Health, home and hearth: how war nurses negotiated their place at the table during the dawn of Francoist Spain

ABSTRACT

During the Spanish Civil War, around 15,000 women were deployed as nurses or auxiliaries in the military health service of the Francoist army. Many of them worked behind the firing lines and came close to the combat and destruction. When the war drew to an end, these frontline nurses were demobilized and sent home to hearth and family. For some of them, returning home was a relief; for others, it meant the end to a professional career and meaningful vocation outside family control. Some of them used the tumultuous ‘post-war’ months to raise their voices, demanding the same treatment as male veterans. They wanted the same privileges these men enjoyed, such as free university access or ex-combatant status. Rallying together in support of such interests, they transcended several social borders, like Francoist ideas of complementary gender roles, concepts of nurses being acquiescent angels at sickbeds, and values of unconditional subordination and obedience. By pushing marriage into the future, they further violated Francoist expectations of a woman’s ‘proper’ biographical trajectory. In all these endeavours to gain a place at the table of Francoist Spain, they found support from their male colleagues and superiors. Drawing from sources of the Francoist military health service, this paper argues that their petitions echoed the elitist and gendered views concerning the making of the victor’s society. These perspectives reflected the intricate integration processes within the heterogeneous support base from which the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco drew his legitimacy and backing both during and after the war.

KEYWORDS:

• Spanish Civil War
• early Francoism
• war nursing
• gender history
• intersectional history
• elites

After the war was ‘over’

On 1 April 1939, Francisco Franco declared the Spanish Civil War to be over. Three years of bloodshed had shaken the Spanish society and put a violent end to the democratic project of the Second Republic (1931–39). The mobilization of the civilian population for war efforts waned, with Francoist troops being placed on reserve before their ultimate demobilization. For the supporters of Franco, the hard-won victory brought peace, whereas for the supporters of the Second Republic, the war moved from the battlefields to the streets and neighbourhoods, unleashing terror and persecution.¹ Amidst this transition, María del Carmen Gómez Serrano and Virginia Rodríguez Solís, two young, recently demobilized military nurses, sent letters to their former superior, Mercedes Milá Nolla, the inspector general of the female services of the Francoist army health service, the Servicios Femeninos de Sanidad Militar (SFSM). They referenced two laws, published just a few weeks earlier,² exempting Francoist war veterans from university admission exams and asked to be accorded the same privileges so that they could both study at a university.³

During early Francoism (1936–51), gender politics strongly aimed at relegating women to home and hearth,⁴ thus making such a demand for an independent future transgressive. As their staff files⁵ and additional correspondence⁶ show, eventually they were not only granted the requested privilege and enrolled at the universities, but also awarded the status of ex-combatants.⁷ A few years later, in 1942, the two of them resumed their careers as bedside nurses and joined the newly founded military nurse corps Damas Auxiliares, where Carmen Gómez remained well into her forties. At first glance, the trajectory of these two young women is surprising because they managed to push their demands through in a society that at the time celebrated the stay-at-home mother as a role model of desirable femininity and that condemned working(-class) womanhood.⁸ Instead, Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez successfully negotiated for themselves a professional future while postponing marriage and childbearing, markers of a ‘proper’ woman in Francoist Spain. Virginia Rodríguez and Carmen Gómez appear rather as women who had voluntarily supported Franco, but not with the agenda to only become wives and mothers. Gender historian Inbal Ofer observes similar behaviour in falangist women, and explains such incidents with the idea that there was a claim to modernity and modern femininity among these fascist women,⁹ a hypothesis this paper extends to other groups of right-wing women. Focusing on these women’s exceptional biographies, this paper raises two interrelated questions: how did Francoism deal with women who refused to submit to the discourses of home and hearth, and how can these negotiations be understood as part of a larger process of integrating elitist women into the dictatorship?

Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez, as well as their former superior Mercedes Milá, belonged to the more affluent and socially privileged classes of Spain, often referred to in historiography as the ‘traditional’¹⁰ elites, meaning members of the Spanish nobility, the military, large landowning families and wealthy conservative liberals. They were among those social groups that sided with the insurgent generals during and after the military coup d’état (17–19 July 1936), which sparked the civil war. Many of these women elites volunteered for humanitarian tasks and war nursing. Although these women were united predominantly through their chosen wartime engagement and their shared social status, they were not alone in the field of relief work. Political women’s organizations, like the fascist Sección Femenina¹¹ or the ultra-Catholic, reactionary Carlist Margaritas,¹² also mobilized women to contribute to humanitarian tasks. Indeed, wartime relief work and nursing became social spaces where women of all political colours met. The sickbed, in turn, became a symbolic arena where these women competed for influence, defending their privileges and status.

This story, however, is not about competition among women of different political affiliations and ideologies.¹³ This paper is rather on how the war shaped the self-perception of these young women – if not to say girls – and how they negotiated themselves a place in early Francoism. The protagonists of this paper all shared military experiences of war. Despite Francoist politics and discourse on gender segregation, military hospitals became realms where men and women met as patients and staff, as curers and caregivers. These experiences of war and mass mobilization left traces not only on these women’s perceptions of themselves, but also on the relationships they developed across the gendered boundaries of Francoist Spain. Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez, for example, were supported in their quest for veteran privileges by the head of the military health service of the zone of Cádiz, Alejandro Rodríguez Solís, Virginia Rodríguez’s father. What appears as an obvious alliance was also symptomatic of the breakdown of these boundaries. Below, the paper will show that such alliances among health service members evolved sometimes for strategic reasons initiated by nurses and auxiliaries, sometimes for reasons of mutual solidarity and well-meaning. Despite Francoism promoting complementary gender roles, the war also provided opportunities that set gender relations in motion even at the epicentre of male power, the armed forces.

By focusing on women like Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez and the SFSM as an institution, the paper highlights a social group that is often neglected by historiography on women’s history of Francoism. Much more attention has been paid to the quickly growing fascist Sección Femenina and their various projects, such as Auxilio Social, as well as their strategies to monopolize the female world of Francoist Spain.¹⁴ This paper thus complements the state of the art on Spanish female fascism¹⁵ by providing perspectives from women who supported Francoism, but at the same time who sought rather to defend their elitist privileges than fight for a national-syndicalist revolution. Furthermore, it also sheds some light on the making of the Francoist elites and the ‘fascistization’¹⁶ of the women of Francoist upper classes during the initial stages of the dictatorship through the lens of gender and age and in the context of war nursing.

This paper analyses staff files, a selection of letters from the vast correspondence of Mercedes Milá, health service documentation from the Francoist army, and other sources, such as laws and journals. The voices of Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez appear directly in the available sources only once. The rest we know about them is a jigsaw puzzle of letters, reports and forms filled out and written by others about them. From the point of view of social inequality, neither of them was an ‘ordinary’ woman. By Spanish standards of that time, they did not suffer from social and economic marginalization – although, as women in the 1930s and 1940s, they did face systematic discrimination based on their gender. In terms of their class affiliation, however, they enjoyed a privileged status in Spanish society.

And yet, Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez were in one way ‘ordinary’. They – and their fellow nurses of the SFSM – left hardly any traces in the archives, and if they did, they often appeared as ‘problems’ or as ‘disturbances’. It was usually others who wrote about them, and many of these ‘ordinary’ nurses were not even mentioned by their names. These women, however, belonged to the social elites that bolstered and stabilized Franco’s rule during and after the war was proclaimed over. Their stories, therefore, help to explain how Francoism as a system of rule and practice of domination worked within and upon the upper social strata.

