Hannah

“I would say I was raised very feminist. The family has a double-barreled surname because my folks hyphenated their names to negotiate the whole names and marriage thing. (Pro tip: don’t hyphenate – people will assume you’re really posh, and if both names are unusual you’ll spend the rest of your life spelling it out to people.)

“I always identified with feminism and was never scared of the word.  I was brought up to believe I could do anything I wanted and my mom made a point of giving me and my brother equal access to all types of toys – like having boy dolls as well as girl dolls. She also always named sexism where she saw it. This was a real gift because growing up I saw sexism as a bad thing and a lazy assumption, rather than just the status quo.

“As I’ve grown up I’ve realised retrospectively just how rad my mom was – she went to Greenham Common, she bought Spare Rib magazine, she had rainbow shoelaces (which I’ve stolen) – but also I’m profoundly grateful that she never ever let me become fucked up about food and body image, or to correlate body-image with self-worth. I really feel like I’ve dodged a massive bullet with that one and am a lot better off than many women because of it.

Love you, Mom (now quit pestering me about grandkids).”

Rai

“My Mum didn’t really raise me in a ‘feminist way’, but the cumulative actions of my parents together has helped to shape my views on the world and, more specifically the concept of equality.  As I understand it, my Mum took time off work to look after me when I was very little and after my brother was born too, but when he was old enough, Mum and Dad essentially swapped.  Mum went back to working in the City and Dad became a househusband right up until I was 12 years old.  Having a mother who worked full time in London and a stay-at-home dad is bound to have an effect (insert some philosophical/psychological insight into strong independent female figures and role models), but that wasn’t the only thing.

“My parents told me once that before they had me (their first child) they sat down and made the time to discuss and agree that there would be no greater importance placed on one parent or the other based on their gender.  So if Mum was looking after us and we did something naughty, there would be no ‘just you wait until your Father gets home!’ threat of punishment… you just got punished by whichever parent was there.  Or, indeed, my Grandma when we lived with her for a while (who is also a huge influence on my feminist tendencies).”

Viktoriya

“Let’s be clear on one thing: my mother (who is Bulgarian) is a farmer’s daughter. Whatever else she became later on, she can still kill and pluck a chicken, cure many common ailments with mysterious herbs, and pick tobacco leaves with her bare hands (no lie: she still has the scars). Of course, that’s not all she is. For one thing, when the local doctor decided to try bloodletting to cure my infant aunt’s colic, my mother snatched her from the doctor’s hands and ran away with her, reasoning that the doctor was a fool and that at nine years old she was clearly more qualified to treat her sister. (Who was fine, by the way, due in no small measure to my mother’s interference.) By the time my mother was thirteen, she had outgrown her local village school, and so she simply packed her bags and moved out of the family home to a nearby city to continue her education.

“At eighteen, when the rest of her friends were getting married and having children, she stayed resolutely single and enrolled at a university instead. A few years later she scandalised polite society by taking up with an older divorcee who – shockingly – was both Armenian and a dissident. When he set off to sea in that dreadfully romantic way that makes sense only in films, she ran the household, raised two children, led the local community group and dealt with the persistent interest of the secret police. She taught me to cook, and to sew, and to knit, and explained that while it was nice to see my father every once in a while, fundamentally I’d have to be prepared to run a household – a community – a country – all by myself.

(The one thing she ever forbade me to do was to become an accountant. Her reason? “Boring.”)

“In this different country, with Communism a fading memory from far away, my mother blends into the background, no different from any of the millions of women in our cities and villages. But when the light is right, and if you know how to look, she is still the twenty-year-old in the pictures: the one with the long hair and the wide smile, who shimmied down the side of a building to sneak away from the secret police and escape, laughing, on the back of her dissident lover’s motorcycle.

I think we can all be grateful she decided to be a mother, rather than an Evil Overlady.

As for the accountancy? I hate to say it, but I should have listened to my mother.”

“¡No pasarán!”
(‘They shall not pass!’)

