ABSTRACT
Deeply affected by the German Revolution, Nelken became interested in social issues and feminism. In 1922, she published La condición social de la mujer en España which, from the outset, was received as a revolutionary call for the development of feminism in Spain. In it she argued that women were exploited in every aspect of their lives: the workplace, the home, their sexual relationships, the legal system, and their education. She extensively discusses comparable worth, the social ramifications of a negligible education for women, sexual hypocrisy, the Church's emotional exploitation of women, the lack of sexual education, the problem of illegitimate children, prostitution, single motherhood, and the need for divorce. This book was perceived to be groundbreaking because she did not isolate each problem and treat it as a single issue. Rather, she subsumed all of the different issues under the general category of exploitation. Her male contemporaries on the Right and the Left were shocked and upset by this book. The Right was scandalized by its tough anticlerical line. The Left was hurt because she did not exclude it from her critique. She often criticizes the Socialist Workers' Party for not paying attention to the woman question when, she argues, that women's oppression originates in the exploitation of women's labor. Her argument is that feminism can only be triumphant if the Left realizes that feminism is essential to its struggle and if the Spanish movement becomes cosmopolitan and links up with the women's movements in other countries. The importance of Margarita Nelken's position is that it proposes the unity of socialism and feminism in Spain.
