Written by Silvia Carrasco
Fifty years ago, in May 1976, only six months after Franco’s death and amid intense repression, more than 4,000 women gathered in the Great Hall of the University of Barcelona for the first Jornades Catalanes de la Dona (Catalan Women’s Conference). With an average attendance of 500 people per session, the event overflowed the venue, with many participants sitting on the floor in the aisles and along the walls, as photographs from the time show. Reviving and renewing feminist ideas and language, the conference denounced the injustices inflicted on women under Francoism and proclaimed, loud and clear, that women would no longer accept a secondary role—either in political struggle or in the society that was yet to be built.
Girls like me, turning sixteen and moving from childhood into adolescence, with all the intensity and excitement of that age, came of age amid the surge of hope and the exhilarating sense of reclaiming freedoms long suppressed at the beginning of the Transition, and we felt unstoppable. Or at least we thought we were—and so did our mothers: both those from anti-Francoist families who had endured forty years of repression and those who were becoming politically aware in the charged political atmosphere of the time.
At the same age, my mother had lived through another historic moment that unexpectedly opened doors for the daughter of a textile worker with a deep passion for culture and education, despite the resistance of conservative National Catholicism and the fascist tide sweeping across Europe and spilling into Spain. Needless to say, she projected onto me the determination to reclaim everything that the defeat of the Second Republic had taken from her, both as a woman and as a worker. Everything that emerged from that conference felt like a long-awaited breath of fresh air.
The conference was an unprecedented success. Women from a wide range of backgrounds took part: women involved in clandestine political organizations and trade unions, neighborhood associations, and cultural and civic groups that discreetly sheltered other forms of activity and made possible the double life so common among those on the defeated side of the Civil War.
The debates and ideas that emerged from the conference are still worth revisiting today—both those that generated broad consensus and those that ultimately prevented the creation of a unified feminist movement rooted in shared experiences, interests, and demands. These difficulties were compounded by early tensions with political parties, which claimed to represent those demands and aspirations but, when it came to acting on them—then as now—consistently pushed them aside, arguing that the moment was never quite right or treating women’s demands as the first concessions to be traded away.
Revisiting the texts of the presentations and resolutions, it is disheartening to see how many of the issues they raised remain strikingly relevant today, despite the profound changes in the legal framework and social conditions over the past fifty years. Among them are the persistence of the gender pay gap, the feminization of precariousness throughout women’s lives, and structural male violence.
These decades have also shown us, for example, that women’s massive entry into higher education—and their attainment of educational levels that now surpass those of men—has not translated into greater feminist political consciousness or into a corresponding increase in real power. We have also seen how patriarchy reacts to advances in equality between women and men, reinventing itself under new and powerful guises in alliance with the individualism and commodification of life fostered by neoliberal capitalism, with profound consequences for us all.
Who could have imagined then that, after so many years of democracy and the implementation of important—though fragile—equality policies, we would also witness the first major rollback of rights? We could not have foreseen being subjected to new laws that erase women as a material reality and as political subjects of our own struggle. Nor could we have imagined becoming targets of censorship, slander, and persecution—not only from the patriarchal resistance of the right, but also from those who had supposedly embraced feminist demands for social transformation. We now find ourselves confronting an infiltration within the movement that seeks to overturn and redefine a feminist agenda built and consolidated over three centuries, reducing women to identities while presenting sexual and reproductive exploitation as forms of empowerment and altruism, thereby reinforcing male privilege and the power of economic elites.
This coming May 30, the Great Hall of the University of Barcelona will host the commemoration marking the 50th anniversary of the first Jornades Catalanes de la Dona, and we will make this new gathering another landmark event in the history of the feminist movement in Catalonia. The Comissió Moviment de Dones Feministes and Feministes al Congrés (PFAC) have organised a conference aimed at forging new shared agreements and developing a program of political and social action capable of confronting the current moment and mobilizing women once again.
There we will meet many of the women who led the struggle during the Transition, those leading it today, and those already taking up the torch, bringing together generations through shared reflection and experience.
You cannot miss it. Women in struggle—now more than ever.
The Day is free of charge but requires prior registration due to limited capacity, through the official website: www.50anysjornadesdones.cat
Program of the Day: https://www.50anysjornadesdones.cat/programa/