The Falange is a way of being (a woman): gender discourses and identities in the Women Section’s periodicals (1938-1945)

Abstract

The Women Section of the Falange’s periodicals in the forties, Medina and Y, contributed to the construction and dissemination of ideals for womanhood accepted in the early period of Franco Dictatorship. Contrary to the thesis that the domesticity model, by virtue of which women were exclusively conceived as spouses and mothers, was reinforced and it emerged as the only referent for Spanish women in the postwar, the analysis of these periodicals confirms that the construction of gender models was a process permeated by tensions and contradictions. These were the legacy of social and cultural changes that had taken place in previous decades, as well as the experience of the Spanish Civil War that, by means of the active participation of thousands of women in the war effort, the dominant gender models in the Francoist side became redefined. Besides, altered these female publications reflected the fascist women’s efforts to negotiate their place in Franco Dictatorship, as well as their desire to make visible their contribution to the ‘New Spain’. To sum up, the article explores the construction of femininity in the Spanish postwar as a process defined by the instability instead of the imposition of a rigid and immutable model.