Silenced women who refused to be silent

BarcelonaMaria Verger was stigmatized for being free and a leftist. Teresa Pàmies, Mercè Rodoreda, Aurora Bertrana, and Teresa Juvé survived exile by working as domestic servants. Dolors Orriols was denied a press card because, according to the regime, she had to care for her son and husband. Assumpció Soler's life was made impossible for her being a single mother. Joana Raspall was expelled from the library corps. Elvira Augusta Lewi disappeared.

"How can so many novels, some of them very good, lie dormant in the attic of oblivion? How can there be so many unknown female authors?" asks the writer Ramon Solsona (Barcelona, ​​1950), author of Women in the Middle: Thirty Storytellers Between Republican Illusion, Defeat, and Recovery (Pórtico, 2025), which won the Carles Rahola Essay Prize. "The Catalan feminist tradition is not linear but rather a spiral, yet it never breaks. The patriarchal canon may be interested in highlighting only four writers, but we must speak of a network; they all knew each other's texts," says Pilar Godayol (Manlleu, 1968), who has published Women in struggle. Twelve moments from the 20th century that have shaped Catalan feminism in the 21st century (Green Ray). Both have done a great deal of work to bring to light the stories of women who often suffered severe discrimination, yet persevered. It's not merely an archaeological exercise. Both Solsona and Godayol rescue from oblivion literary voices and struggles that are worth knowing in order to understand who we are and how we got here.

Solsona admits that she began researching writers such as Maria Teresa Vernet, Carme Montoriol, Rosa Maria Arquimbau, Aurora BertranaCelia Suñol, Maria Dolors Orriols or Concepción M. Maluquer, due to a lack of awareness. "I realized there were some very good ones, but they weren't well enough known. At first, I thought I should read them and say what I thought, but it didn't make sense to talk about someone that no one, or very few people, knew. And the search broadened. It was no longer just about reading books and looking for them—practically all of them—practically all of them. The biographical work, which is generally impressive," says Solsona, who laments the scarcity of obituaries for many of these women and champions the literary quality of Laura Masip, Maria Àngels Vayreda, and Roser Cardús, among many others.

These were women who suffered a double punishment. Many of the authors the writer rescues in the book began publishing during the Second Republic, but after Franco's victory, there was only silence. “Men and women were punished; there was exile and internal exile; it was traumatic, but women were punished and marginalized even more simply for being women. Many never published again,” Solsona recalls. “Then there were the women who were very young in the 1930s and had great difficulty learning Catalan. The publishing house had been destroyed,” she adds.

Despite the extraordinary feminist activism of the 1930s, not everyone understood feminism in the same way. “It was a word with many connotations. Many women avoided the words feminism and feminist as if it were an ugly evil. Rosa Maria Arquimbau, Aurora Bertrana, and Anna Murià, despite launching unequivocally feminist messages, opposed femininity and feminism,” says Solsona. Arquimbau, for example, criticized the British suffragettes and considered them mere tributes. She did not rule out marriage if it was an arena for unfurling the flag of feminism.

Abortion and sex with strangers

Taken together, if we review the works of all those women who lived through the Republican defeat and the long dictatorship, many themes considered taboo emerge. "In most of the novels, the focus is on the woman, and themes such as dissatisfaction in marriage, which becomes a cage, disillusionment, betrayal, fear of unwanted pregnancy, or the consequences of becoming pregnant appear," says Solsona. However, the writer continues, criticism or rebellion falls short: "They don't jump off the cliff perhaps because the price of doing so was too high." Even so, they were quite daring. Carme Ribé wrote From day to night In 1968, during the dictatorship. The protagonist catches her husband with a lover and decides to sleep with the first man she meets. Rodoreda spoke about abortion in Camellia Street and Teresa Vernet explained the life of a kept woman inRed algae

Many suffered greatly, both personally and professionally. "Everything would have been much worse if these women hadn't done anything. If they hadn't sacrificed themselves, perhaps much more would have been lost. They were very aware of the situation; they didn't want to break the thread. There was a strong will and a great need to maintain the tradition," says Solsona. Godayol expresses a similar sentiment: "Throughout history, many women creators have drawn heavily from other women and previous creations." The professor at UVic highlights twelve key moments in the history of 20th-century Catalan feminism: from two feminist journals, Feminine and Women in Struggle...to the Institute of Culture and Popular Library for Women, passing through Oceanic paradises, by Aurora Bertrana, translations of feminist essays such as The mystique of femininity, by Betty Friedan, or The second sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, the LaSal publishing house, or the International Feminist Book Fair.

From more moderate or more radical positions, the protagonists of Godayol's book defended equality between men and women and acted collectively, often against the imposed system. "Patriarchy has promoted the silencing, false classification, isolation, and sometimes censorship of female cultural and literary models," says Godayol, who considers it important to make the various struggles of the 20th century visible. "We cannot move forward if we are blind to the past," she explains. "Only by remembering and reclaiming the achievements of those who came before us can we build a more dignified, pluralistic, and inclusive future."

Godayol considers one of the "stellar" moments of 20th-century Catalan feminism to be the Catalan Women's Days in May 1976, in a context of euphoric and revolutionary post-Francoism. "The Catalan Women's Days were a watershed moment for Catalan feminism and deserve to be remembered and celebrated always. The key to their success was diversity and, above all, the large number of anonymous women who participated. It was the first time that thousands of women emerged from the shadows to meet publicly to demand their rights and challenge the Francoist patriarchy," says Godayol, who insists that all these struggles be properly explained. "We must recover and reclaim female and feminist role models to combat the current reactionary wave, but we must do it right, because otherwise, we risk creating even more opposition. These women in Catalonia are part of the country's history," she adds. Godayol also emphasizes the need to remember and reinstate the names of key 20th-century women in the cultural canon and introduce them to young people through readings in high schools, universities, and book clubs.