600 women, 20 years old, all Speakers

LleidaMaria Sans Moyà, born in Arbeca in 1920, was a war nurse who met Ernest Hemingway in Mataró.For whom the bells ring,the volunteer nurse of the Spanish Civil War with whom the protagonist falls in love. A contemporary of hers, the communist from Agramuntina Carme Brufau Civit (1915-1969), went into exile in the Soviet Union and would end up being considered by the CIA as one of the most important KGB spies in Mexico.

They are two of the 600 women from the 19th and 20th centuries included in the latest book by the historian and writer from Lleida, Antonieta Jarne,Pioneers and unique(Pagès Editors), which has just arrived in bookstores. They share pages with names like Maria Teresa Miralles, the last radio host of Republican Catalonia; Carme Solanes Asmet, co-founder of the Plusfresc supermarket chain; Araceli Segarra Roca, the first Catalan (and wife of the Spanish state) to set foot on the roof of the world; and Maria Rúbies Garrofé, not so much for her political career but as a leading figure in modern mathematics. They are available from all the regions of Ponent, the result of nearly twenty years of research by an author specializing in political, social, and gender history with experience in various biographical dictionaries.

It is a new attempt to correct the invisibility of that part of history that has silently advanced the social, cultural, sporting, scientific, industrial, and commercial fabric of Lleida. Likewise, it saves the memory of women in exile and victims of political violence from obliteration. As the writer expresses, the book is amelting canwhich draws "the richness of a territory often subjected to superficial stereotypes dictated from centrality." Newspaper archives, bibliographies, municipal and parish archives, and oral history have been the multiple sources from which information has been drawn to construct this encyclopedic dictionary, unique in Catalonia. Other contributions have been made by Teresa Ibars, Marc Macià, Noemí Riudor, Míriam Roma, Ferran Dalmau, Josep Rubió, and Xavier Santesmasses.

Pioneers and uniqueIt's the work of someone who, at a very young age, discovered Simone de Beauvoir through her memoirs, and, around the age of 18, discovered the pioneer of intersectional feminism, Angela Davis, who merges gender, class, and race. "My great dream, never fulfilled, was to attend her classes on contemporary social movements at the University of Berkeley," Antonieta explains. The closest she came was with the course on the same subject she taught for a few years at the University of Lleida.

Regarding the recognition of the LGBTI community through shared struggle, coinciding with June 28th, she believes that much progress has been made in the cultural dimension. However, she shares the view of Marxist feminist thinkers, according to whom this progress has not been accompanied by economic rebalancing. She refers to pink capitalism and an entire wealthy social segment, which "has nothing to do with that homosexual or transgender person who can live, for example, in Mariola in Lleida." She thus highlights the identity gap between a Black person from the LGBTI community who is a professional architect and lives in Bonanova in Barcelona and a homosexual who works precariously and lives in a peripheral neighborhood.

In the coming weeks, Antonieta Jarne's schedule will be filled with book launches of her latest novel throughout the Poniente region. And, when free time permits, she may be working on a possible second novel—she's already written about eighty pages. Along the lines of the first,Galera Street, 5(2021) will take us into the world of poor rural women. She's not sure if she'll finish it, but she's convinced that those "located on the margins of the margins" will be its protagonists.