El Silencio Roto: Mujeres Contra el Franquismo by Fernanda Romeu Alfaro Review by: Shirley Mangini The American Historical

Review, Vol. 102, No. 2 (Apr., 1997), pp. 466-467 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2170893 . Accessed: 19/04/2012 17:39
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Reviews of Books

Christian avoids theoretical discussion of any kind; one misses the conceptual sophistication of W. W. Meissner's study of the greatest Basque visionary of With the recent death of Julio Caro Baroja, William A. them all, Ignatiusof Loyola (1992). But what Christian Christian,Jr. is now the leading scholar of Catholicism lacks in psychological depth, he makes up for in as practiced in rural and village areas of Spain from sociological breadth, painting a fascinating picture of medieval times to the present. In connecting the the milieus that fostered rejection or acceptance of the witchcraft epidemic of 1611 with sightings of the seers inside the general context of the church-baiting Virgin Maryin 1931 (his main topic), Christianreasons Second Republic. Many thousands of people ignored that: "The cultural isolation of rural Basque speakers Father Laburu'sscientific attack on the visionaries and may have left them with fewer defenses against and continued to believe in them for years. Faith took root fewer inhibitions about the spirit world and sheltered in "the kin-based clerical culture" of the north and in them from critical alternatives" (p. 212). Although a "permanent, hidden, conventual mystical network" eventually the Spanish high clergy refused to legitimize filled with women familiar with local and international the visionaries, tens of thousands of believers flocked mystics (p. 232). Affluent Catholic conservatives such to the vision sites at Ezkioga and other locales: the as Carmen Medina collected and exhibited their favorsimple schemas of the agrarian world had tapped a ite seers even as they longed for civil war with rebelsource of powerful "devotional energy" that appealed lious factory workers. Sightings of Mary proliferated to urbanites, too (p. 396). quickly:Christiantraces the rash of "mini-Ezkiogas"in Christian carefully chronicles the trance states that rural communities all over Spain. Themes of sacrifice, enabled the seers-many of them children-to com- suffering, and impending chastisement resonated municate with the Virgin and seek answers to pressing throughout the country during the decade of the 1930s, questions of a local or national nature. "As a rule," he and with the outbreak of a "holy war" against Spanish writes, "seers progressed from lesser to greater states atheism many prophecies appeared to have been fulof dissociation" (p. 287). Could the susceptibility to filled. dissociative states at Ezkioga have originated in some Christian deals with many other fascinating aspects form of parental ambivalence, corporal punishment, or of Spanish Catholicism in the twentieth century. We deprivation? The relevance of such questions was discover, for example, how a South American mystic demonstrated some years ago by a landmark study of known as Madre Soledad was able to convince many rural Irish Catholicism by anthropologist Nancy Spanish priests to become like little boys under her Scheper-Hughes (Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics tutelage in the 1920s, submitting to daily self-flagella[1982]). Christian does not pursue this line of inquiry, tion and learning to talk baby-talk to the divinity. but he does suggest that "the Ezkioga visions may have Many of these so-called SacerdotesNifios became firm been ... memories that the force~of fear or desire supporters of the Ezkioga visions. Christian takes a recombined and seers experienced as perception" (p. charitable view of the fantasy boy-slaves of Madre 301). It so happens that the perceptual organization of Soledad, conjecturing that: "A discipline of puerility traumatic experience constructs memory networks may have been particularlyattractive for rural Basque prone to confuse past and present in this way. Philip and Navarrese clergy as a kind of relief from their Greven (Spare the Child [1990]) found abuse instru- inordinate social and political power" (p. 227). Recremental in forging the "psychicwarehouse" of numer- ation it might have been, but one that corresponded to ous Protestant sects in the United States. The psychic unique psychological structures that cry out for expliwarehouse of the Spanish seers included items that cation. (As had happened so often in Spanish church strongly suggest a traumatic genesis, or at the very history, the priestly collusion with female mystics led to rumors of sexual license and was condemned by the least a punitive one. Christian devotes an entire chapter to the grandiose Holy Office in 1925.) Christian's book affords us many precious glimpses apocalyptic themes that emerged in the visions of his seers, with special attention to their prophecies of an into the power of fantasy scripts in the genesis of new impending "chastisement."The Marian sightings were forms of Catholic devotion in Spain. I recommend it to championed eagerly by the more authoritarian and scholars of religion and Spanish history in particular. TIMOTHY MITCHELL credulous members of the Spanish clergy, but it is TexasA&M University intriguingto learn that Jose Antonio Laburu, the most brilliant Jesuit lecturer of his time, personally investigated the sightings of Mary. He subsequently took the FERNANDA ROMEUALFARO. El silencio roto: Mujeres lead in debunking them, in part because of the stunted contra el Franquismo. Madrid: Fernanda Romeu Alspiritual growth of the visionaries and their public. I faro. 1994. Pp. 394. would suggest that, instead of Irish-type schizophrenia, we are dealing with Basque-type dissociation, in which Fernanda Romeu Alfaro's book is a key contribution items from the psychic warehouse of half-forgotten to a small but growing body of work about the fate of coercive experiences, filtered through a particular set Spanish women after the bloody Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Her opening comments about the "colof social relations, became supernaturalvisions.

