Women’s stories about their participation in the university student movement during late francoism

Abstract

The study, based on direct interviews, focuses on the late Francisco Franco period. The work proposes an analysis of the role of women in the university students’ movement and its action strategies, expectations, and full political commitment to change and revolutionary transformation. The student movement offered the young participants an intellectual and political education, as well as new possibilities for experimentation, and new ways of living in which they could exercise their own freedom from family, academic and political authority. The analysis of such new perspectives from a feminist standpoint – developed in the 1970s as a result of women’s experience, increased social consciousness, and progress in the construction of their autonomy as full and independent beings –, allows to recover to a large extent the sense of participation in that process.