To deal with this complicated and fragmented basis of sources, I draw inspiration from microhistorical approaches, which emphasize that ‘the historical actors’ experiences […] point to deep historical structures’,¹⁷ from German Alltagsgeschichte to better understand power relations and domination as practices, as well as a dialectic negotiation between (unequal) actors in concrete social settings.¹⁸ I am also influenced by the works of anthropologists and historians studying ‘the multitudes and the subaltern’, as these scholars know how to deal with the silences, gaps and snippets that are preserved in archives for the nameless.¹⁹ Furthermore, Achim Landwehr’s invitation to always take a step back and cultivate doubt²⁰ is just as helpful when analysing Mercedes Milá’s vast and fragmented correspondence, as is the idea of ‘saturation’,²¹ promoted by social qualitative analysis. Stories like those discussed here appear there in many variations: sometimes it is a few lines, sometimes it is some letters and staff files. Despite all their peculiarities, the stories of Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez and their request to enter higher education appear, therefore, as part of a larger pattern of how ‘ordinary’ nurses related to the inspector general of the female services and how they negotiated themselves a place at the winner’s table.

Being a female member of the ‘traditional’ elites at the dawn of Francoism

During the military coup d’état that sparked the Spanish Civil War, both men and women took to the streets. In Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao, they rose to defend the Second Republic, and in Burgos, Pamplona and Salamanca to welcome the coup. The groups – or rather, the ‘political families’²² – that supported Franco throughout the war represented the right-wing spectrum of the political parties active during the Second Republic. Though united in their cause to end the Second Republic, they were heterogeneous and sometimes opposed in terms of their preferred political culture and system. Carlists hoped for the return of the monarchy, Falange advocated a fascist ‘new’²³ Spain along German and Italian lines, and the so-called traditional elites preferred a system that ensured that they retained their privileges. The latter group is not easy to classify because under the historiographical label ‘traditional’, a wide spectrum of preferences regarding the political system were (and still are) subsumed.

All these different political groups and strands hoping to build their Spain also had a female face. Even though men dominated the public sphere, women supported these agendas. Many of them also organized themselves into their own groups or party subsections, like the Carlist women who formed the organization Margaritas²⁴ or the fascist women who founded the Sección Femenina only a year after the foundation of Falange.²⁵ Women of the so-called traditional elites often established Catholic groups or joined philanthropic organizations, such as the Red Cross. For all of them, Franco promised to establish ‘order’ and to end the ‘chaos’ the Second Republic had allegedly caused through various reform projects, threatening their privileged status in Spanish society.²⁶

For Franco’s female supporters, his promise of ‘order’ meant, among other things, ending the changes that had given rise to a new model of femininity: the educated working-class woman. Instead, the counter-image Francoism promoted assigned women home and hearth as their ‘natural’ and God-given space in the ‘new’ Spain.²⁷ Drawing from the long-standing icon of motherhood, its Catholic interpretation²⁸ and a so-perceived female capacity to love and care, Francoism created the image of the ‘patriotic mother’²⁹ who, under the extreme circumstances of a war, was forced to leave her home and hearth to save the nation. With such a view, men were called to fight for Spain, women were called to heal society.

The above-mentioned women, Carmen Gómez, Virginia Rodríguez and Mercedes Milá, can all be understood as part of these so-called traditional elites. Mercedes Milá was the daughter of a senior naval officer and niece to the wealthy Barcelonese industrialists Pere Milà i Camps and Roser Segimon i Artells. According to Nicholas Coni, she picked bedside nursing as a career because her father served on hospital ships, and she wanted to accompany him.³⁰ Trained by the Spanish Red Cross (SRC), she became a ‘Dama Enfermera’.³¹ Later she studied public health at Bedford College in London, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and partook in international conferences on nursing and public health. During the 1920s and 1930s, she became one of the best-trained nurses in Spain and was even appointed to set up Spain’s first public-health nursing school in 1934.³²

Carmen Gómez’s and Virginia Rodríguez’s trajectories were less impressive than Mercedes Milá’s, but they were 24 years younger than her. Unfortunately, we know little about Carmen Gómez’s family background, but we know that Virginia Rodríguez was the daughter of a military doctor in Cádiz who also engaged with local politics. In the 1920s, he designed, for instance, a health reform that was, however, rejected by the Andalusian parliament.³³ Both women had access to higher education and took the nursing exam at the medical school of the University of Cádiz before the war began.³⁴ Virginia Rodríguez also became a teacher.³⁵

According to the sources available, neither of them appear to have been fascist by ideology. Instead, they all seem to have been from families that valued education, Catholic practice and bourgeois liberalism. They can be understood as representatives of those social strata that had benefitted from the gradual liberalization of women’s rights, dating back to the turn of the century.³⁶ Although Spain did not have a loud and proud grassroots women’s right movement, the first 30 years of the twentieth century saw the social position of women change gradually. Especially in metropolitan areas like Madrid or Barcelona, progressive social milieus emerged. Women cut their hair short and became so-called garçonnes,³⁷ and bourgeois professions were feminized, like the typist or the teacher, becoming respectable career options for women who sought upward social mobility.³⁸ It was more and more socially accepted that young women would take on these occupations and postpone marriage and motherhood for a few years. Organizations with humanitarian or philanthropist agendas, like the Spanish Red Cross, were founded and provided new opportunities, particularly for upper-class women, to engage outside their houses and their local parishes.³⁹ However, until the proclamation of the Second Republic, these changes tended to benefit middle- and upper-class women rather than the working class, because many of these changes depended on education and an overall economic situation that allowed women to study instead of contributing to the family income. Since the public education system was ailing and the private sector expensive, the masses remained disadvantaged.⁴⁰

After the proclamation of the Second Republic, the first seeds of major change were sown. Substantial economic reforms threatened especially the social status of these so-called traditional elites – men and women alike. Specific measures like co-education in the public education system and the overall expansion of education,⁴¹ the legalization of divorce⁴² and the secularization project of the first government of the Second Republic⁴³ affected the former social hierarchisation and power relations. The educated working-class woman gained more visibility and offered alternative, and politicized, images of womanhood to the bourgeois and Catholic female role model of the devout ‘angel of the household’.⁴⁴ The Second Republic also provided women the opportunity to organize, mobilize and politicize more than ever before. This affected left- and right-wing women alike. On the politically right-wing spectrum, it was not a coincidence that organizations like the Margaritas formed in 1932 and started to accompany Carlists on their rallies for support and new members⁴⁵ and that the Sección Femenina was founded in 1934 as the women’s organization of the fascist Falange.⁴⁶ Women of the so-called traditional elites, like the protagonists of this paper, often observed the reforms and changes introduced by the Second Republic with scepticism. Debates on abortion legislation, the limitation of Catholic influence in education and public life, and the introduction of divorce threatened their moral compass, just as economic and agricultural reforms threatened their material wealth.⁴⁷

However, it was not just left-wing women and gender politics that threatened them. They also watched the rise of fascism with unease. For Mercedes Milá, Virginia Rodríguez and Carmen Gómez, fascist women became uncomfortable rivals in their professional field of nursing. After the failed coup d’état, humanitarian relief work and medical attention turned into an arena the fascist Sección Femenina wanted to be a part of. The Sección Femenina’s goal was primarily to contribute to the fascist renovation of Spain and to exert as much influence on Spanish women as possible, not necessarily master the state of the art of nursing. To them, political loyalty and a fascist mindset mattered more than class, status and the value of academicised knowledge production. In doing so, these fascist women’s sense of mission clashed with the professional ambitions and sense of class-bound entitlement of these elitist women. The fact that Virginia Rodríguez and Carmen Gómez chose at their young age to work for the SFSM speaks to their career ambitions and their preference for academic knowledge over a political mission – a characteristic common to the so-called traditional elites.

