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Conclusion: A Legacy and a Prophecy
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Conclusion ALegacyandaProphecy When the niña bonita, the Spanish Republic, succumbed to its own internal divisions and the superior Nationalist forces, women’s dream of a new sociopolitical order metamorphosed into the thirty-five-year nightmare of Francisco Franco’s dictatorial regime. e social revolution that included so many shifts in women’s roles was dramatically reversed. e Franco government, which ruled from until , rescinded most of the legal gains that women had made between and . Women were now indoctrinated with the lessons of the Secci ón Femenina—sewing, cooking, and endless cheerfulness in a revived traditional patriarchy. e national political system (Franco, the dictator , as the symbolic father of the nation) was mirrored in the domestic sphere. Husbands had absolute legal rights over their wives. Legal barriers were imposed against a married woman’s right to work outside the home and against a woman’s right to property and even to her children (if she separated from her husband). e church regained the hegemony over personal life that it had lost during the Republican era, and divorce was once again prohibited. Both literary and social modernism came to an abrupt end. e Lyceum Club, that emblematic location where women (mostly married and otherwise confined to the home) found intellectual nourishment, closed in , when Franco’s troops took Madrid. e Phalange Party confiscated the Lyceum’s building at San Marcos , and the Sección Femenina converted it into the Medina Club. Unfortunately, the new occupants destroyed the Lyceum’s archives. e writings of most of the women discussed in this book, which envisioned a Spain that provided greater equality for women, disappeared from the public record. e novela rosa and narratives about women who find felicity within conJohnsonFinalPages 10/8/03, 11:20 AM 275 Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel ventional marriage, home, and child rearing became the most readily available fiction to a broad spectrum of women readers, replacing the novella series in which Carmen de Burgos, Margarita Nelken, and Federica Montseny had published their feminist novels. e Republican era became a nostalgic memory for intellectuals and writers like María Zambrano, whose Delirio y destino so poignantly chronicles the exuberance that she and her contemporaries felt in as the Miguel Primo de Rivera dictatorship and the monarchy of Alfonso XIII were crumbling. Zambrano, like so many other Republican combatants and sympathizers (including María Martínez Sierra, Margarita Nelken, Federica Montseny, and Rosa Chacel), went into exile. Interestingly , Zambrano left the last vestiges of patriarchalism behind her when she departed Spain. As Franco’s troops entered Barcelona in March , Zambrano stood at the door of her apartment in the Catalan capital poised to leave her native land for exile in France and Latin America. ere before her, packed in neat boxes, were all her notes from her classes with José Ortega y Gasset (who had been her principal teacher at the University of Madrid and who had directed her doctoral dissertation on Benedict de Spinoza). Although the boxes would have been easy to transport and although she did not fully understand her reasons at the time, she decided to leave them behind. She had disagreed with Ortega y Gasset over his lukewarm support of a republic in the late s, and he had belittled her desire to find an alternative to Western rationalism. Although some women attended the university and enjoyed a measure of intellectual freedom in the s and s, there were many subtle obstacles to overcome. Exile provided some women intellectuals with economic opportunities in addition to personal liberty that enabled them to continue to grow and develop. While she was in exile, Chacel wrote her best novels, Memorias de Leticia Valle and La sinrazón (), as well as Saturnal (), her seminal essay on gender (written under the auspices of a Guggenheim Fellowship in New York). Zambrano wrote Delirio y destino in Cuba and her other major books in Rome and Switzerland. From Argentina, María Martínez Sierra finally wrote and published several works under her own name (Gregorio died in , thus invalidating her pen name). Shirley Mangini’s Memories of Resistance () chronicles the many memoirs written by women in prison JohnsonFinalPages 10/8/03, 11:20 AM 276 [3.229.123.80] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:35 GMT) Conclusion or in exile during the postwar years. Even though exiled women writers continued to publish abroad, their writings were mostly unknown in Spain. Despite the fact that the writings of...