Reform schools under Franco: "My crime was smoking and wearing a miniskirt"

Barcelona"Praised be the most holy sacrament"," the nun would announce loudly in the middle of the dormitory in the morning. And they, half asleep in bed and with their eyes still stuck shut with sleep, would answer in unison mechanically:May He be forever blessed and praised"The nuns would wake them up like that day after day. Maria Forns remembers it perfectly, even though it was more than half a century ago. She was 16 when she was placed in a convent against her will.

Mariona Roca Tort was locked up at 17. The nuns dragged her everywhere and dragged her down the stairs and dragged her down the stairs and dragged her down the stairs and dragged her down the stairs and dragged her down the stairs and dragged her down the stairs and dragged her down the stairs and dragged her down the stairs and dragged her down the stairs and dragged her down the stairs and dragged her down the stairs and dragged her down the stairs and dragged her down the stairs and dragged her down the stairs. Administer a sedative to make her stop screaming. In return, the crime Pilar Dasí's defining characteristics were wearing miniskirts, smoking in the street, and liking the Rolling Stones.

The four were interned in centers run by the so-called Patronato de Protección a la Mujer (Board for the Protection of Women), a Francoist institution under the then Ministry of Justice whose main objective was straighten supposedly wayward girls: that is, those who did not follow the standards of the time of aspiring to be a good wife, mother and housewife.

Researcher Pilar Iglesias, author of the book Policies of repression and punishment of women: the Magdalene Laundries of Ireland and the Patronato de Protección en la Mujer in SpainShe clarifies that the practice of confining women to prevent them from going astray is not exclusive to either the Franco regime or Spain: "Since the mid-16th century, convents have existed in the Catholic world, supposedly to protect women, where they were confined for moral or sexual reasons."

The centers of the Patronato de Protección a la Mujer (Board for the Protection of Women) existed from 1941 until well into the democratic era: their closure was decreed on August 1, 1985. All were run by religious orders, whose way of redeeming the wayward It involved forcing them to pray, scrub, wash, and sew. All within a prison-like regime, where parents often lost custody of their daughters.

Girls aged 16 to 23 ended up there, because until 1943 the age of majority for women in Spain was 23. "Afterwards, it was lowered to 21, but a daughter couldn't leave her parents' home if she was under 25," Iglesias explains. According to her, the profile of the young women who passed through these centers varied over the decades: from girls from very poor families to prostitutes, single mothers, rape victims, or simply rebellious girls who came home late, had boyfriends, or participated in clandestine activities against the Franco regime. In other words, those considered to be in "moral danger" because they might have sex outside of marriage. Often, it was their parents who denounced them.

Pilar Iglesias estimates that some 50,000 girls were interned in the Patronato's centers, although it is difficult to know the exact number because no exhaustive investigation has been carried out, nor has the archives of most religious congregations been accessed, and many of these women do not want to dredge up the past. María, Mariona, Isabel, and Pilar are an exception. They intend precisely to end the stigma, the label that they were "bad women." In reality, they were simply ahead of their time. In August, they formed the Association Against Oblivion.

Maria Forns is 69 years old and admits that she skipped classes in high school as a teenager, sometimes didn't come home at the time her parents told her to, and read books considered unorthodox for the time. All of this shocked her family, who lived in a farmhouse in Les Franqueses del Vallès. The village priest recommended that her parents confine her to the house for two months, which they did. Afterward, she was placed in a children's home run by the Patronato (a local social welfare organization). "The priest wrote a letter to the Mother Superior of a convent requesting a place for the daughter of some parishioners," she explains. Two days before she was admitted, the priest entered her room and, according to him, hit her to verify her virginity. "He was the authority figure and had free access to my parents' house," laments Maria, who was so shaken by the incident that she doesn't remember the exact day she was placed in the convent. All she knows is that she was 16 years old and that on that day her parents told her to put on a skirt, because she always wore pants, and to pack her suitcase to leave home.

She was taken to a convent of the Adoration Sisters congregation, located on the corner of Consell de Cent and Casanova streets in Barcelona. A school run by the same congregation now stands there. Months later, she was transferred to another center in Sant Just Desvern. "I remember the dormitory. There were twenty beds. On one side were the wardrobes, and on the other, some tall windows. And at the end of the room was the bedroom of the nun who watched over us," she describes. Her daily routine consisted of getting up early, going to Mass, having breakfast, scrubbing the convent floor on her knees, working in a workshop making stuffed animals, and praying, praying, and praying: the Angelus, the Rosary, and everything else required. They were never allowed to leave. It was closed for eleven months.

Shaved head

“They threatened to shave our heads if we didn’t follow the rules. At first, I didn’t believe it until they shaved a fellow nun’s head,” she explains. Another threat was putting them in solitary confinement. She was locked up for several days because she tried to escape. “I was grateful for it, because at least in the cell I had some privacy; I wasn’t under constant surveillance,” she says, adding, “The hardest part was the feeling of being crushed and not being able to do anything to stop it.” The experience has marked her for life. On her wrist, she still wears a gold-plated no-moblidos bracelet, a gift from a fellow nun she has never seen again. Her name was Mercè Domènech.

For Mariona Roca Tort, her time in the institution has also left an indelible mark. "People can't understand what it meant to be there," she laments. Some of her siblings have criticized her for dredging up the past now.

