Fallen Militiawomen in the Spanish Civil War: The Identity of the Unknown Fighters

Introduction

Robert Capa, Agustí Centelles, Gerda Taro, David Seymour ‘Chim’, the Mayo Brothers, Kati Horna … represent some of the photojournalists who captured still photographs of the Spanish Civil War which eventually came to form part of an enduring collective imagery. Overall, they captured a men's war in which astonishing snapshots emerged of women wearing workers’ overalls, holsters and pistols.

The milicianas (militiawomen) became a revolutionary icon during the war. Later the Franco dictatorship invoked them as the incarnation of evil. Behind the images and their symbolism, however, stood real women who in the tempestuous summer of 1936 decided to leave the safety of their homes and jobs to enlist with armed groups and embark on a venture with a far from certain outcome. They ran risks which they often paid for with their own lives. This article engages with this important history and asks who the fallen milicianas were, why they became soldiers and what they did.

The documentary collection of the Ancillary Military Payments Office (known by his spanish acronym, PSET) contains the information about the place and the details about deaths, missing or mutilated and their direct family (parents, spouse and children). The General Military Archive of Guadalajara holds 16,290 files from the Central Commission for the Examination of Penalties and contains important data on women sentenced for belonging to the militia and sentenced to death for ‘aiding the rebellion’ between 1939 and 1942. The PSET collection consists of 59,852 files and around 55 to 160 records probably refer to women. These records will serve to complete a good part of the information about when, how and why Spanish women mobilized on the war fronts, and how their venture ended. ¹

The conceptual framework used in the following pages to link Spanish women with the armed struggle is based on the theory of the ‘capability approach’ developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen: the notions of agency or empowerment which women used to provide themselves with legitimacy for action. ² The concept – based upon the premise that achieving empowerment among subordinated, oppressed groups requires expanded freedoms – was first conceived as a tool to liberate people from poverty but ever since it has been further expanded to other fields. According to this approach, people possess the capability to achieve their goals only if they enjoy the genuine opportunity to do so. Closer to the Spanish case, Mercedes Yusta applied this theoretical approach to explain the ability of subordinated subjects to equip themselves with weapons and strength for resistance. Following this method, in this article we explore how the emergence of revolutionary violence in the Civil War created the conditions in which millions of men and women experienced for the first time in their lives the ability to control their own destiny. ³ This empowerment was particularly striking among Spanish women, although gender identity and female agency during war cannot always be equated with their emancipation. In this sense, and following Montserrat Huguet, we are contributing to the debate ‘on the social acceptance of women's changing roles that came through their demand to exercise violence or to place their bodies in the line of fire’. ⁴

Contemporary Warrior Women

The case of Spanish milicianas was not without precedent. In the 1930s, there were at least three powerful international referents of female armies: the Mexican ‘Adelitas’; the ‘Battalions of Death’ led by Maria Bochkareva in Russia; and the ‘Red Guards’ during the Finnish Civil War. In the first case, in 1910, both the federal army and the rebel guerrillas of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa recruited mestizo peasant women, illiterate indigenous people and women from the poorest urban strata, who were paid a soldada (soldier’s salary) to serve, care for or bury their men on the battlefield, in the absence of auxiliary quartermaster services. On foot behind the horses, or crowded on the roofs and beams of railroad cars, these ‘soldaderas’ and their children transported domestic and religious utensils to play their traditional role as mothers, wives, maids and lovers in the trenches. As happened to the Spanish milicianas, or guerrilleras later, between 1920 and 1925, the decision to expel them from the front by the villistas as a symbol of military modernization was accompanied by a harsh discourse of contempt. They were described as prostitutes, immoral, cruel, dirty, vicious, violent … and ‘the main cause of vice, disease, crime and disorder’. Decades of oblivion had to pass until their mythologization took hold in the popular imagination as self-sacrificing victims for the revolution. In 1935, the Union of Revolutionary Women of Ana María Zapata obtained a pension from Lázaro Cárdenas for 800 fallen women in Morelos, Oaxaca, Puebla, Guerrero and Hidalgo. ⁵

Female soldiers coexisted along with the most famous carers or ‘Adelitas’, the name of the corrido in honour of Adela Velarde Pérez. These women hailed from higher social groups, owned their own groups of horses and marched to the front to fight as men, and, like them, were given an informal graduation. Their number is unknown, although it is estimated that in 1913 there were about 200 women distributed across all the revolutionary factions. We know that under the orders of Petra (aka Pedro Herrera) alone between 25 and 1000 women fought at different times. ‘La China’ formed another rebel unit of war widows, sisters and daughters of the fallen in Morelos; and Carmen Vélez ‘La Capitana’ led groups of 200 or 300 men. ⁶

In 1917, as the Mexican revolutionary process reached its climax with the Constitution of Querétaro, the world's attention shifted its focus to Russia. Some of the same reporters who had covered the confrontations between federal porfiristas and irregulars in Mexico, such as John Reed, left to cover what was happening in the land of the czars. One American reporter, who had interviewed the soldaderas forced by their husbands to cook and sleep with them among the crossfire, went to Saint Petersburg where he encountered an army of women loyal to Kerensky defending the Winter Palace.

