Women in Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) in Francoist Spain played important roles in the union dating back to the Second Republic period, even as their specific needs like maternity leave, childcare provisions and equal pay were subverted for the improvement of better overall working conditions. Women UGT leaders in the Civil War period included María Lacrampe and Claudina García Perez.
In the post-Civil War period, the Franco regime confiscated all UGT property and other assets. Many members of UGT went into exile, where they formed an external UGT leadership group. Women who remained faced repression, harassment, prison and were disappeared. Feminism and socialism continued to have a fraught relationship. An interior UGT body was formed in 1943, with Claudina García Perez, Julia Vigre and Carmen Guelin some of the most important women inside Spain in this period. Socialist women worked as liaisons or as messengers for clandestine PSOE and UGT activities. In the exterior, the biggest groups were in France and Mexico.
The 1950s and 1960s continued a period where women's issues were ignored as part of broader political ideologies. PSOE also found itself having little control over UGT despite a huge overlap in leadership. Mining strikes in Asturias were some of the biggest labor challenges faced by the regime in this period, with UGT activists at the center of this. Josefina Arrillaga on the interior would begin to set the stage for the fissure that would erupt in 1970 between those in Spain and those in leadership in exile. In the interior, Carmen Romero, Carmen Muriana and Manuela Moreno would be some of those most influential women. On the exterior, Carmen García Bloise would play a pivotal role in getting UGT to change leadership to the interior.
Leadership was formally changed from the exterior to the interior by 1971 with the help of Asturian unionists and militants. Franco died in 1975. The involvement of women in the movement assisted in a push for more democratic ideals that would come about in the 1970s, which would also see feminism merge politically with the movement as part of individual and collective goals towards creating a more democratic society following the death of Franco. In 2019, UGT declared itself as an explicitly feminist union.
Background
Francoist Spain was a pseudo-fascist state whose ideology rejected what it considered the inorganic democracy of the Second Republic. It was an embrace of organic democracy, defined as a reassertion of traditional Spanish Roman Catholic values that served as a counterpoint to the Communism of the Soviet Union during the same period. It came into exist in 1939 following the end of the Spanish Civil War. Misogyny and heteronormativity where linchpins of fascism in Spain, where the philosophy revolved around patria and fixed gender roles that praised the role of strong male leadership.
In July 1936, the Spanish Civil War started with a military coup attempt launched from the Spanish enclave of Melilla. In October of that same year, Franco took over as the Generalissimo and Chief of State in Nationalist zones. On 19 April 1937, Catholic and Falangist parties were merged, making Falange Española Tradicionalista the official state party behind Nationalist lines. On 30 January 1938, the first National State Cabinet meeting was held, with the Spanish Civil War formally coming to an end on 1 April 1939 and an official government formalized on 8 August 1939.
The Franco regime banned all political parties and trade unions. The only permissible type organization was Falange, founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera in 1933. An election was held in 1966, where people were given the option to affirm or deny Franco's leadership. With more voters than electors, Franco was affirmed as Head of State. Prince Juan Carlos was appointed as Franco's official successor in 1970, with Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco being the unofficial successor. Carrero Blanco was assassinated in 1973 by ETA. Franco died in November 1975.
History
Pre-Francoism period Pablo Iglesias founded Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) on 12 August 1888 in Barcelona as a trade union affiliate to his socialist party, PSOE, that he had founded in Madrid in 1879. Early growth for UGT was slowed as it was in competition with an anarchist trade union that focused on reaching out to Spain's working class. UGT's connection with PSOE also gave the union a rigid Marxist ideology coupled with anti-clericalism. This was sometimes difficult for Spain's small industrial working class population who had many other left-wing political options to choose from. In 1921, a split developed inside PSOE which resulted in the creation of Partido Comunista Española (PCE). Despite this, during the 1920s the party continued to grow and was the largest one in the country by 1931 when the Second Republic was founded.
Women were involved in UGT during the 1930s, playing important roles in events like the Asturian miners' strike of 1934. The strike was one of the first major conflicts of the Second Republic, when workers' militias seized control of the mines in Asturias. Originally planned as a nationwide strike, the workers collective action only really took place in Asturias. Some women were involved in propaganda and others in assisting the miners. After the government quelled the insurrection by bringing in Moroccan legionaries, some 30,000 people found themselves in prison and another 1,000 were put into graves. A large number of those put into prison were women. Women also played an advocacy role in trying to see their husbands and male relatives released. Among the UGT women involved in the strike was María Lacrampe, who had joined the union in 1932.
Near the end of 1931, workers at a shoe factor in the village of Arnedo near Logroño were fired because they were members of Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). Villagers decided to protest their firing outside the townhall, and were fired upon for no discernible reason by the Guardia Civil. Four women, a child and a male worker were killed, while another thirty were injured.