Young and female by war

Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez were both born in 1919.⁴⁸ When the civil war began and they volunteered at the local military hospital in Cádiz, they were 17 years old. Their young age was no exception. Quite the contrary, as an estimation based on the staff files of SFSM nurses that today are preserved in the military archive in Guadalajara suggests, around two-thirds⁴⁹ of the nurses deployed in the Francoist military health service were younger than the legal age, which in 1936 was 23. The reason for such a selection was by no means accidental but not necessarily intended. Instead, it was the effect of both the grassroots mobilization of women during the initial stages of the war and also the unintended effect of the recruitment politics of the armed forces.

Especially during the initial stages of the war, casualty numbers spiralled and thus quickly increased the demand for staff able to care and cure. The pre-war health infrastructure was particularly weak in rural areas, and even in the cities it was not prepared to shift quickly to a wartime modus operandi. The Spanish society and the army lacked the experiences their neighbouring countries had gathered during the First World War, and the disintegration of society and territory into two warring factions further aggravated the situation. Women of the whole right-wing spectrum mobilized to support the putschist generals. They collected money, goods and provisions for the troops and militia units; set up canteens for orphaned children; stepped in to bolster the economy; and also organized first-aid crash courses for nurses and auxiliaries while gathering linen, dressing material, beds and other goods for improvising field and rearguard hospitals. The historian of medicine María López Vallecillo describes the activities of these women and their organizations as ‘mushrooming’ all over the Francoist territory.⁵⁰

Until the war, health care and medicine had been socially dominated by the Catholic Church and the so-called traditional elites.⁵¹ Once the war had begun, this changed. Apart from university medical schools and the Red Cross, the fascist Sección Femenina and Carlist Margaritas engaged especially with health care and nursing. For the Spanish history of bedside nursing, this was a milestone because it was the moment when the social fabric⁵² of this professional field tore, allowing social groups who had long been structurally excluded to enter nursing. The ways of being and becoming a bedside nurse were interpreted differently by the various political actors, and so nursing became an arena where political ideologies were also negotiated. In other words, when women like Carmen Gómez signed up for the SFSM or for the nurse corps organized by the Sección Femenina or the Carlist Margaritas, such actions had different political reverberations.

All these women’s organizations addressed young women through their mobilization efforts while reflecting the dominant gendered mobilization discourse. Thus, supported by official propaganda promoting a gendered division of space in war, the face of the rearguard thus became female and young. This finding may seem trite at first. The image that wars are intricately linked to youth has become entrenched since the transition from mercenary to conscript armies and the massification of warfare. To sustain families and rearguard economies, drafting efforts and mobilization campaigns predominantly targeted people without any family responsibilities. Only if the circumstances of war required it were these efforts extended. That young men and women were the first to take up combatant and war-supporting tasks appears as an unavoidable consequence of the mass warfare of the twentieth century.⁵³ For the Spanish Civil War, this was even more true as the question of Spain’s future was crucial for both warring factions. While the Republican propaganda promised to defend a democratic society, in the Francoist zone, just like many other contemporary fascist organizations in Europe, notions of youth played an important role in their quest for renovation and the creation of a ‘new’ Spain.

However, in the case of the Francoist war nurses and auxiliaries, their youthhood was not only the result of grassroots mobilization, individual initiative and propaganda. Rather, it was also an (unintended) effect orchestrated by Francoist military authorities, who, for the first time in Spanish history, were confronted with the task to systematically deploy a female labour force in support of the military health service. Thanks to grassroots mobilization, a largely uncontrolled influx of staff with little treatment experience had poured into the military medical facilities. While some medical facilities managed to easily integrate this new labour force, in others they caused turbulence and conflicts. ‘[T]here are doctors who are hostile towards this staff because they disturb the stillness, peace, and quiet, necessary for some patients in the hospital wards’,⁵⁴ reported Melchor Camón Navarra, inspector general of the health service of the Francoist army. He referenced the various complaints that had reached him from frustrated health service officials from different front sections. Not only the military doctors but also the orderlies had difficulties working with ad hoc trained auxiliaries. Apart from conflicts revolving around skills, capacities and code of conduct, Melchor Camón also mentioned frictions among these different groups of women as a result of jealousy. ‘[T]hey often feel less valued’,⁵⁵ he was told about the orderlies, even though they were ‘burdened with a truly overwhelming workload’.⁵⁶ After four months of war, towards the end of 1936, complaints accumulated, and Melchor Camón proposed to solve the ‘women’s question’ by regulating the admission and deployment of female personnel and proposing, among other things, a selection mechanism that was based on skills and age:

3° The order of preference for admission will be: female practitioners with a university degree, nurses examined by the local assemblies of the Red Cross, University Medical Schools and the Valdecilla Foundation. In the absence of personnel with the above-mentioned characteristics, all others will be employed.

4° According to the above-mentioned criteria volunteers will be admitted preferably in the following order: married women, widows, single women, all in order from oldest to youngest.⁵⁷

This extract from the regulation draft indicates that young and single women were not at all among the preferred recruits: quite the contrary. Expertise, professional experience and skills were given priority, but, if possible, only women were to be hired who were ‘old’ and/or ‘married’. In other words, women who were supposedly unavailable and therefore unattractive both to the medical corps soldiers and to the patients were to be preferred. These admission rules reflected misogynist discourses that permeated all European armed forces at the time, or international armies for that matter. As gender historian Ute Frevert has shown for the German case and which confirms the findings of war historian Odile Roynette for Europe, the creation of conscript armies and a national draft was accompanied by gendered discourses that systematically excluded women.⁵⁸

The power of these discourses came to light as soon as a war brought forth a gender shift in society. Female presence in militarized social spaces caused strong unease among army officials. They saw them as a threat to the epicentre of normative masculinity.⁵⁹ It may not be surprising that the mobilization of war nurses during the First World War was organized primarily through the Red Cross sections and did not result in lasting reforms of army medical corps. Against this backdrop, the proposition to admit women according to their age and marital status in the Spanish case can be understood as a reference to their potential attractiveness and desirability. ‘Age’ was turned into a chiffre for order. ‘Old’ and ‘married’ women were presumably less likely to attract soldiers’ attention and to distract them from their combatant duty. Contrary to the mobilization efforts of the women’s organizations, war nurses in the army, according to the health service’s suggestions, were not supposed to be young but instead as unfeminine as possible.

These restrictions on auxiliary volunteers were further defined in this regulation in the section on the deployment rules. The female staff was urged to do their work ‘precisely in the department of their designation’⁶⁰ and to ‘keep completely absent from the rest of the facility’.⁶¹ In other words, the female staff was supposed to be as invisible as possible. To that end, their bodies and appearance mattered, as well as their general presence. Francoists claimed to restore an allegedly ‘natural gender order’. The setting of these barriers for war nurses can be understood as an attempt to make good on this promise. This regulation of female staff, however, also fits with the finding that there are no records of women being deployed as doctors or practitioners, even if they held university degrees. Instead, the staff files of the war nurses reveal that even though there was a small number of women who had such diplomas, they were recruited to do care work.⁶² This regulation, however, did not contain any suggestions how to deal with the staff that had already been admitted as auxiliaries or nurses.