In 1916, there were 50,000 women on the Russian home front carrying out health, office or aid work for refugees. Additionally, numerous young women became involved in the fighting after hiding their sex. ⁷ These female fighters were mostly Russian and Orthodox, but they were also some Polish Jews. Normally they came from lower social classes and were illiterate, although among them there were some university students from the professional middle classes who even gained promotion to the highest ranks.

They faced circumstances which proved not very different to those that Spanish women later found. They harboured the desire to defend the homeland and their class interests, earn a living with a decent salary and accompany their men. According to the US reporter Florence Harper, the number of Russian fighters ranged from 2000 to 20,000. If until 1917 they joined the ranks individually as soldiers, drivers or machine technicians, Order No. 1 of February 1917 of the Petrograd Soviet allowed them to form exclusively female units. The already famous Siberian peasant Maria Bochkareva, hardened at the front, used the new law to create the ‘Battalions of Death’. Their recruitment attracted young women (normally between the ages of 18 and 21) who were subjected to tyrannical instruction to strip them of any sign of femininity. They went to great pains to show that they could smoke, sweat and kill just like men. ⁸

Their male counterparts did not receive the female soldiers well and treated them with suspicion. The women also had to fight Bolshevik obstructionism, as they were moved from the front to positions of defence of infrastructures in the rear. The 15 units that were still in operation on 25 October were definitively disarmed on 21 November 1917, with the bulk of the 80,000 mobilized in the Civil War transferred to health and administrative services. ⁹

After the triumph of the Soviet Revolution and the end of the Great War, the Finnish Socialist Workers’ Republic, in the wake of the fall of the Russian Empire, confronted both a collapsed authoritarian state and a broken society. The Whites, supported by the German Imperial Army, fought against the Republic and sparked an internal war characterized by the almost total absence of professional soldiers. With 3 million inhabitants, around 90,000 people fought on each side, with between 1500 and 2600 women mobilized mainly in support of the Red Guard. This constituted around 2.2 per cent of combatants: a figure similar to the Spanish militiawomen in the ranks of the anti-fascist volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. ¹⁰ The Finnish women were recruited in the industrial centres and cities of southern Finland with an average age of between 18 and 23. During and after the war, some 5500 red women were sentenced to three-year jail terms for their role in the war, which was loudly denounced by the Whites and their German allies. Despite hardly benefiting from any military training, Finnish women participated in the biggest battles of the Civil War around Tampere, Helsinki and Vyborg.

White-supporting women such as Hilja Riipinen also pressed for the formation of female White Guards. Their leader, General Mannerheim, stalled the plan, but some women took up arms or were drafted as soldiers. They were a direct precedent for the Lotta Svärd. After May 1918, when the war ended, the White Army and German troops captured around 80,000 Red prisoners, including 5000 women and1500 children. According to Tuomas Hopu, 60 Red Guard women had already died in combat. In addition, 25 fled to the Soviet Union and about 270 were executed. ¹¹

October 1934: The First Spanish Milicianas

The birth of the Second Republic in April 1931 witnessed a quantitative leap in the mobilization of Spanish women. In February 1934, activists founded the Anti-Fascist Women's Committee in Madrid. This was a sister movement of the Amsterdam-Pleyel organization that the pacifist Gabriele Duchêne led in Paris. Within a few short months, this committee spread to Spain's main cities and provincial capitals. Some of the best-known names from the Spanish political class swelled its ranks. Almost all of them hailed from an upper-middle class and enlightened social background.

Women soldiers did not appear in Spain until the violent revolutionary strike in Asturias in October 1934. Although we do not know how many women were directly involved in the fighting, we do know that a few hagiographies of left-wing heroines spread rapidly. In some of these accounts, women appear as victims but, at the same time, writers strove to justify the violence they committed because they were wounded wives or mothers. As with the Mexican widowed soldaderas, writers characterized this as ‘feminine conscience’ that led to family revenge, portraying it as an act of personal liberation. Solano Palacio described how some women in Asturias were already wearing worker's overalls, carrying rifles, and were seen on the parapets fighting among their male comrades. ¹²

It was thus in Asturias that the first images of the milicianas, both positive and negative, appear. Realistic or otherwise, these images would be perpetuated during the Civil War and in the post-war period. Pivotal in the creation of those images sat the story of Aida Lafuente, a 16-year-old girl. During the Asturias events, she became famous because of her decision to cover the withdrawal of her comrades with a machine gun. It was a heroic act that led to her death. ¹³ In the collective imagination of the left (and probably because of her lack of sexual attributes, husband and children) Aida became a perfect revolutionary hero. ¹⁴ Her story demonstrated the need to desexualize women in order to render them as anti-fascist symbols. This also points towards the intolerance shown by many on the Republican side towards the ‘modern woman’ and the transgression of gender stereotypes. From then on, the October Rose, as the communist poet Rafael Alberti referred to her, represented the ‘guerrilla girl’ later idealized in 1944 by Bergamín as a virginal and mythologized combatant. ¹⁵ Some of the women who fought in the Civil War had studied in the Aída Lafuente Schools of the JSU (Unified Socialist Youth).

