The complacent submission to male appetites was the general slogan of the Women's Section ("Try to be the wheel of the cart, leave the government to someone else. Courage woman, to fulfill your new and glorious mission in silence and ignorance").

It did not matter whether Pilar Primo de Rivera wrote it ("The life of every woman, despite how much she wants to simulate -or conceal- is nothing more than an eternal desire to find someone to submit to") or that one of the media did it criers.

"Motherhood will not be instinct, but duty, and at the same time expiation", inculcated the book

as a cleaning formula after the carnal act.

"Men continue to like them very much, to marry, white blackbirds who have lived their first love with them," advised

In these pages, it was sometimes made clear: "If you are superior to him mentally, do not make him feel this superiority."

And on other occasions, inflamed metaphors were resorted to: “Think that evil is always near, insinuating sin in your ear, deceiving you with promises of distant seas, a vain illusion of an empty shell [...] the useless overflows end in the sad spectacle of the ponds”.

According to María Victoria Martins, a historian of repression with a gender perspective, the "denial of women's sexuality" was one of the results of the fusion of Catholic conservatism with fascism.

There was not a glimmer of light among the most renowned Spanish doctors until Ramón Serrano Vicens managed to publish in the 1970s the result of an investigation that he began in 1933, with the collection of testimonies from his own patients.

Throughout 1,500 interviews with women, Martins recalls, she found that "masturbation was a common practice" and that many Spanish women recognized premarital relationships, adultery, abortions and lesbian experiences while the "patriarchal society" ruled in the marital bed.

A year before his death, in an interview with El País (1977),

Tip number 5 of the 'Guide to the Good Wife', written by Pilar Primo de Rivera and published in 1953.

The result of education segregated by sex and the general blackout of women's appetites also had its counterpoint within the Women's Section itself, guarantor of morality.

According to Martins, in her bosom there were inevitably "infatuations between women".

However, Nanina Santos, co-founder of the Asociación Galega da Muller, defends, the strategy of the dictatorship was the "invisibility" of female homosexuality: "While thousands of men were punished with prison and ridicule, lesbians had the dubious luck of not exist because we were the most dysfunctional compared to the regime's model of housewives,” describes this retired history teacher.

The lives of many were spent "blaming themselves, closing themselves in false bottom cabinets" and even, at the request of their families,

The Board of Trustees or the “derailed prison”

The Valencian Llum Quiñonero was "struck" that in 1977 there were 9,000 social prisoners in Spanish prisons without amnesty and that in 40 years, however, "hardly" there would have been women.

She began to “investigate” and that was how she found them all “interned in the Board of Trustees”, an organization considered to be a benefactor that functioned between 1941 and 1985 to “redeem those who had gone astray, fallen or at risk of falling”.

That institution was the "hell" of women, describes the gynecologist and professor at the University of Granada Enriqueta Barranco.

The Board of Trustees was organized into provincial boards and had a national classification center that, after the vaginal examination, classified them as "complete" and "not complete".

The tentacles that reached everywhere were the police, the local authorities,

in girls.

The papers speak of a very varied casuistry, from young war widows who work as prostitutes to support their children to minors caught at dawn in a bar or having their first relationship with their boyfriend.

The documentation of these centers today has different fates depending on the community.

While several archives are available in Galicia, in Andalusia, according to Barranco, "they are still kidnapped in conventual venues."

Upon being hospitalized, families lost guardianship, pregnant women ended up confined in "pregnant mothers' homes and maternity hospitals such as Nuestra Señora de la Almudena, in Peñagrande, Madrid."

Many other girls were misplaced, sent to centers in diametrically opposite provinces on the map, Barranco denounces.

According to this researcher, they worked in a “slave” way, embroidering, cleaning, cooking for the “preserved” girls, students from the same nun schools, with whom they could not mix.

Specifically, the gynecologist points out, the Peñagrande inmates "sewed and stuffed stuffed animals for the English Court", and for their tasks "they did not receive any payment".

From left to right: Pilar Primo de Rivera, Carmen Polo and Francisco Franco, in an act of the Women's Section in El Escorial, in 1944.

In many of these reformatories "they were shaved" and in centers such as Nuestra Señora de los Ojos Grandes in Lugo, where there was "an isolation and punishment cell", "there were no mirrors" so that the adolescents "could not look at themselves".

“There were suicides, escapes, police chases,” says Quiñonero.

To get rid of that prison, in which they remained an average of eight years, many of them had no choice but to marry (even "forced", with men who went to choose them at the centers) or "become nuns".

"Many ended up with psychological disorders" and there was "a space reserved for

" in asylums that, "like the one in Ciempozuelos, admitted lesbians."

In the files of the Board of Trustees in Pontevedra, there have been cases of girls who were punished with imprisonment after becoming pregnant due to violations by their own parents.

The victims of this machinery were "stigmatized" and according to Llum Quiñonero "they have never organized to vindicate their history", which was diluted "in the mist" of the Transition.

For these "crimes", moreover, "the Church was never held accountable."

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