The attempt of male Francoist health service officials in winter 1936/37 to limit the collective practice of general mobilization by the different women’s organizations was then institutionalized on 24 March 1937, when Mercedes Milá Nolla was appointed inspector general of the female services, the SFSM.⁶³ Her task was to set up an all-female nurses’ corps in support of the military health service and to that end channel the female care volunteers. Mercedes Milá then took many of the suggestions made by her male counterpart Melchor Camón, like the admission rules, the limitation of women to care work, and how hierarchies were to be gendered. However, she changed one important bit that eventually contradicted the preferences presented by the men. She decided that nurses of the SFSM would work without pay. At the beginning of the conflict, some military facilities had paid their staff, others did not. Thus, with this new rule medical care work was ultimately defined as a ‘service to the nation’⁶⁴ and as a necessary sacrifice for the ‘salvation’ of Spain. Furthermore, she ruled that only women without family obligations were to be admitted into her service.

Whether intended or not, these two rules produced intersecting class and age effects: women who had no family responsibilities and could make the time to work in shift systems were usually young and unmarried. In addition, it was predominantly women of relatively wealthy families who could afford working for free. Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez embodied these facets. In 1939, when the war was declared over, they were 20 years old and still not even of legal age. The fact that their families had not depended on their income emphasizes that they survived the war more or less well in economic terms. Certainly, it was not only upper-class women who applied to serve as war nurses. However, since payment was out of the question, we must assume that most of the SFSM nurses could afford to work for free.

Learning (early) Francoism at the sickbed

Following the appointment of Mercedes Milá as inspector general, the sexes were institutionally separated in the military health service, that is to say through administration, coordination and recruitment. The division of medical labour was also more strictly divided into ‘cure work’⁶⁵ and ‘care work’. All these restrictions and measures to segregate the sexes, however, did not prevent women and men from meeting one another. Quite the opposite, they met on a daily basis in the wards of military hospitals or in vanguard missions, encounters that left traces, as the letters of Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez demonstrate. In late summer of 1939, a few months following the official end to the war, they wrote to Mercedes Milá asking for her help. Carmen Gómez’ letter reads as follows:

In the Official State Bulletin […] rules are dictated for the admission to the universities for ex-combatants. According to these norms, everyone who holds a bachillerato⁶⁶ is exempted from the admission exams for having served in the Glorious Army. In my capacity as having finished my ‘bachillerato’ in 1936 and having served as a voluntary war nurse in military hospitals of this district during the three years of our war, I believe myself to be included in the same conditions as the male ex-combatant graduates. It is why I appeal to your Excellency so that you may interpose your important influence in favour of my request to the Ministry of National Education, so that I may be exempted from the university admission exams.⁶⁷

‘[P]lease take this with the greatest possible interest so that it can be resolved as soon as possible’,⁶⁸ added Virginia Rodríguez to Carmen Gómez’s plea in her own letter to Mercedes Milá. Although their letters differ in tone and courtesy, in unison they believed that they were entitled not only to contact her directly but also to have their wishes granted. What may appear as wayward or at least contradictory to the female role model Francoism propagated was no isolated case. The analysis of Mercedes Milá’s vast correspondence reveals that it was quite common that nurses and auxiliaries would direct their needs to her personally. Initially these requests included mostly wishes for an improvement of individual situations, such as nurses or auxiliaries asking to be deployed with their friends, sisters or relatives, wanting to further their knowledge and do additional training, or wishing to be deployed in vanguard units. As the war progressed and war experience mounted, requests changed. Many asked for medals of honour, payment and other means of compensation and recognition.⁶⁹

That these women wrote often personally to Mercedes Milá and, in doing so, bypassed their immediate superiors, must be understood as a reflection of the fact that this nurse corps was more than just an institution supporting the Francoist armed forces and allowing women to pursue careers as wartime nurses. The leadership style, the work culture, and the general expectations regarding a gendered code of conduct also made the SFSM a social space where women were confronted with and engaged with more general conceptions of early Francoism, which, historiography agrees, must be understood as a fascistized dictatorship. Therefore, Francoism shared most of the characteristics of contemporary fascist or national-socialist rule, such as single leadership, violence, mass organizations and social atomization, as well as ‘elasticity’⁷⁰ – as sociologist Zira Box calls the system’s capacity to not only exclude and define enemies but also to integrate supporters.⁷¹

In the two years following her appointment as inspector general, Mercedes Milá had built up the SFSM as a strictly hierarchical institution that chimed well with the Francoist claim to order, translating at the institutional level into unambiguous responsibilities and vertical structures. Following the military logic of dividing territory into different administrative sections, she appointed provincial delegates for all the army districts who oversaw the work of all nurses and auxiliaries deployed in military hospitals, frontline hospitals and sick bays. Though work and responsibilities were distributed hierarchically and became more and more ramified in the periphery, Mercedes Milá’s leadership culture strongly thwarted any individual proactivity of her delegates.⁷² Accordingly, even though Mercedes Milá assigned responsibilities to her few regional delegates, she reserved the last say in any matter for herself. As a consequence, basically all decisions had to be run by her and she was particularly jealous about admissions and transfers.

Additionally, she applied a ruling practice mostly based on case-by-case decision-taking, which ultimately strengthened her position and created a general atmosphere of arbitrariness. In this way, Mercedes Milá not only monopolized the entire service, but also was omnipresent. That nurses, like the protagonists of this paper, would send their inquiries directly to her and not necessarily to their immediate superiors must be interpreted against this backdrop. Towards the women in her service, whether they were regular nurses, auxiliaries or delegates, Mercedes Milá demanded complete subordination. Her management style was not a specific invention of hers, but strongly resembled the fascist single-leader principle, which was used by Franco,⁷³ as well as by other leaders of women’s organizations, such as Pilar Primo de Rivera,⁷⁴ in the Sección Femenina.

Mercedes Milá also did not accept any intervention from other women’s organizations that engaged with humanitarian tasks. To that end, she took Melchor Camón’s suggestion and enforced that rule that only certain certificates qualified women to apply as war nurses or auxiliaries for her military medical corps. In that way, she managed to formally exclude all efforts by the Sección Femenina⁷⁵ and Carlist Margaritas to interfere with her work.⁷⁶ Although both organizations continued to train nurses, before their graduates were admitted to the military health service, they had to take the exams accepted by the regulations set up by Mercedes Milá. These rules about the certificates can serve as one indicator of many when trying to assess a nurse’s or auxiliary’s professional competences, but also her political affiliation. Considering that the influence of Sección Femenina continued to grow after the beginning of the war, it is surprising when a SFSM nurse did not mention their affiliation with Sección Femenina in the staff questionnaires. For instance, this was true in the case of Virginia Rodríguez.⁷⁷

In order for her health service to function, Mercedes Milá understood that she needed to gain support and acceptance among the male staff and soldiers of the medical corps and the troops. She met this task with a twofold strategy: one aimed at the appearance of her staff and the other at the implied politics of subordination. She assumed, for instance, that reliability, efficiency and competence were key to ensuring that the female staff were respected by military officials and authorities. The coordination and power to deploy well-trained nurses and auxiliaries who know the code of conduct were her primary goals. In her communication with male colleagues, she presented herself and her nurse corps as being at their service, doing her best to please any staff need they had.⁷⁸

