Republicanas : Revolución, guerra y exilio de nueve diputadas

The Second Spanish Republic had three legislatures between 1931 and 1939. During that period, only nine women held seats in the Cortes (Parliament). Nine, among hundreds of male deputies. Four of them made parliamentary history for different reasons: Dolores Ibárruri, Clara Campoamor, Margarita Nelken, and Victoria Kent; but others, equally important, have fallen into unjust oblivion. This is the case of the writers María Lejárraga and Matilde de la Torre, the lawyer Julia Álvarez Resano, the teacher Veneranda García Manzano, and the educator Francisca Bohigas, the only one who did not have to go into exile after the Civil War. All of them, however, were the vanguard of many other women who, in the first decades of the 20th century, from the cultural sphere, the labor movement, and the legal profession, fought for an equality that seemed remote in a country dominated by oligarchies and political bosses, a reactionary Church, and a reactionary Army. More than just a collective biography of these nine female members of parliament, Republicanas is also the story of the struggles for women's suffrage, equal rights, and political commitment to the underprivileged. It is also the story of a country that saw the enormous social and feminist progress, so painstakingly won during the brief republican period, vanish after the Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship.