Bearing Witness: Carlota O'Neill's Una mujer en la Guerra de España

Abstract

Carlota O'Neill's memoir Una mujer en la Guerra de España charts her experiences of the early days of the conflict and her time in prison, and is a valuable narrative both for its eye-witness account of the confusion of the early days of the Nationalist uprising and for its description of the conditions and treatment of women in prison. Carlota's testimony offers a critical alternative to the official version of events, and highlights the voices of other forgotten women, whose stories were not part of official history. Written from exile, it also captures the author's anger at the brutality of the Nationalists and their supporters, the lack of intervention from Western democracies and the injustice of her trial. Her narrative constitutes a denunciation, an appeal to conscience, and a refusal to be silenced. It represents a continued struggle against the regime and its legacy. Although it is a very personal story, it is one that is rooted in the history of the Civil War, its aftermath and its legacy, and it is a valuable addition to a collective memory that is constantly being revised and re-negotiated in order to reach a more complete understanding of Spain's recent traumatic past.

Notes

¹The volumes that comprise this memoir were first published in Mexico as Una mexicana en la Guerra de España (México D.F.: Populibros la Prensa, 1964), Romanzas de las rejas (México D.F.: Castalia, 1964) and Los muertos también hablan (México D.F.: Populibros la Prensa, 1971). References given within the text are to Una mujer en la Guerra de España (Madrid: Oberon, 2003).

²Vicente Moga Romero, Las heridas de la historia. Testimonios de la guerra civil española en Melilla (Barcelona: Alborán Bellaterra, 2004), 43.

³For a further discussion of the nueva mujer moderna, see Mary Nash, ‘Un/Contested Identities: Motherhood, Sex Reform and the Modernization of Gender Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Spain’, in Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, ed. Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff (New York: SUNY Press, 1999), 25–49.

⁴Moga Romero, Las heridas de la historia, 40; Lidia Falcón, Los hijos de los vencidos: 1939–1949 (Barcelona: Pomaire, 1979), 35.

⁵Falcón, Los hijos de los vencidos, 22–24; 26–27.

⁶From the family archive of the Leret-O'Neill family (ACLO). I am grateful to Carlota Leret O'Neill for giving me access to material from the archive and for her generosity in answering my questions during a series of meetings that took place in Madrid in May 2007.

⁷Falcón, Los hijos de los vencidos, 32; Irene Falcón, Asalto a los cielos. Mi vida junto a la Pasionaria (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1996), 96.

⁸Interview with Carlota Leret, Madrid, May 2007.

⁹Her membership number in the Ateneo in 1934–1935 was 16.719 (ACLO).

¹⁰Danièle Bussy Genevois, ‘Del otoño del 33 al verano del 34: ¿los meses claves de la condición social femenina?’, in Las mujeres y la Guerra Civil Española. III Jornadas de Estudios Monográficos. Salamanca, Octubre 1989 (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura; Instituto de la Mujer, 1991), 15–22 (p. 16). Catherine Davies refers to this magazine as Nosotros, but a copy of the letterhead for this ‘Revista femenina’ held in the family archive clearly shows that it is Nosotras, and that it was published from Carlota's home at Guzmán el Bueno, 31. See Catherine Davies, Spanish Women's Writing. 1849–1996 (London: The Athlone Press, 1998), 107. Juan Antonio Hormigón observes in his detailed essay on Carlota that the name of the journal was probably inspired by César Falcón's Nosotros (‘Un velero blanco en la bahía. Derrotero de Carlota O'Neill’, in Carlota O'Neill, Circe y los cerdos. Cómo fue España encadenada. Los que no pudieron huir [Madrid: ADE, 1997], 7–292 [p. 42]).

¹¹For a discussion of this aspect of her work, see Catherine O'Leary, ‘Carlota O'Neill: una dramaturga comprometida’, in Mujer, literatura y esfera pública: España 1900–1940, ed. Pilar Nieva de la Paz et al. (Philadelphia: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 2008), 205–16.

¹²César Falcón, ‘El teatro proletario en Asturias’, La Lucha (Madrid), 30 January 1934, p. 19. Reprinted in Los novelistas sociales españoles (1928–1936). Antología, ed. José Esteban and Gonzalo Santonja (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1988), 104–07 (pp. 105, 106).

¹³Paul Preston, ‘Las víctimas del Franquismo y los historiadores’, in La memoria de los olvidados. Un debate sobre el silencio de la represión franquista, ed. Emilio Silva et al. (Valladolid: Ámbito, 2004), 13–21 (p. 15).

¹⁴Falcón, Los hijos de los vencidos, 34. Carlota's prison experiences during the war and at the start of the regime are echoed by those of her niece, Lidia Falcón, towards the end of the regime. See Lidia Falcón, En el infierno: ser mujer en las cárceles de España (Barcelona: Ediciones de Feminismo, 1977).

¹⁵José Antonio Marina and María Teresa Rodríguez de Castro, La conspiración de las lectoras (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2009), 219.

¹⁶Hormigón, ‘Un velero blanco en la bahía’, 267–74.

¹⁷Leret-O'Neill Family Archive (ACLO).

¹⁹Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2003), 5.

¹⁸Manuel Tuñón de Lara, ‘Historia’, in La cultura bajo el franquismo, ed. José María Castellet (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1977), 23–46 (pp. 23, 30); Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (London: Harper Collins, 1993), 661.

²⁰Paloma Aguilar Fernández, Memoria y olvido de la Guerra Civil española (Madrid: Alianza, 1996), 56.

²¹Michael Richards, ‘From War Culture to Civil Society: Francoism, Social Change and Memories of the Spanish Civil War’, History and Memory, 14:1–2 (2002), 93–120 (p. 111).

²²See the ARMH website: <http://www.memoriahistorica.org/>.

²³Spain's involvement in the Pinochet case raised questions about her own unresolved past. See Omar G. Encarnación, ‘Pinochet's Revenge: Spain Revisits Its Civil War’, World Policy Journal, 20:4 (2007–08), 39–50; Madeleine Davis, ‘Is Spain Recovering Its Memory? Breaking the Pacto del Olvido’, Human Rights Quarterly, 27 (2005), 858–80; Madeleine Davis, ‘Externalised Justice and Democratisation: Lessons from the Pinochet Case’, Political Studies, 54:2 (2006), 245–66.

²⁴Kathleen Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia U. P., 1999), 27.

²⁵Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, 20.

²⁶For a discussion of the legal debates, see Georgina Blakely, ‘Politics As Usual? The Trials and Tribulations of the Law of Historical Memory in Spain’, Entelequia. Revista Interdisciplinar: Monográfico, 7 (2008), 315–30, <http://www.eumed.net/entelequia> (accessed 3/12/2009).

²⁷Copies of the reviews cited here are held in the Leret-O'Neill family archive, ACLO.

²⁸ Spojrzenie zza kraty (Varsovia: Czytlnik, 1968); Trapped in Spain (Toronto: Solidarity Books, 1978).

²⁹Carlota recounts the prostitutes’ stories of abuse and their fear of being branded ‘rojas’ (70). The political prisoners and the prostitutes often view each other with suspicion, though the latter are an important source of information from the outside for all of the other prisoners. For a further discussion of prostitution, and the attitudes towards it at the time, see Mary Nash, Rojas. Las mujeres republicanas en la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Taurus, 2006), 219–33.

³⁰Laura S. Leret O'Neill, ‘Regreso al arte testimonial de Carlota O'Neill’, Papel literario/3, El Nacional, 31 March 2006, <www.analitica.com/mujeranalitica/documentos/9374806.asp> (accessed 1/2/2007). A copy of this file is also kept in the Leret-O'Neill family archive ACLO.

³¹Kalí Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1996), 7.

³³Dulce Chacón, ‘La mujer y la construcción del olvido’, in La memoria de los olvidados, 75–78 (pp. 75–76); La voz dormida (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002).

³²Preston's correspondence with Laura Leret O'Neill (28/5/2004), quoted in ‘Regreso al arte testimonial de Carlota O'Neill’.

³⁴Chacón, ‘La mujer y la construcción del olvido’, 77.

³⁵Mercedes Yusta Rodrigo, ‘The Mobilization of Women in Exile: The Case of the Unión de Mujeres Antifascistas Españolas in France (1944–1950)’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 11:1 (2005), 43–58 (p. 43).

³⁶Falcón, Los hijos de los vencidos, 40.

³⁷Tomasa Cuevas’ memoir, Cárcel de mujeres. 1939–1945 (Barcelona: Sirocco, 1985), translated and edited by Mary E. Giles and published as Prison of Women. Testimonies of War and Resistance in Spain, 1939–1975 (New York: SUNY Press, 1998), is another significant testimonial work. Some recent popular culture novels and films have also focused on women's experiences of the Civil War and its aftermath. In addition to Chacón's aforementioned bestseller, two films, Vicente Aranda's Libertarias (1996) and Emilio Martínez Lázaro's Las 13 rosas (2007) have had some success at the box office in Spain. Other recent developments include the Generalitat's online resource on the women's prison Les Corts in Barcelona (1939–1955), <http://www.presodelescorts.org/ca/node>.

³⁸Jo Labanyi, ‘The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 9:2 (2008), 119–25 (pp. 122, 121).