Did you know that the first Catalan Women's Conference was funded by Jordi Pujol?

Certainly, the 20th century is not the century of Einstein or the atomic bomb, it is the century of women. Here in Catalonia, the 20th century was prolific in feminist demonstrations, which we need to know in order to build an even more feminist 21st century. As long as we do not want to perpetuate the mess that the world is today.

Like the links in a chain, Pilar Godayol (Manlleu, 1968), a professor at the University of Vic-Central University of Catalonia – a specialist in gender studies and author of, among others,Where are the women? Lives and manifestos– Now, we're going to trace a dozen key moments of feminism in Catalonia. Twelve adventures that have allowed us to get to where we are now, whether in the form of people, books, magazines, publishers, or even feminist fairs.

The journey of Women in struggle It does not begin with the magazine of the same name – born during the Transition – but rather starts at the beginning of the 20th century with the legendary magazine Feminal, which existed by the work and grace of Carme Karr, an exponent of bourgeois feminism. It continues with the pioneering work of Francesca Bonnemaison at the Institute of Culture and Popular Library of Women—through which thousands of young women passed—and focuses on the radically free figure of the writer. Aurora Bertrana, who dreamed of building a women's workers' university.

Already in the second half of the century, the author highlights the publication of three key books: Women in Catalonia, from the teacher Maria Aurèlia Capmany and two translations, The second sex by Simone de Beauvoir and The mystique of femininity by Betty Friedan. It then expands on the fruitful First Catalan Women's Conference, which in May 1976 brought together four thousand women. It dwells, of course, on the magazine that gives the book its title and the first feminist publishing house in the country, La Sal, editions of women. It ends in the 90s with three moments: the Feminist Book Fair held in the Drassanes of Barcelona in 1990, the analysis of an emblematic text by Maria-Mercè Marçal In this work, she confesses her debt to symbolic mothers and recalls the twentieth anniversary of the aforementioned Conference, an anniversary that hammered home the feminist commitment in our country.

Although it's an enjoyable read, don't expect a simplistic approach to these goals, but rather a complete and well-documented contextualization that reveals lesser-known aspects of this journey toward the consolidation of feminism in Catalonia. Did you know that the fledgling Popular Women's Library, aside from being the first in the world, held a highly successful raffle of figurines on Sundays? That the publisher Castellet promoted the Catalan translation of Betty Friedan's book? That the first Catalan Women's Conference was funded by none other than Jordi Pujol?

Women in struggle It's a valuable insight into the construction of our memory. I personally would have added a thirteenth chapter on women's associations in the 1930s, embodied in the Women's Sports Club and the Barcelona Lyceum Club, but although I don't dedicate an entire section to them, Godayol already addresses them.