July 1936: The Early Enlistment of milicianas

Following the July military coup that sparked the Spanish Civil War, the first militias were created by the anarchist and socialist unions and several political parties. Those organizations, characterized by a notorious lack of hierarchy and military discipline, were the most suited to the novel incorporation of women. However, there were also specific organizations responsible for the mobilization of women. Such was the case of the Antifascist Female Militias of Catalonia (MFAC), which we will discuss further later, or the Female Aid Commission led by the communist Dolores Ibárruri, also known as Pasionaria. ¹⁶

Both Tomasa Cuevas and Fernanda Romeu detailed many years ago the networks of sociability and recruitment for enlistment among young, working-class anti-fascists, attracted by a job opportunity other than domestic service and that also provided them with professional training, both in the use of weapons for fighting in the vanguard, and in war industries, health services or rearguard transport. ¹⁷ When these women obtained a weapon, they did not hesitate to climb aboard lorries that rushed them to the principal war fronts in Madrid, Toledo, Aragon or Andalusia. ¹⁸ This is how they were described at the end of the conflict by the fascist press:

In the early days in Madrid, it was a painful torture to see in the hot and drunk atmosphere the militiawoman with her open overalls, with her long straight hair on display, with her bitter voice and her rifle ready to take lives in order to satisfy her sick whims and to satiate her sadism. This vile woman boarded the lorries taking people to the hills outside Madrid to fight the ‘nationals’ [rebels] and treated going to battle as if it were a Sunday picnic to which one took bread and an omelette. Alongside her in the lorry was the left-wing pedantic intellectual, the failed little student and the employee envious of the boss. All of them had with their tiring worries forgotten the differences between the sexes which remained frozen for them. They were the worst kinds of people … they were ugly, stunted, knock-kneed, without a rich inner life, without the solace of religion, their femininity suddenly extinguished and they turned green with envy. On the 18th July the desire for vengeance began to burn inside them, as the smell of onions roasting on the campfire accompanied savage murder and they hoped to ease their fury by destroying all that was beautiful. And they betrayed the men who had never even looked at them. ¹⁹

As these words show, the fear of social revolution materialized in the perception of these Republican and militiawomen, quintessentially representative of gender disorder and therefore stigmatized. Androgynous, ugly, envious, proactive, and far removed from any trait that coincides with traditional femininity, in themselves they questioned the association of war and violence with normative masculinity. ²⁰

As historian Lisa Lines has explained, from the first days of the conflict, women participated in obtaining weapons, street fighting and building barricades. These actions were part of the revolutionary fervour that started with the containment of the coup and which developed during the following the first six months. ²¹ During this period, Lines estimates that there were 1000 women in the trenches and 5000 destined for defence behind the lines. With numbers extracted from an exhaustive newspaper analysis and the re-reading of oral testimonies and memoirs, it is estimated that those women made up 2 per cent of the total members of the militias. ²²

If the aforementioned 2 per cent is applied to the data provided by the general literature of 150,000 militia and 5000 foreign-brigade members for the first year of combat, a fair estimation would be that around 3100 women were enrolled in the militias. The contemporary Barcelona press even referred to 500 women recruited exclusively by the Antifeixist Militias of Catalonia between July and September 1936. According to the research on conscription conducted by Michael Seidman and James Matthews (see Table 1), in the first months of the conflict there were 120,000 troops who volunteered to fight for the Republic, ‘mainly, but not exclusively, men’. ²³ Enrique Líster’s Fifth Regiment, organized by the Communist Party in Madrid, stands out among these volunteer forces: 50 battalions with no more than 25,000 men, and ‘1000 women organized in ten companies of 100 women soldiers led by a female officer’ during the first days of the conflict. ²⁴

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Table 1.

The militiawomen in numbers (total men and women: 120,000–150,000 and 5000 from the International Brigades; 26,000 Fifth Regiment in Madrid and 35,194 volunteers in Catalonia).

Authors	Total	Front	Rear	IB	Madrid	Catalonia	Asturias	Convicted	Fallen	Post-war
Lines	6000	1000	5000
Nash		200
Blanco					1000
Lugschitz				400
Egido					275	20	21	832
Berger						553
López							72
Rodríguez	3100	854					100		55	123

Ángeles Egido's research of the 832 files of women whose death penalty was commuted by the Central Commission of Penalties during the early years of the Franco regime does not give an exact number of volunteers enlisted in 1936, but she estimates that at least a hundred were convicted for having served as militiawomen, although probably not all of them fought and certainly many were condemned for their actions behind the lines. ²⁵ This is more than plausible. The involvement of women from Madrid in the Republican rear-guard repression has been conclusively demonstrated. ²⁶

It is important to determine whether these early militiawomen were the same ones who were in charge of surveillance and security (and repression) behind the lines. According to Lisa Lines, these groups included the members of the Union of Girls who fought in Madrid, along with the Lina Odena Battalion and the women's unit of the Avanti Battalion, the women's militia from the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia based in Barcelona and the Rosa Luxembourg Battalion which participated in the attempt to take Mallorca.

