ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the repression of women carried out by the new regime. It does so by first placing the repression in its historical context. The chapter analyses a range of different forms of persecution suffered by thousands of women that included imprisonment, public humiliation, and social marginalisation and, in some cases, death. The struggle for women's liberation between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 followed a slow and twisting path. A wide number of groups on the Catholic and anti-Liberal right believed women's essential roles revolved around raising children and carrying out housework. The Franco regime deployed the full force of the law to wipe out the social and legal equality achieved by thousands of women during the Second Republic. The Francoists began by suspending Republican legislation that allowed women to manage their own property or granted them legal equality with men.
