Santana-Vallarta

PRIMARY SOURCES
During the early twentieth century one encountered a world where the particular
question of women in society became a major topic of discussion, and in Republican
Spain, 1931-1939, this much was apparent to all living at the time. However, women
were still regulated as a sidebar in society, barely mentioned in accounts of war aside
from the status of significant other. In Memories of Resistance, Mangini illustrates the
unheard voices of these women, who lived in a time where the majority of people writing
were men who wrote about other men in the war and any mention of women was absent
in accounts of the war.
After Francoist Spain however, many documents written by or about women
began to appear, virtually all associated with the left-leaning and less traditional
Republicans. These documents reveal a string of women, at least those involved in
writing their thoughts and memories, who were interested in the war, their place in it, and
the struggles of being a women looking for more human agency when sometimes it
wasnt there under an impeding traditional order. Though Trapiello argues that the war
divided society, the documents Mangini presents offer a perspective from the more
silenced gender, one that by a majority saw its hope in the Republic.

Mangini, Shirley. Memories of Resistance: Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil
War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

In this autobiography by Republican aristocrat Constancia de la Mora, one finds a

book with a women dedicated to the Republican cause against the Nationalists, her book
having circulated outside of Spain and never officially inside until after regime of Franco.

Santana-Vallarta
Here we see a women, like many of the male writers mentioned in Trapiellos book,
caught between the political frenzy and upheaval of Civil War Spain, herself leaning to
the left while her own sister associated with the Falange, the premier fascist group within
Spain.
Perhaps more so than others, Mora gives us a nuanced view into both her own and
others thoughts during the war, thoughts not necessarily caught up in a diametrically
opposed rhetoric of violence but concerned with the complicated lives of loved ones and
society at large. On the one hand, Moras work then gives us a record the pushes against
Trapiellos assessment that it was, in Spain, rare to find one single Spaniard who didnt
think first and foremost that the problems of Spain were grave and required one solution
(29): war. On the other hand, her work supports Trapiellos argument that those who tried
not to choose a side were inevitably forced to by a public discourse that pushed them,
without other option, to do so.
Mora, Constancia de la. In Place of Splendor. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1939.