Profile of the Fallen Milicianas in Madrid, Asturias and Catalonia

Along with the personal files of the volunteers in the Militia Command, we can identify militiawomen, and particularly those who became war casualties, thanks to another source: the Central Military Pension Treasury which formed part of Secondary Payment of the Land Army (PSET), created on 28 July 1937 to centralize the pensions for the fallen’s survivors and war invalids. This organism replaced the Centro de Reclutamiento e Instrucción Militar (Recruitment and Military Instruction Center), which had previously paid widows and orphans since 1936. ²⁷ The data collection addressed here is incomplete but contains the records of 59,852 soldiers killed in battle, a number large enough to allow us to draw evidence-based conclusions. In particular, this source allows us to analyze the profile of 25 women killed, 23 reported missing and seven who became invalids.

Upon analyzing this source, we concluded that female combatants only represent 0.1 per cent of the casualties of the People's Army. If we take into account that these records do not even include the many Catalan women who died during the first months of the conflict, however, then we must assume that the average female component must be much higher. ²⁸ This leads us to think that either their enrolment occurred in other sub-organizations or, simply, that the percentage of casualties stood much lower than that for men. This could, in turn, be due to their shorter service at the front or because their duties meant that they were less exposed to enemy fire.

The PSET data collection and the records of the Provincial Commission for the Review of Sentences mainly refer to the central area of ​​the country. They show that the profile of the miliciana was a single young woman, between 19 and 30 years old, who had arrived in Madrid looking for work and was later unionized. A further 30 also joined the Communist groups, rather than the CNT anarchist union or the Socialist Party. A few days after 18 July 1936, many of these women went to the headquarters of the Fifth Regiment to enlist as milicianas (this was the case with 14 of the disappeared milicianas who joined the ‘Pasionaria Regiment’). ²⁹

Based on the dates of their enlistment, almost 40 women registered as militia members in the PSET (deceased, disappeared or disabled) became causalities in the first two months of war, with fewer enlisting later. A good many of these women did not survive a week on the fronts of Somosierra. Four girls fell in July 1936, 10 in August, 19 in September and two in October. The majority fell during the Battle of Sigüenza which took place in those months and during which the Nazi aviation bombings destroyed part of the city. Three other women died in battle in November and four more between January and April 1937. ³⁰

Between October and December 1936, the journalist Rosario del Olmo volunteered, at the age of 32, for the anarchist column ‘España Libre’, when supposedly women were already withdrawing from the front line. Upon returning from the front, she interviewed some of those who had been her comrades and had refused to retire to work in more feminine activities:

I have a temperament that goes better with combat, with direct fighting, you understand? But I have great admiration for those who have the courage to heal the wounded, to endure hours and hours in order to ensure that neither the son nor the companions at home notice the scarcity too much. I was not good at that. On the other hand, I am increasingly passionate about serving on the front line. […] Now I study military art in depth. You have to get the maximum result with the minimum wear. ³¹

With regards to the sociological profile of these women, Lines limited herself to pointing out that they were both young and old, from different anti-fascist political movements, from students to housewives, proletarians or intellectuals. We now have a more reliable record to test that theory. Although the data on their origins is very fragmented, the PSET records contain information about many women from Madrid and neighbouring provinces. As stated previously, they show that in the majority of cases they were people who had arrived recently in the capital seeking work. The importance of Madrid as a centre for mobilization is due, according to Egido, to its status as the capital of the resistance, with the front as the city’s gates. Furthermore, in urban environments, as in the case of younger Russian or Finnish industrial workers, anti-fascist women became more political and union-conscious. In all three cases, they were also were surrounded by barracks and columns of militias they could join.

Of the 55 casualties among the female combatants in Madrid, the single biggest group came from the textile sector, specifically 10 dressmakers, in addition to 9 tailors and a seamstress, representing 36.4 per cent of the total. This category is followed by 10 housewives, who represent 18.2 per cent, with the third ranked category consisting of 9 day labourers, representing 16.4 per cent. As female members of the industrial sector linked to the most combative workers, the records list a metalworker, an automotive machinist, a glass blower and woman employed in a cannery, all of which represent 7.3 per cent. Although women generally belonged mainly to the service sector, this group is proportionally less represented in the number of casualties, with no teachers and only the record of the death of a nurse practitioner and single mother, a cook and two servants (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Professions of militiawomen fallen or disabled in combat

