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8. Spanish Women’s Clothing during the Long Post–Civil War Period
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8 SPANISH WOMEN’S CLOTHING DURING THE LONG POST–CIVIL WAR PERIOD Giuliana Di Febo T H E ‘ ‘ C H R I S T I A N W AY O F D R E S S I N G ’ ’ Women’s clothes played an important role in Spain during the Civil War (1936–39), which was so dominated by irreducible political, cultural, and symbolic polarizations that dress too became a sign of dichotomy, a way to show which side you were on. For the Francoists, the “vestir cristiano” (the Christian way of dressing) became an important stimulus to recover the traditional feminine role from Republican emancipation. Ultimately, it acquired attributes of a patriotic principle: “You’ll build our homeland if you make healthy habits with your Christian way of dressing. Decide, woman.”1 Vestir cristiano linked patriotic reconstruction to the society’s “re-Christianization” in Francoist propaganda. In this light we should read the strongly negative caption to a photograph of a female soldier in blue overalls carrying a rifle: “She dressed as a man and behaved as the worst savage of the wild hordes.”2 Fighting on the Republican side, female soldiers adopted masculine clothes, the mythic “blue overalls.” In fact, female participation in armed battle was brief and limited, but it gave rise to a significant amount of iconographic production.3 If the Republicans presented the image of a fighting woman as one of the principal symbols of female emancipation, for the nacionales, instead , the woman “dressed up” as a man represented the most profane expression of the reversal of traditional roles. After the war ended, references to the female soldier as a contaminating figure of the “feminine” continued. This miliciana became the final point in a chain of transgressions caused by the policy of female emancipation enacted by the Second Republic. Its demonization also entailed the condemnation of behaviors that questioned Spanish esencia, including one of its pillars, the traditional female. Decrying the negative repercussions to Spain of practices considered to be transgressions (smoking, playing sports, sunbathing, dancing) became a cliché. The harmful eƒects of Spanish women’s bolder acts would often be recirculated in numerous publications produced by religious, political, and creative writers. These writings were characterized by a rhetoric of condemnation and a redundancy of examples that remained substantially the same until the 1960s. It is not surprising, therefore, that, in the 1960s, a description of female soldiers as dissolute reappeared in a speech of the Feminine Section of the Falange: “Women wore soldier uniforms, got drunk in cellars, raised machine guns, and converted themselves into the sad figure of the female militia, which was both bestial and lamentable.”4 During the entire so-called postguerra period, which in reality lasted until the 1950s because of the continuation of extreme backwardness and of the opposition between the victors and the defeated perpetuated by the regime, dress played the role of a symbolic indicator of a feminine model of maternal sacrifice and confinement to the private sphere. Gender diƒerence, emphasized even in Franco’s speeches, was codified through legislation that removed women from work and the public sphere and canceled modern and secular Republican laws such as divorce and coeducation.5 If, at the end of the war, the Caudillo desired a renewal that meant “men with more courage and women with less lipstick,” the church also promoted an intense campaign for the recovery of feminine “modesty” and “decorum.” The vestir cristiano was made explicit through postings on Spanish churches of the 1 2 7 / S P A N I S H W O M E N ’ S C L O T H I N G [44.200.49.193] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:54 GMT) Normas concretas de modestia femenina (Concrete rules of feminine modesty), following the instructions of Archbishop Pla y Deniel: 1. Clothes should not be so tight as to mark provocatively the forms of the body. 2. Clothes should not be so short as not to cover most of the legs; they cannot reach just the knees. 3. Low necklines go against modesty; some are so audacious that they are sinful because of the dishonest intentions they reveal and the scandal they produce. 4. Short sleeves go against modesty if they do not cover the arm at least to the elbow . . . . 5. Not wearing stockings goes against modesty. 6. Wearing clothes that are transparent or punctured goes against modesty if they do not...