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Women's suffrage in the Spanish Second Republic period

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Through One-party state

Between 1877 and 1930, several attempts were made to give women the right to vote. The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera would see a two-year period where women held the right to vote, from 1924 to 1926. Because of a move from an elected congress to an appointed government, no elections were held in this period and women never went to the polls. Unsuccessful attempts to give women suffrage also took place in 1877, 1907, 1908 and 1918. Despite this, Primo de Rivera's royal decree and the arguments put forward in that period would prove influential during the debate in the period to come.

The Second Republic would see women granted full emancipation, including the right to vote, on 1 October 1931 with women going to the polls only twice: on 2 November 1933 and again in 1936. The right to vote came after the passing of a constitution after elections in June 1931. Both sides of the suffrage movement had women representing their causes in one of the greatest duels between Spanish parliamentarians. Clara Campoamor Rodríguez represented those seeking full emancipation for women, while the left-leaning Victoria Kent Siano represented conservative and Republican views seeking to prevent women's right to vote. Campoamor claimed that women's access to the ballot box was an ethical obligation for the Congress and that Spanish women had won it having battled on behalf of the Republic for a long time. Kent argued women were not yet ready to vote as they were not sufficiently educated to make an informed decision, submitting to the wishes of their husbands and the Church, a position supported by the conservatives although they had different reasons for resisting women's suffrage.

Following Francisco Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War, neither women nor men would be able to vote in national elections until 1977, two years after his death.

Prelude to the Second Republic (1800 - 1922)

Spanish women did not hold the same status as citizens as men from 1800 to 1931. Single Spanish women enjoyed a few more legal rights than their married peers once they reached the age of 23. At that point, unmarried women could sign contracts and run businesses on their own behalf. Married women needed the approval or involvement of their husbands to undertake such matters as changing their address, accepting an inheritance, or owning property or a business. All women in this period were denied the right to vote or run for political office. Catholicism played a huge role in Spanish political thinking in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Religion required strict gender roles, which led to the repression of Spanish women and fostered ingrained sexism across the whole of Spanish society. Society, through the Catholic Church, dictated that the role of women was to marry and bear children. They were to be invisible in society outside the domestic sphere. Violations of these norms was often met with violence.

Near universal male suffrage in Spain dated only to 1890. The first vote related to women's suffrage came in May 1877, when seven deputies in the conservative congress, suggested giving women the right to vote if they were of legal age, heads of households exercising parental authority. This initiative failed and would not be revisited for another 30 years.

Suffrage as an in issue appeared in women's publications in places like Valencia, the Balearic Islands and Barcelona from the late 1900s to the early 1930s, but were often part of a demand for female emancipation through education and broader changes in laws to protect social changes as women increasingly entered the workforce. Benita Asas Manterola, Pilar Fernández Selfa, Carmen González Bravo and Joaquín Latorre were among the more important voices in newspapers in this regard. Overall, feminists movements were much more concerned with providing women with an education that was equitable to that of men instead of securing the right to vote. Women like Belén Sárraga and Ana Carvia created the Asociación General Femenina in 1897, and other women created La Unión Femenina in 1895 in Huelva, La Federación Provincial in 1898 in Málaga and Hijas de la Regeneración that same year in Cádiz. Their efforts would lead to women having the right to attend university recognized by Ministerio Público in 1910.

During this period, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) did not generally want to address women's rights as they saw the movement as bourgeois. They wanted to focus on union organization. This contrasted little from the international socialist movement, which always had problems with feminism and women's rights. The International Socialist Congress, Stuttgart 1907 issued a statement in favor of women's suffrage, but said the movement needed to come from the proletariat. The conditional support was because men believed that women's rights should only come after universal male suffrage. Including women's suffrage more openly would hinder their efforts. The limited inclusion came about as a result First International Conference of Socialist Women which was being held concurrently in the same building.

For a brief time between July 1907, Congressional President Antonio Maura had discussed the possibility of giving women the right to vote under limited conditions, including they were widowed heads of households and they paid their taxes. Despite being aided by the left and by Republicans, Maura's efforts proved ineffectual even with conditions requiring heads of household status and no possibility of women running for office; there was no perceived pressing social need by the conservative majority to give women to vote, and more important domestic problems like a war with Morocco were on the horizons, along with an economic recession.

A year later, Count of Casa-Valencia, this time in the Senate, with support from Francisco Pi y Arsuaga in the Congress, would press the issue again. The 1908 attempt lacked restrictions that Maura had been willing to make to see its passage. It would have allowed all women aged 23 and older to vote. Unlike the 1907 efforts, the 1908 votes came within a few votes of passing. According to Concha Fagoaga, for the first time, those that argued against women's suffrage argued that it would lead to disastrous political results, and women would be overly influenced by Church officials. This was the first time a woman had argued along these lines, and it would soon be taken up by others. Carmen de Burgos wrote in a newspaper that year of the parliamentary debate in 1908, "while the English fight in a devilish way for their civic ideals, while the French claim to affirm in laws the guarantee of their selfishness, while the Russians know how to die protesting from tyranny, we, the Spanish, remain indifferent to everything." Margarita Nelken wrote in El Fígaro at the time that "putting a vote in the hands of women is today, in Spain, performing one of the greater yearnings of the reactionary element so that Spanish women, really lovers of freedom, must be the first to postpone their own interest for the progress of Spain." Nelken did not believe Spanish women were ready to vote as they were not educated enough to do so, a position she continued to hold for more than 25 years. The suffrage topic was brought up again in 1919, with Manuel de Burgos y Mazo, a conservative lawmaker, raising it in Congress, with the goal of tabling legislation to have a vote on women's right to vote. With no support, his initiative did not even come up for a vote though it would inspire feminists over the next two years. A petition then was put before the Cámara in 1919 that Parliament should address the issue of women's suffrage again. This was followed up in February 1920 with Valencia's Progreso de la Mujer also creating a petition for the matter to be considered. Cruzada de Mujeres Españolas, led by Carmen de Burgos, would again try to get parliament to address the issue, by giving equality in the vote and in terms of broader civil and political rights.

National Association of Spanish Women (ANME) was founded in 1918. Headed by María Espinosa, it lobbied for women's right to vote. The Female Republican Union was created by Clara Campoamor to advocate for women's suffrage in Spain. Campoamor, María Lejárraga and Regina García established the Foundation for Women to advocate for women's legal equality in Spain during the Second Republic. Their argument for women having the right to vote was largely based upon ideological grounds.

Starting in the 1920s, the efforts of women to get the right to vote intensified as part of a broader western movement that saw women demanding equal rights. These efforts post-dated efforts in other Western countries like the United States, France and Great Britain because feminism in Spain did not emerge as a powerful movement until much later as a result of a delay in the emergence of a Spanish middle class. Suffrage as a topic among this feminist group would largely disappear from 1918 until 1931, as women focused more on social changes than on political goals.

The socialist Lidia Falcón argued that the Socialist men's position would deter women from adhering to the party, or would result in only including women who believed in subservience to men. Falcón further argued this position would make feminists enemies of the party, a development that was born out by 1921, when Socialist men decided that to stop any attempt to promote the rights of women as they did not believe it was the time to push for electoral reforms.

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