Mercedes Milá’s conceptions of reliability, efficiency and competence defined the code of conduct nurses and auxiliaries had to internalize and represent. They learned these values not only in the health service’s nursing training, but also on the job. Efficiency and competence were mostly derived from conceptions of bedside nursing from the 1920s, which, in the Spanish case, embraced the heritage of Catholicism as practiced by nursing congregations and Catholic liberalism as promoted by the Spanish Red Cross. According to these standards, nurses were to be quiet, pleasant and submissive while professionally speaking the competent shadows of doctors.⁷⁹ Mercedes Milá herself had been trained by the Spanish Red Cross and was very familiar with this code of conduct. In terms of the code of conduct and the appreciation of state-of-the-art nursing practices, her service can thus be understood as a continuation of a bourgeois tradition as well as an adaptation to the new regime, in terms of her leadership style. While her work ethics and traits paint a different picture than the image of falangist womanhood Sección Femenina promoted in their discourses and magazines,⁸⁰ the co-existence of both versions of womanhood speak to the capacity of Francoism to integrate its supporters, to the ‘elasticity’⁸¹ of the fascistisised society-building during the initial stages of Franco’s dictatorship. In other words, despite Mercedes Milá being no falangist avant la lettre, she contributed to building Francoism and added with her regulations to a greater variety of versions of acceptable femininity.

The institutional framework not only affected the selection and recruitment of nurses and the rules that influenced their professional day to day, but conversely also provided them with the opportunity to learn how Francoism worked in that particular social space and how much leeway to negotiate it included. Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez understood that there was certain room for their needs and that they could address them personally to Mercedes Milá. But they also knew that their voices carried less weight than those of men. As their staff files and additional correspondence⁸² show, they pulled out all the stops to achieve their goal. They not only appealed to Mercedes Milá, but also asked for a letter of endorsement written by Virginia Rodríguez’s father, Alejandro Rodríguez Solís, who at the time was the head of the military health service in the region of Cádiz.⁸³ Having someone like the head of the health service of Cádiz as an advocate was obviously quite helpful and thanks to the family ties maybe obvious, yet it must be understood as a strategic allyship because they were not the first nurses to ask a superior for their support – on the contrary. The analysis of Mercedes Milá’s correspondence demonstrates a pattern of many nurses managing to mobilize male military officials for their causes.

Requests issued towards the end of the conflict like the desire for military medals of honour, payment or the status of ex-combatant status in particular became issues that gained a certain importance and reach over the course of 1938 and 1939.⁸⁴ What is most striking about this finding was that these interjections always referred to either a single nurse or a small group of colleagues. There seem to have been little horizontal communication and room for forming alliances of solidarity among the members of the SFSM across the Francoist zone. Instead, as other accounts show, they rather voiced their demands individually but referenced other cases they knew. Knowledge about what happened to other nurses obviously travelled, but the thought of being a collective with a shared identity and solidarity bonds did not seem to have evolved.

Incidents like the above-mentioned demand for payment or the medals of honour also illustrate paradigmatically how pressure could grow on some occasions, so much so that a general solution had to be found. Case-based decision-taking reached its limits. Although working as a nurse for the SFSM was supposed to be without payment, this topic specifically appears again and again in Mercedes Milá’s correspondence. Owing to various – mostly war-related – reasons, nurses could lose their financial backing provided by their families. Facing such economic precarity, they wrote to Mercedes Milá. At other times, considerate head nurses or regional delegates learned about the circumstances of their staff and reached out to Mercedes Milá on their behalf. Payment became an issue just as the medals of honour. After the first group of vanguard nurses was awarded medals of honour for enduring enemy fire, letters from all front lines started to pour in on Mercedes Milá’s desk. The senders of these letters felt they were treated unfairly; they also wanted their courage and frontline experiences to be valued. These women were often supported by their male and female superiors.

In both cases, pressure rose from all sides, forcing Mercedes Milá to find a general solution. Eventually, payment was institutionalized as an option for women who could provide a poverty certificate.⁸⁵ Medals of honour were ultimately created and given out to all nurses like participation trophies.⁸⁶ Notwithstanding these solutions, they were tainted. Although they silenced the voices of the petitioners, tying payment to poverty meant turning money into alms and strengthening the Francoist principle that female work was to be a service and not labour. Creating a special medal of honour and awarding it to all nurses meant diminishing the value of individual acts of heroism, tied to the equivalents awarded by the army to their male heroes.

Nevertheless, these examples show how gender relations and social positioning were renegotiated both top down and bottom up. Whenever pressure rose considerably and Mercedes Milá was not able to deal with issues at a local level, certain change was possible. Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez seem to have understood this principle and applied it consciously. They were, however, smart enough to add as much pressure as possible by asking Virginia Rodríguez’s father for his help; he sent more letters to other, male, contacts, which generated awareness at different levels of the army and public administration.⁸⁷ The fact that Virginia Rodríguez and Carmen Gómez were eventually admitted to the university illustrates that their strategy worked, that their knowing of the Francoist rules had produced an outcome in their favour, and that their relegation to home and hearth was officially postponed. In summary, while Mercedes Milá governed her body of nurses in a top-down fashion, demanding subordination, professional skills and loyalty, her single-leadership culture also allowed individual nurses to approach her and voice their demands and, if necessary, to back them up with strategic alliances that were preferably male and high-ranking.

Gender relations in motion

The letters of Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez not only tell us the story of two young women who wanted to study at the university, but also reflect their sense of self-confidence, matter-of-fact aspirations, and ambitions for their futures. ‘We nurses who have a “bachillerato” and who have served should be granted the same exemption from the university entrance examination, since men in the same circumstances as us have this privilege’,⁸⁸ argued Virginia Rodríguez. Carmen Gómez’s phrasing was even more direct when she explained, ‘I believe myself in the same conditions as the male ex-combatants’.⁸⁹ In other words, these women stated in their letters that they wanted the same treatment and privileges as their male colleagues while considering themselves and their care work of equal value to their cure work. Given that Francoist labour legislation of 1938 (Fuero de Trabajo) and propaganda had gone to great lengths to disseminate a legal framework and a discourse that sanctioned notions of gender equality as abnormal, it may seem puzzling that amidst the turmoil of the ebbing war, young women who officially chose Francoism and, in doing so, supported these discourses of complementary gender relations raised their voices and demanded equal redistribution and recognition⁹⁰ of their work. As if this were not enough, on top of that they considered themselves to have the same status as combatants, which turned the discursive and spatial arrangement of the male vanguard and the female rearguard upside down. In that way, they transgressed what Francoist propaganda had deemed socially acceptable.

They were not alone with their demands. Male health service officials often supported such claims by sending letters of endorsement or taking initiative themselves. In the case discussed here, it was Virginia Rodríguez’s father who mobilized his network on their behalf. He sent several letters to Mercedes Milá asking for her support. ‘I believe that you should take a more active role and that the Minister should contact the University Rectors, so that this state of affairs is eliminated’,⁹¹ he urged her, justifying his inquiry by emphasizing ‘[i]t is not a fleeting or meaningless thing, it is about the future of a youth who has selflessly served’.⁹² While it may appear obvious that a father tried to help his own daughter, the analysis of Mercedes Milá’s correspondence shows that constellations of male health service officials who supported their female colleagues was a common occurrence. ‘It is a question of justice’⁹³ or ‘she deserves a few days’,⁹⁴ read some examples of how health officials justified the requests they sent to Mercedes Milá on behalf of their female staff.

