“Women Want to Work”: Shifting Ideologies of Women’s Work in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1962

In the first years of the Franco dictatorship, the regime and the fascist women’s organization, the Sección Femenina (Women’s Section), worked to change the norms for working women in the new state. Women’s work was redefined and moved toward the domestic, and the regime’s discourse endowed it with new social value. This new ideology did not reflect the reality of many working class Spanish women who found themselves working outside the home or the economic realities of Franco’s Spain. In the 1950s, however, women’s economic role began to change as they became consumers. Women carved out their own spaces of economic significance despite the regime’s plan for them and their new economic identities, spurred on by consumerism and a reintegration with the larger world, forced the regime to recognize their contributions with the 1961 “Law of Political, Professional, and Labor Rights for Women.”