page_title: Mujeres Libres
section_title: From other women's organisations
hierarchical_section_title: Mujeres Libres / Opposition / From other women's organisations
caption_attribution_description: English: Spanish political leader Dolores Ibárruri (1895-1989).
context_page_description: Mujeres Libres was an anarchist women's organisation that existed in Spain from 1936 to 1939. Founded by Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Mercedes Comaposada, and Amparo Poch y Gascón as a small women's group in Madrid, it rapidly grew to a national federation of 30,000 members at its height in the summer of 1938.
  It emerged from the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement, composed of three main organisations: the CNT union; the FAI federation; and the FIJL youth wing. Many women who participated in these groups felt that their issues were being ignored by the predominantly male anarchists. As a result, the autonomous Mujeres Libres groups were created, pursuing both women's liberation and the anarchist social revolution. They argued that the two objectives were equally important and should be pursued in parallel. Aiming towards the empowerment of working class women, they organised activities ranging from education programs and technical classes to childcare centres and maternity care.
  While Mujeres Libres sought recognition as the fourth main organisation within the anarchist movement, they never formally achieved equal status to the other branches.
context_section_description: Relations between Mujeres Libres and other women's groups were often tense. One reason for this was their rejection of feminism, due to their belief that women's activism should only take place alongside anarchist organising. This belief was of particularly great significance due to the political nature of many women's organisations. Several other political parties had set up women's organisations, particularly socialist and communist groups; even the fascist Falange had a Sección Femenina. Mujeres Libres effectively filled this role for the anarchist movement.
  During the Civil War, within the Republic, ideological tensions between various factions were extremely prominent. As anarchists made strides towards revolution in the Spanish Revolution of 1936, Communist groups such as the PCE and PSUC moved to suppress the movement, arguing that defeating Franco was more immediately important than revolution. As this ideological tension grew, the competition between the respective women's groups developed a new dimension, with Mujeres Libres particularly competing for membership with the PCE-led Association of Antifascist Women (in Spanish, Asociación de Mujeres Antifascistas, AMA).
  In the name of anti-fascist unity, the AMA called for the unification of women's groups into one organisation dedicated to mobilising women for the war effort. Dolores Ibárruri, a prominent female Communist figure and leader of the AMA, contested that women should be organised and encouraged into the workforce, but focused on the war effort rather than women's emancipation. Mujeres Libres rejected this call, not only due to their ideological opposition to the PCE, but also because they viewed wartime contribution as only one part of a broader programme of women's emancipation. In this way, Mujeres Libres was unique among contemporary women's organisations in that it considered women's emancipation an end in itself.
caption: Dolores Ibárruri, female Communist figure and leader of the AMA, in 1936.
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