The average wage that the deceased had received in times of peace, and which they subsequently gave up in order to join the front, was 4.30 pesetas per day. At one extreme, a cook and a specialized industrial worker earned between 10 and 20 pesetas, while the tailors earned between 6 and 7.50 pesetas. This is in contrast to the 0.55 pesetas that the servants or apprentices earned per day. For these badly paid youngsters, the 50 pesetas signing-in bonus offered by the volunteer militias was no doubt an incentive to join, as was the 10 pesetas per day paid to the troops by the People's Army (since the Decree of 20 October 1936). This remuneration was considered very acceptable in that context. When free lodging and food was also added, conditions would be enticing. Such would have been the case for the 17 militiawomen we have identified who were fatherless orphaned women or those whose parents had been evacuated from Madrid. After the war, some women would claim that hunger, not ideology, led them to enlist. Was this true or just a strategy to avoid a harsh sentence? ³²

As happened in Morelos or Petrograd, there were female combatants who changed their names and used male pseudonyms in order to remain active when their presence on the front lines became more ‘uncomfortable’. This strategy was employed by Mari Luz Mejías, also known as Julia Manzanal or Comandante Chico. ³³

Among the 55 casualties registered by the Military Payment, there are several whose presence in the records refutes the theory that very few women reached officer status. These female officers include the famous Commander Encarnación Hernández Luna from Alicante and Captains Mika Feldman, Anita Carrillo and Luisa Paramont. ³⁴ Carmen Fernández Gijón offers a further example. She was a 22-year-old tailor from Madrid and a communist since 1935. She joined the General Workers’ Union and later the Cavada Batallion on 5 August 1936, before being wounded on September 16 and discharged due to serious injury in May 1937. She had already been promoted to lieutenant, as had Remedios Jover Cánovas. ³⁵

The presence of women at the front could be very different from unit to unit, even if they were not far from each other. In Asturias, the Aida Lafuente 201st Battalion had only one female soldier, 14 cooks and three health workers. In contrast, the 223rd ‘Juanelo’ battalion had up to 25 milicianas. Marcelino Laruelo studied 26 women from Asturias who were later court-martialled. Because they had been cooks and nurses and they had not actively participated in the war, they received lower sentences of 12 years. Obviously, their circumstances contrast with the machine gunners Guadalupe Álvarez, Sara Piñela and Eulalia Arevalillo, who took an active part in the assaults on Oviedo or Gijón.

With regard to the fronts in Aragón, Gonzalo Berger's recent thesis shows that there were around 20,000 Catalan volunteers in that region in August 1936. Their numbers increased rapidly. Five months later, on 19 January 1937, the People's Army of Catalonia had 49,900 active troops. ³⁶ Among them there were at least 553 militiawomen. This data is consistent with the traditionally accepted 2–3 per cent of female combatants.

Almost all of these women were of Catalan origin and among them, unlike their male counterparts, anarchist membership was not so prevalent. The Socialist Party of Catalonia's (Communist) membership represented 26 per cent of the female combatants. The MFAC were established, in principle, as a reservist army for rearguard operations under the leadership of Eloïna Malasechevarria and Carme Julià Puiggròs. They were organized into seven sections, ranging from union propaganda to social assistance or the clothing workshop, and what was properly considered as ‘War Operations’, organized by Gaviota Viana for the formation of the Catalan Women's Battalion. Its internal structure was that of a traditional military organization. Only women affiliated to working-class unions participated. The first sub-section was also responsible for war operations and was made up of rifle soldiers, munitions suppliers and artillery (women). Other subsections included: the motorized section, made up of tram operators, lorry and ambulance drivers and aviation personnel; health, where the stretcher bearers and nurses worked; the military, for instructors in shooting; the auxiliaries, who provided washing, sewing and ironing services; correspondence; social assistance, which dealt with subsidies for the relatives of the combatants; and, finally, the finance section. ³⁷

Their incorporation was also strictly regulated. Volunteers submitted an application and, if they received favourable political reports, entered the militias. In order to be sent to the front, they had to be over 22 years old and needed to pass an entrance exam to receive military training. Those not fit to fight were assigned to auxiliary work while the most able in the handling of rifles and machine guns were assigned to the front. These women were distributed into different columns such as that of Del Barrio and Durruti, or those of the ERC and Estat Catalá (pro-independence parties), which on the whole struggled to attract recruits, despite benefiting from prominent figures such as Nativitat Yarza or Rosa Domenèq, heroine of the Macià and Companys columns. ³⁸

On 16 August 1936, the first company of soldiers left by ship to participate in the ill-fated expedition to Mallorca. The battalion was mainly made up of members of socialist and communist groups, which were organized under three ‘flags’: Rosa Luxemburgo, Bolshevik 31 and Aida Lafuente. Four days later, Amalia Lobato Rosique became the first militiawoman to fall in combat. Although on 27 August the casualties were replaced with new troops arriving from Barcelona with Gaviota Viana, the expedition to Mallorca ended in failure. The women's battalion returned to Valencia on the night of 3 September, leaving behind several casualties and five prisoners. They all would later be shot. ³⁹

The estimates of Jordi Oliva with regards to Catalonia add another 55 victims from the records of the Central Payment, 25 of whom hailed from Lleida province. Those women make up 3.7 per cent of the total number of casualties. They were mostly housewives (13) attached to the communist PSUC-JSU, although it is uncertain whether they were involved as non-combatant civilians behind the lines. In total, 10 per cent of them fell in the central zone during the first year and a half of the war. ⁴⁰