Angeles: University of California Press. 1996. Pp. xxii, 544. $39.95.

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Modern Europe
lective amnesia" in Spain regarding resistance to the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975) are particularly appropriate with regard to women. Punished by a regime whose tenets were deeply rooted in Hitler's and Mussolini's fascist dictates, Romeu Alfaro reveals how female activists were silenced (in some cases permanently, as in that of Julia Conesa) during the Franco regime for having transgressed as women and as resistance workers. She concentrates on one particular women's prison in Madrid, Ventas. It was commissioned during the democratic Republic by the first female director of Spanish prisons, Victoria Kent, to house five hundred women. Yet in the early postwar period, thousands passed through its gates. Romeu Alfaro studied some nine hundred files of women who were imprisoned in Ventas throughout the Franco regime. This was no doubt a formidable task, since in the first years of the dictatorship, torture and assassination were rampant, and the regime's jailers often protected themselves by falsifying information about their savage acts. Primarily a compendium of oral testimonies (in addition to numerous documents and statistics and an invaluable chronology of women's participation in the resistance), the book provides source material for analyzing how activist women were treated by the regime and how they themselves perceived their role in the resistance. Romeu Alfaro divides underground activities into four periods. In the first (1939-1952), women were imprisoned and often tortured because they were hiding or aiding guerrilla fighters. By the 1950s, Romeu Alfaro points out, the resistance had begun to organize strikes, and women's participation increased. In the 1960s, the insertion of women into the workforce made them more visible. In fact, in 1961 a group of women staged a demonstration in the center of Madrid clamoring for the release of their men from prison. Forty women were arrested, and Romeu Alfaro was among them. During that period, the Democratic Women's Movement was created. By the early 1970s, women had joined the student movement and were actively working underground, and the first signs of feminist activity emerged. Yet what we find in the oral testimonies-and this was largely true during the war also-is that the exclusive role of women continued to be that of "helpmate," even into the final years of resistance. In fact, many of the testimonies reveal the traditional antifeminism that still exists in Spain today. Ironically, while rejecting feminism, the women admit that they were not considered essential to the resistance movement by the men. Some complain that they considered marriage to another revolutionary as "romantic"until they realized that the spouses envisioned their exclusive role to be that of housewife. Also, the women with children who committed their lives to the movement regret the fact that the children had to suffer the consequences of their political activism. Another compelling theme that surfaces in the testimonies is that of prostitution, especially in the

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early postwar years. Single women, ex-prisoners, and women whose husbands were in prison often fell prey to the petitions of the Franco police, who promised money or special treatment for their husbands. Without financial resourses, many women succumbed to such entreaties; pariahs because of their politics or those of their men, they were even more ostracized because of their role as "fallen women." This book appears to be an exorcism for Romeu Alfaro. In the beginning, she explains the difficulty of getting a publisher and the indifference with which the topic was received. It is obvious that as she gathered the testimonies and documents about women who were imprisoned in Ventas and wrote the text, she was carryingon a moral crusade to reverse the silence the activists had suffered for decades. Romeu Alfaro clearly represents what I have called the "urgent solitary voice of collective testimony." Yet the book could have greatly benefited from an analysis-derived from her own personal experience as a participant in the resistance and as a feminist historian-of how women were encoded by their male colleagues. Though the book's organization is somewhat confusing because of the arbitrarynature of chapter and section divisions, it is a useful primary source for scholars of survival studies who choose to analyze resistance and repression as gendered experiences.
SHIRLEY MANGINI

CaliforniaState University, Long Beach from the Tower:English KEITH L. SPRUNGER. Trumpets Puritan Printingin the Netherlands,1600-1640. (Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, number 46.) New York: E. J. Brill. 1994. Pp. xvi, 240. This book represents another solid contribution to the growing body of literature on printing and bookselling in the early Dutch Republic. Its distinguishing characteristic is that the individuals under consideration are usually English and Scottish exiles-more interested in affairs back home than in their adopted countryrather than Dutch natives. Keith L. Sprunger supports the longstanding notion that Protestantism and printing went hand in hand, both by showing expatriated Puritans churning out over 300 different titles on English religion and politics during these decades and by regular discussion of a Puritan "philosophy"-or better "theology"-of abundant printing. That philosophy proved to be more viable in the Dutch Republic than in England, partly because all Europeans felt safer discussing sensitive matters of the homeland when outside it and largely because of the Republic's unusually favorable environment for booksellers. One strength of the book is the balanced discussion of that environment: it was as much the result of a fragmented political structure that intentionally or not promoted the flow of ideas as it was of tolerant attitudes. When pushed too far, Dutch authorities showed that they were just as capable of intolerance as

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