Free Women Of Spain

"When historians take women's movements and gender differences in organizations... seriously, this book will become part of the canon.... a forthright effort to view women's participation in politics in exciting new ways." --American Historical Review "The work not only fills a gap in knowledge of women's radical politics, but also addresses current concerns of feminist scholars." --Choice "The book brings us something of the excitement of the revolutionary possibility lived by these women--and the frustration of their encounter with male resistance to including women's emancipation in the revolutionary program." --Signs "Theirs is a story of commitment and creativity, of steadfastness and practicality, of communal endeavour and the bleak individual fate of defeat, hardship, and exile." --Gender and History "Ackelsberg, in the roles of both historian and activist, has crafted a volume that speaks to a wide variety of interests.... Her story is rich with the memories and voices of women... " --The Women's Review of Books "The author examines the autonomous women's liberation organization in late-1930s Spain, which represented an alternative to the individualistic perspectives characterizing mainstream feminist movements of the time." --Smith Alumnae Quarterly "... particularly strong on the ideology and organization of this radical women's group of the late 1930s." --Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Bulletin "Ackelsberg gives the reader a fine explanation of the Spanish events, the general perspective of anarchism and the inspiring goals and struggles of Mujeres Libres." --Fifth Estate Ackelsberg explores the development of Mujeres Libres, founded in 1936 during the Civil War in Spain as an organization dedicated to the liberation of women from their triple enslavement--to ignorance, as women, and as producers.

She discusses the factors that provoked the war and how they affected Spanish women - both the "visible" women who during the turbulent 1920s and 1930s tried to become part of mainstream politics and the "invisible" women who came to the fore during the revolutionary years of the Second Spanish Republic from 1931 to 1936 and became activists in the protest against the military insurrection of 1936.

Free Women based their activities upon the dialog, the solidarity and the equality of differences. It was therefore a model for the social movements of the current dialogical societies of the XXIst Century, in which these elements basic are to overcome the social inequalities. Free Women organization was created in the framework of the libertarian movement shortly before the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. It was one of the movements with greatest impact upon the lives of the worker and peasant women. More than twenty thousand women enrolled the organization, almost all of them young women, workers and with no academic education. They got organized in order to overcome what they called the triple slavery of the worker woman: slavery as a woman, slavery as a worker and slavery for the lack of opportunities to gain access to education. They were the main actresses of the complete transformation of their own lives. They didn't only claim for labor and social equality, but they also transformed their personal relationships, love and the sexuality, contributing to the overcoming of a traditional masculinity model based upon power relationships and double standards. Laura Ruiz is a researcher at the University of Barcelona.

The first anthology in English on modern Spanish women's history and identity formation.

With fists upraised, Mujeres Libres struggled for their own emancipation and the freedom of all.

In hundreds of businesses, secretaries -- usually women -- do clerical work in "open floor" settings while managers -- usually men -- work and make decisions behind closed doors. According to Daphne Spain, this arrangement is but one example of the ways in which physical segregation has reinforced women's inequality. In this important new book, Spain shows how the physical and symbolic barriers that separate women and men in the office, at home, and at school block women's access to the socially valued knowledge that enhances status. Spain looks at first at how nonindustrial societies have separated or integrated men and women. Focusing then on one major advanced industrial society, the United States, Spain examines changes in spatial arrangements that have taken place since the mid-nineteenth century and considers the ways in which women's status is associated with those changes. As divisions within the middle-class home have diminished, for example, women have gained the right to vote and control property. At colleges and universities, the progressive integration of the sexes has given women students greater access to resources and thus more career options. In the workplace, however, the traditional patterns of segregation still predominate. Illustrated with floor plans and apt pictures of homes, schools, and work sites, and replete with historical examples, Gendered Spaces exposes the previously invisible spaces in which daily gender segregation has occurred -- and still occurs.

This beautifully written biographical work depicts the lives of four extraordinary women to paint a vivid, dramatic, and poignant portrait of the ideologies, horrific realities, and long-lasting emotional costs of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).