The letters presented here not only provide some access to the individual stories, but also refer to a development that took place during the war. This development can be understood as an amalgamation of a longer process of gradual liberalization of women’s rights in Spanish society and, to some extent, class privilege with war experiences that affected both right-wing women and men. Young, self-asserted women understood that they had made a contribution to the war effort, while military officials and soldiers had to work with women for the first time in Spanish military history and valued their contribution. These letters can be read as indicators that gender relations within the armed forces, with reverberations throughout the society, had been set in motion.

When Franco declared the war over on 1 April 1939, he proclaimed the ‘year of the victory’. For Spanish society, this meant that the social division between supporters of Franco and the supporters of the Second Republic would continue. The latter were stigmatized as ‘red’ and faced social exclusion and violent repression. The former, particularly Francoist soldiers, were awarded certain privileges like the mentioned admission-free access to universities and easier access to jobs in public administration.⁹⁵ The war nurses of the SFSM were, in contrast, demobilized and sent home, which meant for many of these women having to let go of a meaningful vocation outside parental control. The fact that Virginia Rodríguez and Carmen Gómez demanded free university access must be understood, at least in part, as a consequence of the socialization of this generation of conservative women. They were happy to take advantage of the new opportunities that had opened up for them but did not want to fundamentally change society, let alone turn social power relations upside down. However, once the war began, they saw in nursing an opportunity to contribute actively to building a political and social future that would ensure their privileged position and restore a social code of conduct that was more in line with their own convictions than the one promoted by the last government of the Second Republic.

Although the war allowed for a certain liberalization of gender relations, the proclamation of victory was accompanied by a sharp reversal of the ‘gender shift’.⁹⁶ Women were no longer needed to enable mass warfare. On the contrary, after the war was proclaimed over, they were supposed to step aside, to return back to home and hearth, becoming ‘true Catholic women’.⁹⁷ Notwithstanding, feeling entitled due to their social status and understanding themselves as part of the winners of the war, women like Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez also wanted a seat at the winner’s table.

Despite this sense of entitlement coupled with their wishes, this still falls short of explaining this alleged female waywardness only as the result of the interwoven collective right-wing experiences of social opening, on the one hand, and the threat to one’s status, on the other. It overlooks the impact the war had on the lives of Francoist supporters and the relations between women and men. Gender historians observe for other (post-)war contexts specific forms of solidarisation,⁹⁸ which can also be found in Francoist Spain, as evidenced by these letters. Although authorities like the army administration or Mercedes Milá had tried to keep women and men as separate as possible, the war had offered women and men opportunities to relate differently to each other than before the war, and these experiences did not disappear overnight. Veterans of the First World War – and this experience would repeat in the Second World War – often fondly remembered women, and particularly nurses, as valuable comrades with whom they shared the hardship of war.⁹⁹

Research on the everyday experience of war in armies and militia units has demonstrated¹⁰⁰ that combatants often formed family-like communities of solidarity that enabled them to endure the suffering the war had in store for them. The Francoist army was no exception in this respect, as not only do such inquiries and letters reflect it, but oral history collections document it too.¹⁰¹ It is, therefore, worthwhile to analyse these incidents against a European backdrop. Nurses who asserted their demands for attention, benefits and privileges and men who supported their wishes can be seen as symptoms of such subcutaneous processes of change the wars of the twentieth century had triggered.

These dynamics of solidarisation included women learning to understand and use the semiotics of Francoist military practice and culture for their own benefit through strategic networking as well as performatively accepting their supposed inferior position. Soldiers and officials, particularly the ones working with them, learned to overcome prejudices and appreciate the female presence in their hospitals and sick bays. Solidarity evolved as a two-way street in many of the military hospitals, and the idea of complementary gender roles did not stand in the way, as revealed by the eventual success of Carmen Gómez’s and Virginia Rodríguez’s self-lobbying. Apart from admission-free access to university education, in 1940 these women were also given the status of ex-combatants,¹⁰² along with all nurses and auxiliaries who had served more than 900¹⁰³ days. Their stories therefore reveal that some of these incidents had happy endings. Examples like these demonstrate how social boundaries were renegotiated and reflect how Francoism integrated its elites, or, in other words, and how gender relations changed despite all efforts to promote complementary gender roles.

Victor’s society, victor’s women

Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez chose to become ‘bourgeois elitist angels of the sickbed’ twice. Once after the civil war had begun and again in 1942 when the successor institution of the SFSM, the Damas Auxiliares, was founded. When Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez wrote their letters to Mercedes Milá in the summer of 1939, the possibility was not yet on the horizon that there would be another military nurse corps. Instead of applying to be nurses with Falange, which had reached its zenith at that time, to work in one of their humanitarian projects, they preferred to fight for unrestricted access to higher education. Stories like theirs show us that the women’s side of the victor’s society of early Francoism was complex and marked by contingencies. Although Sección Femenina had gained a monopoly position in women’s issues and realms over the course of the war, institutions like the SFSM provided opportunities to find a niche for those who supported fascistization to some degree but not all the way à la the Falange-styled Sección Femenina like these so-called traditional elite women.

The stories of these nurses from Cádiz furthermore provide insight into a group of women who were tied together by age and gender – not (only) by choice, but because admission rules and wartime propaganda acted as selection mechanisms. Although wartime propaganda and the everyday of their work as war nurses had further indoctrinated them that a woman’s place in Francoism was at home beside her husband, their war experiences had also transformed their sense of self. They had learned to understand their position in a vertically hierarchized society that rested on single-leadership culture, as well as how they could use their status, knowledge and networks to push for their own interests. In the face of the aggressive gender rollback Francoism promoted at the end of the war, they managed through smart networking and by rallying male support to postpone marriage and childbearing in order to pursue an academic career that eventually led them back to military bedside nursing. Through all these efforts, they successfully negotiated themselves a seat at the winner’s table.

This story is therefore not just the story of two nurses and the inspector general of the female services; it reflects how Francoism integrated its elites. Upper-class women were supposedly part of the winners of the civil war just like men. Their relegation to home and hearth, however, clashed with their own experiences and their ideas about their futures. They fought to preserve the privileges they thought they deserved as female Francoists in the ‘new’ Spain. It was, however, not only a struggle of women, but also a struggle supported by some groups of Francoist men. Their engagement shows that the war had set gender roles in motion and that complementary gender roles could not be decreed or disseminated via propaganda. Rather, these roles were negotiated everywhere – even within Franco’s alleged epicentre of power, the armed forces. Cases like these demonstrate that the actual relegation of women to home and hearth that Francoism promoted as a ‘natural gender order’ was a balancing act between the various authorities and the women themselves, culminating in an everyday practice.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Barnabas Bálint for leaping and doing this project together, for his constructive feedback and always productive ping and pong. Also thank you very much to Anca Axinia, Lewis Driver, Sheragim Jenabzadeh and Claudia Kraft for discussing my thoughts. Thank you very much to all presenters and discussants of the Rallying Europe workshop. A huge thank you goes out to Forrest Kilimnik for his support in finishing this text!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the University of Vienna (uni:doc), the Doctoral School of Historical and Cultural Studies, and the Research Center for the History of Transformations.