To those women we must add those of the International Brigades. Renée Lugschitz has documented the existence of 400 of these women throughout Spain, although it is estimated that there were around 600–700. ⁴¹ These idealistic young volunteers known as brigadistas, mostly came from Europe and America. Among them, women from urban Jewish families stood out. They were well educated, and were not only focused on welfare, but also were journalists and fighters, mostly travelling to Spain alone, with some even leaving their children to travel to Spain. ⁴² Upon arriving in Albacete, they received military training and came under the orders of the French communist André Marty. ⁴³

Some brigadistas became famous. The Dutch Fernanda Schoonheyt fought to contain the Francoist attack on Tardienta (Huesca), where she was wounded. ⁴⁴ A newspaper controlled by the Guipúzcoa Defense Council in August 1936 defined her as one of the icons of the war and devoted an entire report to her while she lay in in hospital:

We found her surrounded by bouquets of flowers that had been sent as a tribute to her heroism. She is pretty, has burnished skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair. She is 23 years old. She smokes some fancy cigarettes. It doesn’t look like a gory hospital; it looks more like the dressing room of a vedette [cabaret artist].

The text, loaded with meaning, kept mentioning that her athletic physique made one forget that she was carrying a machine gun, while she insisted that the real reason for her transfer to Spain was because she had quarrelled with her family over her communist ideas. ⁴⁵

Why did They Fight? The Rifle Question

If the women from the International Brigades were attracted by an ideological struggle, performing professionally as ‘new or social women’ on the pre-World War II fronts, many other motives drove the Spanish milicianas.

In addition to the economic stimulus, the motivations that led these women to break out of their domestic roles depended on other circumstances, such as the family environment and previous militancy in the labour movement. In this last regard, some had been involved in the fight against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–1930), or the revolutionary strikes in Barcelona and Asturias in October 1934. Such was the case of the anarchist Concha Pérez Collado, or the communist Fidela Fernández de Velasco. Many became activists only after the military uprising, such as Rosario Sánchez, who was only 17 years old in 1936, or due to rebellion and a desire for adventure. This last motive was often the cause of frivolous interpretations, such as the one made by the sexologist Félix Martí Ibáñez, who differentiated between an initial small group of women with political convictions and a larger group of women he considered to be romantics and prostitutes. ⁴⁶

In October 1936, the press in Asturias reported that many women from León enlisted from a desire for revenge born from the indignities inflicted by Franco. Such was the case of the seven girls sentenced by the Commission for the Seizure of Property in 1937. They were accompanied by several milicianas like María Rodríguez García, who participated in the Battle of the Port of Somiedo, and three other female comrades from the 242nd Battalion. ⁴⁷

Another example of different motives are the women who left ‘as a family’ to accompany their husbands, parents or brothers, as was the case with Francisca García, an emigrant from Almería to Barcelona, but known as Paca La Francesa (The French Woman) due to her long exile in France. Her testimony, recorded in 2013, is the best example of this set of personal motivations and clichés that exist among the anti-fascists:

I was a volunteer, they kicked out all the women …  and I stayed, because there were women and women … I was there to fight. Not with a rifle in hand, but to help […] I had my weapons. I knew how to handle the 9-millimetre gun very well  …  I had to try just in case there was a need and there was no choice  …  But if I couldn’t even go outside, they had dressed me in a red bib  …  the bullets would see you right away. […] I was dressed as a military man. From the time I entered until the very last  …  Everyone respected me! … I was in the kitchen and my husband was with me, because he was a cook, he had no guard or anything, so … We slept in a haystack, the two of us, and the soldiers slept in another large haystack that had […] He wanted me to stay behind, to stay with a family in the town. But I said no to going up and staying in a town, I stayed at home, so he went to the commander and I remained a volunteer … ⁴⁸

We can therefore reconstruct a broad generalized profile of the miliciana as a young emigrant woman arriving from inland areas to the capitals of the Republic such as Madrid or Barcelona, ​​of humble origins, employed in the textile industry or in domestic service, and unionized or affiliated with the JSU. They left behind gruelling hours of work and meagre wages to take part in an adventure that would, in the first instance, provide them with independent financial means, and, in the second instance, allowed them a unique experience which they shared with their peers of both sexes. Only by interpreting the revolutionary context of the Civil War as an opportunity for female empowerment can one fully understand why more women than previously admitted contravened Premier's Largo Caballero's call to leave their front posts in February 1937. This has been called the ‘rifle question’: a measure that did not affect foreign brigade members, but rather only the mostly working-class Spanish women whom we have identified and described.