-Dolores Ibárruri, July 19, 1936 (Madrid, Spain)

Dolores Ibárruri age 82

No, not Gandalf: La Pasionaria.  Or, ‘The Passion Flower’ in English.  Before I continue to talk about Ibárruri, I acknowledge that I’m a bit of a giddy schoolchild when it comes to praising anything Basque in a public sphere and that having a Hispanic Studies degree means I take some knowledge for granted.  So some background information is probably going to be pretty useful for you all.

The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 when General Francisco Franco led troops in an attempted coup d’état against the Second Republic. Although the government were caught unawares and significant numbers of Spain’s army were behind Franco, the events of July 1936 turned into a three year civil war.  Having written several thousand words on the subject during the course of my degree, I could go into much greater detail but I don’t want to detract from our main focus.  Basics to remember: Franco et al were far-right/fascist; the Second Republic was left/socialist.  Now we can move on to our woman of the hour.

Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez was born on 9^th December 1895 in Gallarta, within the borders of the Basque Country in Spain, into a poor mining family.  In 1918 she adopted the pseudonym ‘Pasionaria’ on the publication of an article, highlighting religious hypocrisy, which coincided with Holy Week in a devotedly Catholic country.  In 1920 she was appointed as a member of the Provincial Committee of the Basque Communist Party and in 1930 moved up to the Central Committee of the PCE (Communist Party of Spain).  In ’31 she moved to Madrid alongside the formation of the Second Republic and was jailed in September ’31 for the first in several arrests over the following five years.

There are many amazing things that she did as a prominent pre-war communist woman in politics in Spain, and for a succinct overview of them all I urge you to have a look over on her Wikipedia entry.  There’s only so much I can say within one article and I want to focus on her wartime contributions to the fight against Franco and fascism.

During the war she was, above all, an astounding orator and a passionate figurehead for the men and women trying desperately to battle Franco’s advances.  As a communist she was no stranger to strong retaliations against her speeches and actions, but during the Civil War she became much more than just a voice for communism.  She became a central figure for the Republicans trying to push fascism back and defend Spain against Franco.

The whole country cringes in indignation at these heartless barbarians that would hurl our democratic Spain back down into an abyss of terror and death. However, THEY SHALL NOT PASS! For all of Spain presents itself for battle.

[…] The Communist Party calls you to arms. We especially call upon you, workers, farmers, intellectuals to assume your positions in the fight to finally smash the enemies of the Republic and of the popular liberties. Long live the Popular Front! Long live the union of all anti-fascists! Long live the Republic of the people! The Fascists shall not pass! THEY SHALL NOT PASS!

– Dolores Ibárruri, No Pasarán speech (translated here)

• Youtube:an original speech
• Youtube: Maxine Peake reading her International Brigades’ sendoff speech

 



La Pasionaria statue in Glasgow

Most people will know, however, that Franco won.  Ibárruri spent much of her life thereafter in exile, but returned to Madrid in 1977 and lived in Spain for the remaining 12 years of her life.  On her 90^th birthday, the PCE organised a party in Madrid with upwards of 15,000 guests; when she died of pneumonia at age 93 thousands of people paid their respects and attended her funeral, where they chanted “They shall not pass!”. The life and actions of La Pasionaria were felt internationally (e.g. there’s a statue of her in Glasgow) and there remains strong opinion on both sides of the political spectrum on her in Spain (if you read Spanish, have a glance at some of the comments on the YouTube video).

I know this has been brief, but there is plenty more to discover for yourself; I am only here to open the door.

It is better to die on your feet than to live forever on your knees.

– La Pasionaria

Sources and further reading (other than Wikipedia)

• Daniele Conversi, The Basques, The Catalans and Spain: Alternative Routes to Nationalist Mobilisation (2000)
• Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (2005)
• Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge (2006)
]]> /2011/09/19/revolting-women-la-pasionaria-or-the-woman-who-fought-franco/feed/ 3 7385