Notes on contributors

Katharina Seibert

Katharina Seibert is currently a Postdoc Research Fellow at the Seminar für Zeitgeschichte at the University of Tübingen. She earned her PhD with the thesis ‘Who Cares? Negotiating Gender and Society at Spain’s Sickbeds during the 1930s and 1940s’ at the Department for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna in 2022, funded by the University of Vienna (uni:doc) and for which she received among others the Austrian Award of Excellence. She spent the summer term 2022 as a Research Fellow of the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include Intersectional and Gender History, the History of Interwar Europe, Comparative Civil War Studies, Peace Studies, the History of Medicine and Public Health, and the History of the Body. She draws in her research from postcolonial, intersectional, and praxeological methodology.

Notes

1. Statistics and numbers on the mass incarceration during the so-called post-war period are still considered highly unreliable. According to Helen Graham, however, for the period between 1939 and 1943 Spain had an annual average of incarcerated people amounting to 200,000, which was 20 times the number for the years 1931–34. Such numbers do raise the question of whether the civil war ended at the unconditional surrender or if it just entered a new stage. For the numbers see, among others, Graham, “Re-reading Francoism to Re-read Post-1945 Europe,” 3–15.

2. Boletín Oficial del Estado no. 162, June 6, 1939 and Boletín Oficial del Estado no. 238, August 20, 1939.

3. Expediente personal de Carmen Gómez Serrano, AGMG. UCOS. Damas Auxiliares de Sanidad. EPDP. 3.66; Expediente de Virginia Rodríguez Solís, AGMG, UCOS, Damas Auxiliares de Sanidad, EPDP 3.24.

4. Moreno Sardà, “Mujeres en el Franquismo,” 82–89.

5. Ibid.

6. Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, Servicios Femeninos, AGMAV, C. 46761, 2.

7. Expediente personal de Carmen Gómez Serrano, see note 3; Expediente de Virginia Rodríguez Solís, see note 3.

8. Morcillo Gómez, “Shaping True Catholic Womanhood,” 51–69.

9. Inbal Ofer refers in her reflections to Karen Offen’s concept of ‘relational feminism’ and raises the question of whether Spanish fascist women were ‘relational feminists.’ I do not agree with this hypothesis. I share, however, Ofer’s observation that these right-wing women demanded more independence in relation to the generations before them and that they strove for modernity, which I suggest understanding as the effects of long-term developments of gradual liberalization, but do not understand them as feminist. For the whole argument see Ofer, “A ‘New’ Woman for a ‘New’ Spain,” 583–605.

10. The term ‘traditional’ is misleading and too vague in the Spanish context. Carlists, for instance, called their organization Comunión Tradiconalista and claimed for their monarchist, ultra-Catholic and reactionary political agenda the term of tradition. Francoist propaganda on gender relations often used ‘traditional’ as the antonym to femininity as represented by the working class, which Francoism judged as symptom and source of Spain’s demise. Historiography, on the other hand, uses ‘traditional’ to refer to social groups that looked back on long trajectories of (family) histories of wealth and power. For lack of adequate terminology, I will use ‘traditional’ but highlight it when referring to these elites.

11. Among others, Cenarro Lagunas, La sonrisa de Falange.

12. A detailed case study is offered, for instance, by Larraz Andía, “Entre el frente y la retaguardia.”

13. An overview is provided, for instance, by Alfonso Sánchez and Sánchez Blanco, “Las mujeres del Nacional-Sindicalismo,” 433–55; Pérez Espí, Mercedes Sanz-Bachiller, 131–42.

14. Relevant publications on the subject are, among others, Orduña Prada, El Auxilio Social (1936–1940); Cenarro Lagunas, La sonrisa de Falange; Richmond, Women and Spanish Fascism; Ofer, “A ‘New’ Woman for a ‘New’ Spain,” 583–605; Morant i Ariño, “Para influir en la vida del estado futuro,” 113–41; Gahete Muñoz, “La Sección Femenina de Falange,” 389–411; Rodríguez Barreira, “Auxilio Social y las actitudes cotidianas,” 1–23.

15. See, among others, Cenarro Lagunas, “La Falange es un modo de ser (mujer),” 91–120; Morant i Ariño, “Para influir en la vida del Estado futuro,” 113–41; Gahete Muñoz, “Las mujeres como transmisoras de la ideología Falangista,” 17–43; Orduña Prada, “La propaganda y la obra social del primer Franquismo,” 111–25; Ofer, “A ‘New’ Woman for a ‘New’ Spain,” 583–605; Richmond, Women and Spanish Fascism.

16. Saz Campos, “Fascism, Fascistization and Developmentalism,” 342–57.

17. Magnússon, What is Microhistory.

18. Lüdtke, ed., “Herrschaft als soziale Praxis,” 9–63.

19. Among many, I want to highlight the works of Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 1–14; Komarova and Svašek, Ethnographies of Movement; Hüchtker, “Deconstruction of Gender and Women’s Agency,” 328–49.

20. Landwehr, “Die Kunst sich nicht allzu sicher sein,” 7–14.

21. Strübing, Grounded Theory, 9–37; Przyborski et al., Qualitative Sozialforschung, 181–4, 199–201; Corbin et al., “Grounded Theory Research,” 418–27.

22. Saz Campos, Las caras del Franquismo, 1.

23. When I use ‘new’ I refer to Francoist source language.

24. Pablo Larraz Andía and Víctor Sierra-Sesúmaga offer in their oral history collection the memories of Lola Baleztena, one of the key figures of the Margaritas. Antonio Moral Roncal provides an overview on the mobilization and militarization of the Margaritas. Larraz Andía and Sierra-Sesúmaga, Requeté, 569–89; Moral Roncal, “Las Carlistas en los años 30,” 61–80.

25. Richmond, Women and Spanish Fascism, 5.

26. Some more recent and detailed overviews, among others, are González Calleja et al., La Segunda República Española, 79–144; Robledo Hernández, La tierra es vuestra, 103–240; Otero Carvajal et al., La educación en España, 9–26.

27. Nash, “Las mujeres en el último siglo,” 45–7.

28. Blasco Herranz, “Citizenship and Female Catholic Militancy in 1920s Spain,” 441–66.

29. Cenarro Lagunas, “La Falange es un modo de ser (mujer),” 94.

30. Coni, “The Head of all the Nurses,” 79–80.

31. The Spanish Red Cross offered two courses for aspiring nurses, one for ‘Damas Enfermeras,’ which was a mixture of bedside nursing practices, medical knowledge and charity responsibilities for the SRC; the other was for ‘Enfermeras Profesionales’ and consisted of nursing practices and medical knowledge. It was designed for women who wanted to earn their living as nurses. However, the latter was less successful than the former. For more details, see, among others, López Vallecillo, Enfermeras, 136–8.

32. Coni, “The Head of All the Nurses,” 80.

33. Ministerio del Interior, Telegramas, oficios, informes y relaciones entre el Subsecretario de la Gobernación y los Gobernadores Civiles sobre Sanidad, 1920–1923, AHN, FC-M°_Interior_A, 54, Exp. 15.