Azucena López has identified several enlisted women from Asturias who were still in the vanguard during the spring of 1937, despite that famous decree of militarization of 29 September 1936 and all the official pressure put on them to leave the front. The photographs of the defence of Madrid, however, and those publicized by the Press and Propaganda Delegation, as well as the decree of 17 October 1936 issued by Minister Ruiz Funes on marriage between militia personnel serving on the front, testify to the continued existence of women in the ranks. Thanks to López's study of the legislation, the press and payroll reports, we know that women registered separately as combatants or as cooks, although they also filed complaints for being assigned to these tasks. ⁴⁹

Neither the decrees of October 1936 for the regularization of the People's Army, in principle reserved for men aged between 20 and 45, nor the original creation of the Madrid Volunteer Battalions, later placed under Republican-Army discipline, explicitly prohibited female participation. ⁵⁰ On the contrary, the decree of Premier José Giral of August 1936 linked the militias who already belonged to units created by their parties and unions to regular units. According to those laws, the milicianas received standardized wages, the right to maintenance support and military promotion. This was the case of Pilar Lage Bobadilla from the Transmission Battalion of the V Corps of the Ebro Army, who remained active until the end of the war. ⁵¹

When the new Minister of War determined, at the end of September 1936, to transfer the Volunteer Battalions to the ranks of the newly created Republican Army, under the control of the Government, he always referred to it as a ‘voluntary’ transfer. Article 4 exempted the nursing corps from militarization, although it neither prevented women from continuing to work on the fronts as civilians, nor referred to female soldiers. Furthermore, with regard to the creation of the Popular Schools of War, together with the system of quintas (levees) in 1937, neither made explicit references to women. ⁵²

In reality, political statements inserted in the press and public opinion, rather than a formal withdrawal decree, degraded the public image and the standing of the militiawomen. This meant that militiawomen went from constituting an icon of the ‘Republican Nation’ to being characterized as prostitutes or even belonging to the fifth column. The conclusion was that these women should be redirected to work behind the lines. ⁵³ The Communist Party’s growing influence over the war guidelines led to a greater conservatism in the measures adopted by the Republican side with respect to women. Broadly described, those new policies aimed at re-establishing the traditional gender roles in which women had to fulfil their obligations as subordinates and caregivers while men defended the homeland.

Gonzalo Berger's research demonstrates that in Catalonia the effective disappearance of the women from the front was, by January 1937, affecting all units. This decision extended to other fronts. The anarchist Antonio Ortiz ordered the withdrawal of the women from the Aragón sector where his column was deployed, starting with those serving as General Staff. Other commanders relegated them to auxiliary tasks after coming under pressure from their own comrades-in-arms, who considered them inferior or ‘harmful elements’, as the press began to describe them. On 25 January 1937, the war committee of the ‘Tierra y Libertad’ (Land and Liberty) column, which was controlled by a hard-core FAI anarchists, also decided on the removal of most women serving in Madrid. However, the Estat Catalá, Santaularia and Volante Catalana columns continued to allow women to serve. ⁵⁴

Militiawomen's presence in service beyond the first three months of war, therefore, depended on the unit to which they belonged. Women from Asturias participated in both the front-line and rear-guard militias and fortifications until the fall of Avilés and Gijón on 21 October 1937. Of the military officers who continued fighting we can highlight the case of Argentina García, captain of the machine-gun section in Oviedo, or that of Gloria Álvarez Díaz who was later sentenced to 20 years in prison. ⁵⁵

The fact that these women were impelled to leave their front-line positions when hardly a year of war had elapsed was not due to any legal imperative, but rather the result of a change in the discourse from the workers’ leaders themselves, including females ones such as Dolores Ibárruri, Minister Federica Montseny or the intellectual Simone Weil. ⁵⁶ In contrast, several high-ranking officers not only accepted women, but proved crucial in ensuring that they remained in their units, sometimes by changing their names or by moving them to positions that would make them invisible. ⁵⁷

As Tabea Alexa Linhard indicates in her comparison between Mexican and Spanish revolutionary women, the call for women to abandon war and revolution and to return to the domestic sphere constituted both a real fact and an effective discourse. If the first narratives of the conflict were launched to show women as protagonists, in a stereotyped role, as heroines, icons and myths, the later narratives also drew on stereotypes by labelling militiawomen as prostitutes. In the end, the same symbols that exalted the warrior women served to neutralize their emancipatory discourses. So the relationship between political agency and violence became uncomfortable, showing that participation in the war did not always amount to a sign of agency and political liberation. This should lead us to reflect more deeply on the extent to which periods of war are or are not favourable contexts for the emancipation of women. For this we must take into account progressive women's refusal to accept their subordination and also the support of female groups for the most reactionary sectors on the counterrevolutionary side. ⁵⁸

Another issue is the post-war repression. In this regard, Spanish and Finnish militiawomen, whose fate tied them to failed revolutionary projects, fared badly when compared to the successful experience of Mexican women and those in the Red Army. In addition to the executions and unrecorded extrajudicial reprisals, we see that 832 Spanish milicianas had their death sentences commuted. ⁵⁹

