The women of Sección Femenina

An intersectional approach to their militancy profiles and membership motives

Abstract

This article addresses the identity of the women of the single party during Francoism, analyzing their social origins as «old shirts» of the Falange prior to 1936, and the inflation in the ranks of FET-JONS during and after the conflict. Using the various theoretical approaches to the organization, chronologies and case studies from all over Spain, we will try to understand what was the power of attraction of the only legal female «political» organization during the dictatorship, in the various stages of its existence. It was in the reactionary trajectory of affluent families, where we observed how their daughters were encouraged to first support the campaigns against the secularization of the Republican State; vote for the right in 1933, and then compensate «their fallen» in the Civil War. In the words of Pilar Primo de Rivera, the most important thing was not the adult organization or its youths, «who are like the battlements of our towers, [but] those dead who are really our foundations, who are our roots».