Mariona was institutionalized in 1969, when she was 17 years old. She is currently seventy-three. As a teenager, she wasn't part of any political party, but she was a member of the high school student union, and one of her classmates was arrested on May 1st of that year. That, she says, was the trigger that led her parents to forbid her from leaving the house and bombard her with questions every time she went out. Taking advantage of the fact that her family had gone on summer vacation and she had stayed behind working in Barcelona, ​​she ran away from home and traveled to Menorca with some friends. What she never imagined was that her own parents would report her to the police. "They arrested me in the port of Maó. It was a shock," she admits. From there, they took her by boat to Barcelona and locked her up in a convent: first in the Catalan capital, and then in Madrid. Specifically, in the convent that the dictator Franco gave to the Adorers of the Blessed Sacrament congregation on Padre Damián Street in Madrid, which became the main headquarters of these nuns for decades. The building was demolished in 1991.

What struck Mariona most while she was there was the silence. An absolute silence that filled the corridors and rooms of that immense convent. Silence when they prayed, silence when they rubbed cloths, silence when they sewed. Always silence. "A nun would read aloud while we worked in the sewing workshop so we couldn't talk to each other. And if they saw you were getting along well with a fellow nun, they would separate you so you couldn't talk to her either." And external silence as well: the muteness that has existed for decades about everything that happened in the centers of the Patronato de Protección a la Mujer (Board for the Protection of Women).

Mariona was locked up for nine months. Her parents, who unlike others did not lose custody, took her away because she began to lose too much weight. "I didn't go on a hunger strike, but I stopped eating. I wasn't hungry," she explains. Her file literally states that she showed "sadness." As she continued to lose weight, her parents then admitted her to a psychiatric hospital, also in Madrid. Something also very typical of the time: women who deviated from conventional norms were considered insane. The administration of psychotropic drugs was also common in the Patronato's centers. Mariona was even given electroshock therapy. "I ended up in a very bad way, blaming myself for everything I had done."

Isabel Gallego Soler is 65 years old, from a village in Granada, but has lived in Sant Joan de les Abadesses for a decade. Unlike other women, she voluntarily went to one of the Patronato's centers, Nuestra Señora de la Almudena, better known as the Peñagrande maternity ward because of the Madrid neighborhood where it was located and because it primarily served young pregnant women and single mothers. It was run by the Evangelical Crusades, and one of the gynecologists who attended the births was Dr. Eduardo Vela, who has been proven to have been involved in the cases of stolen babies during the Franco regime. Isabel became pregnant at 19 by a married man who, as was common at the time, abandoned the child. For a while, she worked as a live-in maid, but was fired as soon as her pregnancy became apparent. Abandoned by her mother as a child and abused by her father, she had no choice but to seek refuge with the nuns. She entered Peñagrande on January 13, 1981.

She says that initially they treated her well because she neither smoked nor drank, had vocational training, and was hardworking. In other words, her only misstep had been getting pregnant. "They gave me a dormitory where there were only two of us, offered me a paid job in the center's kitchen, and let me go for walks on Sunday afternoons." But the problems started during childbirth. Isabel says she was in labor for 48 hours and that no one attended to her, to the point that she almost died. "They removed my daughter with forceps and damaged her spine, shoulders, and hip." And then she had to endure the nuns who insisted every day that she give the baby up for adoption to a wealthy family, because she would be better off than with her. "I am a survivor and I haven't stopped fighting for justice," she declares.

Pilar Dasí, 73, also considers herself a survivor. Her case is somewhat atypical. She was confined for four months and was only allowed to return home because criminal lawyer Alberto García Esteve threatened to file a criminal complaint against the Patronato (a children's welfare agency) for removing her parents' custody. "I wore miniskirts, smoked, went to the movies, read a lot, and my parents would tell me to be home by a certain time, and I would arrive later. That was my crime," summarizes Pilar, who deduces that her mother, overwhelmed by all of this, asked for help from a cousin who lived in Madrid, and that her cousin died. "My mother signed the consent form without being fully aware of the implications of what she was doing."

Shortly after, on October 9, 1970, the police arrested Pilar at the company where she worked as an executive secretary and took her to the Convent of Mary of the Blessed Sacrament in Valencia, which still partially stands today. They then imprisoned her in another convent in the same city. She was only 18 years old.

"I didn't know why I had been denounced, or why I was there. If I asked about my parents, they told me they had nothing to say." The nuns only told her that she was there because she was "modern." A few days later, her parents went to the convent to demand their daughter back, but they were told they had lost custody. "My family was left-wing and very afraid of the right wing, so they didn't insist any further."

The Spanish Conference of Religious (CONFER) apologized on June 9 at an event in Madrid for what happened at the Patronato centers. The event was meticulously planned for a whole year to ensure nothing went off script, to avoid any surprises. However, the event ended in a completely unexpected way: a large part of the audience spontaneously rose to their feet to shout, "Truth, justice, and reparations. No forgetting, no forgiving!" This is what the women who were imprisoned against their will in Franco's reformatories want. As a first step, they demand that the Democratic Memory Law, passed by the Spanish government in 2022, finally recognize them as victims of the dictatorship.