The open door

SPAIN’S government has 23 ministers and 14 of them are women, successors to Federica Montseny, Spain’s first female minister and one of the first in Europe.

Montseny was born in Madrid in 1905 although her parents, both teachers and both anarchists, were Catalan by birth.   She was initially home-schooled but studied Philosophy and Literature at Barcelona University where she joined the National Confederation of Labour (CNT) and wrote for anarchist publications.

The Republican Prime Minister, Francisco Largo Caballero offered Montseny the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance in November 1936, four months after Franco’s uprising had precipitated the Civil War.

She remained there until May 1937 when she resigned in protest at the government’s treatment of anarchists in Barcelona.  During that time she introduced a short-lived Abortion Law and opened centres where prostitutes found accommodation and training to help them seek alternative employment.

Montseny and her family fled to France in February 1939 when the Civil War was all but lost.  She died in Toulouse in January 1994 and one of her daughters, Vida, later said – not without  bitterness – that Federica had turned her back on the role of wife and mother to devote herself to politics and the rights of women.

Forty-five years were to pass before Spain had another female minister, when Soledad Becerril was Minister of Culture in Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo’s Union de Centro Democratico (UCD) government from December 1981 until December 1982.

In all there have been 61 female ministers since the Transition to democracy on Franco’s death in 1975.

The majority of Montseny and Becerril’s successors have belonged – or belong – to the PSOE socialist party and the conservative Partido Popular.  There have also been Independent ministers affiliated to no party at all, two from Podemos and one from Spain’s PCE communist party.

What Federica Montseny would have made of her successors and their policies is beside the point.  She was there first and she held the door open for them.

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