After the White terror ceased in 1918 in Finland, between 4000 and 6000 prisoners, mainly women and children, were released, but 113 died of hunger and disease in prison camps (1 per cent). Around 300–400 Red women – mainly troops – were executed. The winners considered that the women had acted in a shameful way by transgressing their gender roles as nurses or food providers, as happened with the majority of rural women in the country. Therefore, they punished them more severely than men whose sexual violence against those combatants in particular is a long-term taboo subject. While we enjoy a relatively small number of reliable documentary sources, we possess a higher number of oral testimonies. These have helped ensure White brutality in prison camps and the executions of Red women have both become the subject of public discussion. ⁶⁰

The repression carried out by the Francoist authorities against Spanish combatants focused on their putative position as ‘lost’ women who had transgressed prevailing morality. They had dared to flout domestic modesty and go out into the public space to participate as speakers in acts of propaganda and in military tasks that, normatively, formed forbidden fields. When they dressed like men, with trousers and cartridge belts, they adopted symbols of citizenship that since ancient Greece had been reserved for men of a certain social status. ⁶¹

Conclusions

This article will not significantly change the estimates that have been made on the number of militiawomen, although we went from speculation to identifying many of them while also offering a qualitative study. We are aware, however, that identity is a complex problem that goes beyond the sociological profile of the women studied. It reflects the difficulties these women encountered in reconciling their gender with an anti-fascist identity and their status as female combatants, in the face of hetero-normative categories. Often their political activity was born out of their emotional ties with men who volunteered for the front. But even in those cases women still managed to control their own trajectories of activism and commitment. ⁶²

Too often, historians have looked for women in archives that had been revised and purged, and so their tracks must be traced in other archives. This is why we approached the problem with a different methodology. Instead of researching survivors, or those who faced post-war repression, we have studied fallen militiawomen. Thanks to study of the documents that were created to compensate women or their relatives for their wounds or death in combat – the Secondary Pagaduría (Quartermaster-General Payroll Records) of the Spanish Army (PSET) – we have been able to gain a better understanding of these women’s social profile and even their motivations to join the war. This investigation has identified for the first time the identity and actions of those combatants who previously were too often just or little more than a statistical percentage. Still, our study has been limited to the regions on which we have more data: to the central area of the country (Madrid and neighbouring provinces), Catalonia and the northern front of Asturias, fundamentally.

Our research has allowed us to make an approximate calculation of the number of women soldiers who fought to defend the Republic. We have not been able to verify the existence of more than 1000, but we have been restricted to records from the northern half of the Iberian Peninsula. Specifically, our total yields a partial balance of 854 female combatants, to which we could add those 123 post-war female guerrilla fighters plus the 400 international female ‘brigadistas’.

The social composition of these combatants is similar to that of the male volunteers. The main motivation for these women to fight was ideological. Most of the militiawomen mobilized in the first weeks after the coup in Madrid fell within the orbit of the Communist Party. Accordingly, our archival data refutes the notion that the militiawomen hailed from anarchist backgrounds. This absence of anarchist women could be due to the pacifism of the anarchist organization Mujeres Libres (Free Women) and women's ostracism from the Libertarian Youth. Those who joined later and tried to remain active, despite the manoeuvres to dissuade them, did so, we contend, for economic reasons. These women were older and many were married. Unlike the feminists who enrolled early in the war, they did not resent leaving their homes to continue playing their role as carers for male soldiers, but instead accepted payment to clean barracks, cook and wash clothes. Furthermore, these second-wave women who were mobilized in the central zone seem to have resisted longer than the Catalans and northern women, who often joined the war early and found themselves sent back behind the lines.

As can be deduced from stories regarding the 1934 Revolution, many women went to the front in order to accompany their partners, and so continued to fulfil their roles as carers and as support for the ‘real’ combatants. This same scenario was repeated during the Civil War and in the anti-Franco resistance after the Civil War, both within Spain and outside its borders. Such was the case of female guerrilla fighters at least until 1947. ⁶³ Nevertheless, often their husbands tried to send them home so that the stigma of prostitution would not engulf them. This was a social condemnation that propaganda helped fix in the collective imagination, but which found little reflection among the majority of women in the trenches.

By studying these milicianas, we have traced a female genealogy characterized by the transgression of gender roles since the Revolution of Asturias, and the resistance to leaving the front line in 1937 in the context of the so-called ‘question of the rifle’. Only through such a study can we cease to consider these women as mere icons, but instead remember them as flesh and blood female soldiers. Using both new archival sources and the concept of the ‘capability approach’, we have analyzed who these women were who used their own strength as free citizens to consolidate their gains.

In addition to the Mexican pioneers, the Spanish militiawomen had much in common with their Red comrades in Russia or Finland. Both the Great War and interwar Europe showed the paradoxes of action–reaction by the mobilization of new-women as citizens and professionals in the public sphere. For this reason, military service came to be seen as a way of re-masculinizing men and endowing them with a fuller citizenship.

Women combatants challenged men as their protectors and transformed the status quo of the armed forces, addressing violence even against other women, and cultural constructions in crisis such as femininity, class and race. Finally, all the warriors were vilified as lesbians or prostitutes to try to subdue them, which paved the way for post-war Francoist Spain and, more widely, World War II, with their experience of a return to maternalism. ⁶⁴