In this period, major unions like UGT and Confederación Nacional del trabajo (CNT) ignored specific needs of women, including maternity leave, childcare provisions and equal pay; they instead focused on general needs or needs of men in the workforces they represented. Only 4% of UGT's membership was female by 1932.
Civil War period (1936 - 1939)
UGT leader Francisco Largo Caballero served as Spain's Prime Minister from 1936 to 1937. UGT and PSOE were both banned by Franco in 1938. In November 1937, María Lacrampe became the secretary of the Asociación Socialista de Madrid. As part of her work, she assisted in bringing Spanish Republican children into exile in Belgium. Claudina García Perez served as a member of UGT's Executive Committee from October 1937 to April 1939.
Most of the militias that were created during the immediate outbreak of the Civil War came from civil society groups like trade unions and political parties. CNT, UGT and other unions stepped in to provide logistical support for many of these militias. Aragón UGT militant María Elisa García Saez was killed in combat in the mountains of Múgica on 9 May 1937.
Post Civil War period (1939 - 1945) The Franco regime confiscated all UGT property and other assets, starting in the Civil War and continuing into their early period of governance. Around the start of the War, UGT owned more than 1,100 properties in support of their activities of supporting Spanish workers, including providing relief services and assisting mutual aid societies.
Many members of UGT went into exile and the group had to rely on international support as a consequence of domestic repression. Oran, Algeria would receive around 7,000 members of PSOE and UGT who fled into exile as a result of the Spanish Civil War. UGT and PSOE party member Selina Asenjo Puello went into exile in Argentina after 12 years in France. María Lejárraga also spent time in exile in many European and South American countries.
Women who were affiliated with UGT were disappeared during the early Francoist period.Ballester, David (2003), Els homes sense nom. L’exili i la clandestinitat de la UGT de Catalunya (1939-1976). Barcelona: Viena Edicions-Fundació Josep Comaposada. UGT members also went to prison in the immediate post-Civil War period, where found themselves facing deplorable conditions. During 1939, conditions in prison for children of mothers imprisoned for political offenses were awful. In the Las Ventas prison, an average of eight children died a day as a result of lack of food an unhygienic conditions.
PSOE and UGT militant Ángeles García Ortega was sent to prison for three years in 1939. At the conclusion of the war, María Lacrampe unsuccessfully tried to escape via boat by claiming she was a French citizen. By June 1939, she was in the Las Ventas Prison in Madrid, where she used her time to work as a nurse assisting children of other female prisoners. She would also be present right before many women were put to death, with many of these women offering her their last testimonies. Because of her political involvement, Dolores Bañares Villanueva went to Las Ventas Prison in Madrid on 28 April 1939, where a court martial on 12 June 1940 gave the 39-year-old a twelve-year prison sentence. She was released from an Avila prison on 9 January 1941. PSOE and UGT militant Pilar Pascual was arrested in March 1939 in Yecla, Murcia for writing an article about socialism. Sentenced to death, she would spend time in prison in Yelca, Murcia and Las Ventas in Madrid after her conviction was commuted. After leaving prison, she rejoined PSOE and was active with the organization until she died. Ángeles Malonda was one of the UGT women imprisoned during the Franco regime as a result of her involvement with the union during the Civil War. PSOE and UGT militant María Añó was involved in clandestine PSOE organizations, and would be sent to prison several times as a result of her political activities. By May 1939, when the Spanish Civil War was officially over, Claudina García Perez was in the Las Ventas Prison in Madrid. The case against her was dismissed in 1940, and she was released from prison.
Wives of UGT members also found themselves subject to harassment in Francoist Spain. They could lose their jobs, and have the state take away their children, forcing them into internal exile. Teachers were a group particularly repressed during this period. In the Basque Country, following the Nationalist seizing control of the area, women found themselves being investigated by the new regime. In Biscay, over 300 different women were investigated in this period. Many were also imprisoned. They were subject to scrutiny because people accused them of being involved with or having sympathies for groups like PCE, PSOE, UGT, Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV), and Emakume Abertzaleen Batzak.
Feminism and socialism continued to have a fraught relationship during the early Francoist period.
1940s
Interior Following the end of the Spanish Civil War, the UGT Executive Committee officially convened abroad with no domestic body until 1943. In 1943, Claudina García Perez was invited to serve in on the interior Executive Commission. She would also on the PSOE First and Second Executive Commission in the same period. Franco's government spied on her and persecuted her, before hunting her down with the intention of arresting her. García Perez then fled to exile in France in December 1946. She then moved to Mexico in February 1948.