34. See note 3.

35. Expediente de Virginia Rodríguez Solís; see note 3.

36. Nash, “Las mujeres en el último siglo,” 25–51.

37. Ramos Palomo, “La construcción cultural de la feminidad en España,” 21–46.

38. Nielfa Cristóbal, “Trabajo, salud y vida cotidiana,” 125–8.

39. Arrizabalaga, “The ‘Merciful and Loving Sex’,” 41–60; Clemente, La escuela universitaria de enfermeras de Madrid.

40. González Calleja et al., La Segunda República Española, 320–1.

41. Ibid., 322–35.

42. Aguado, “Entre lo público y lo privado,” 105–34.

43. González Calleja et al., La Segunda República Española, 100–29, 196–253.

44. Cantero Rosales, “De perfecta casada” a “ángel del hogar.”

45. Larraz Andía et al., Requetés.

46. Morant i Ariño, “Die Frauenabteilung der spanischen Falange,” 44.

47. Robledo Hernández, La tierra es vuestra, 103–240.

48. See note 3.

49. These percentages are extrapolations based on a sample of 2448 records that have already been indexed. Of this sample, 2056 cases were younger than 30 years old and among them 1859 younger than legal age, which in 1936 was 23. Of course, these numbers are preliminary because the files have not yet been all indexed since they were only found in 2020. However, these estimations provide an impression about the effectiveness of Melchor Camón’s age barrier – or rather the age effect following Merdedes Milá’s cutting of payment for female care work in military hospitals.

50. López Vallecillo, “Relevancia de la mujer en el bando nacional,” 421–2.

51. Bernabeu Mestre et al., Historia de la enfermería de salud pública en España, 9–23.

52. Insight on the emergence of secular nurses is provided by, among others, Arrizabalaga, “The ‘Merciful and Loving Sex’,” 41–60; Germán Bes, “Historia de la institución de la enfermería universitaria,” 157–76.

53. Roynette, “Die ‘Fabrikation’ von Soldat*innen,” 303.

54. Cuartel General del Generalísimo, Estado Mayor, Sección 2^a, División 14, Sanidad, Enfermeras en Hospitales, AGMAV, C. 2802, L. 666, Cp. 5/4-5.

55. Ibid., AGMAV, C. 2802, L. 666, Cp. 5/5.

56. Ibid.

57. Cuartel General del Generalísimo, Estado Mayor, Sección 2^a, División 14, Sanidad, Enfermeras en Hospitales, AGMAV C. 2802, L. 666.

58. Frevert, “Soldaten, Staatsbürger,” 77–85; Roynette, “Die ‘Fabrikation’ von Soldat*innen,” 309–11.

59. Apelt, “Militär und Krieg,” 891–900; Latzel et al., “Soldatinnen in der Geschichte,” 17.

60. Cuartel General del Generalísimo, Estado Mayor, Sección 2^a, División 14, Sanidad, Enfermeras en Hospitales, AGMAV, C. 2802, L. 666, Cp. 5/7.

61. Ibid.

62. I want to thank Zoraida Hombrados, archivist at the Military Archive of the General Staff in Madrid, who pointed out this detail to me. Today, these staff files are stored at the General Military Archive of Guadalajara and can be consulted there.

63. Boletín Oficial del Estado, No. 157, 26.03.1937, 811.

64. Nielfa Cristóbal, “Trabajo, salud y vida cotidiana,” 130.

65. The separation between secular bedside nursing and Catholic care work in hospitals is a development in Spain that gained impetus from the civil war. However, the separation of medical work – cure work, as I like to term it – and nursing work – care work – originated earlier. To highlight the symbolism that underlies this distinction, I decided to use these terms: cure and care.

66. She refers here to the diploma that universities awarded women who passed the nursing exams that were introduced in 1931. To avoid confusion with other secondary or higher education diplomas, I use the Spanish term as used by the protagonists of this paper themselves. Further on the university diploma for nurses, see Martín Moruno et al., “The Nursing Vocation,” 309.

67. Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, Servicios Femeninos, AGMAV, C. 42068, 2.

68. Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, Servicios Femeninos, AGMAV, C. 42068, 2, 77.

69. Hernández Navarro et al., “Los distintivos y las medallas,” 239–320; López Vallecillo, “Presencia social e imagen pública,” 357–258; Seibert, “Who Cares?,” 297–8.

70. Box, “The Franco Dictatorship,” 297.

71. A good overview on the debate and with a focus on the Spanish case in its relations with other fascisms is provided by, among others, the works of Saz Campos, “Fascism, Fascistization and Developmentalism,” 342–57; Saz et al., Reactionary Nationalists, Fascists and Dictatorships; Fuentes Codera, “The Intellectual Roots and Political Foundations of Reactionary Spanish Nationalism,” 67–84; Mann, Fascists; Griffin and Feldman, Fascism; Costa Pinto, Rethinking the Nature of Fascism.

72. López Vallecillo, Enfermeras, 125–45.

73. Rodrigo, Generalísimo, 173–252; Saz Campos, “Fascism, Fascistization and Developmentalism,” 346–48.

74. On the leadership culture of Pilar Primo de Rivera and the Sección Femenina, see, among others, Morant i Ariño, “Para influir en la vida del Estado futuro,” 113–41; Richmond, Women and Spanish Fascism; Hudson-Richards, “Women Want to Work,” 87–109.

75. Seibert, “Who Cares?” 369–89.

76. Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, Servicios Femeninos, AGMAV, C. 42067, 2; Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, Servicios Femeninos, AGMAV, C. 42068.

77. Expediente de Virginia Rodríguez Solís, see note 3.

78. Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, see note 67.

79. Arrizabalaga, “The ‘Merciful and Loving Sex’,” 51–4; López Vallecillo, “Presencia social e imagen pública,” 37–72; Germán Bes, “Historia de la institución de la enfermería universitaria,” 64–108.

80. A vivid image provides the Sección Femenina monthly magazine Y – Revista para la mujer nacionalsindicalista, and, among others, Ángela Cenarro elaborates what it meant to be a falangist woman; see Cenarro Lagunas, “La falange es un modo de ser (mujer),” 91–120.

81. Box, “The Franco Dictatorship,” 297.

82. AGMG, UCOS, Hospital Militar, Cádiz, 1–7; Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, Servicios Femeninos, AGMAV, C. 46,761, 2.

83. Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, see note 67.

84. Seibert, “Who Cares?,” 297–8.

85. Ibid., 300–1.

86. Ibid., 400.

87. Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, Servicios Femeninos, AGMAV, C. 46761, 2.

88. Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, Servicios Femeninos, AGMAV, C. 42068, 2, 73.

89. Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, Servicios Femeninos, AGMAV, C. 42068, 2, 72.

90. Nancy Fraser’s reasoning about how redistribution and recognition can serve as tools to understand how patriarchal power relations are reproduced and provides inspiration for the Francoist context. Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition?,” 68–93.

91. Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, Servicios Femeninos, AGMAV, C. 42068, 2, 80.

92. Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, Servicios Femeninos, AGMAV, C. 42068, 2, 79.

93. Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, Servicios Femeninos, AGMAV, C. 42068, 2, 125–136.

94. Correspondencia de la Inspectora General, see note 87.

95. Alcalde, “The Demobilization of Francoist and Republican War Veterans,” 205.

96. Higonnet et al., “The Double Helix,” 31–50.

97. Morcillo Gómez, “Shaping True Catholic Womanhood,” 69.

98. Kühne, “Kameradschaft,” 521–3.

99. Latzel et al., “Soldatinnen in der Geschichte,“ 37.

100. Among others, Knoch et al., Kriegsalltag; Wette, Der Krieg des kleinen Mannes; Kühne, “Protean Masculinity, Hegemonic Masculinity ,” 390–418; Lüdtke, “Alltagsgeschichte,” 278–95.

101. Among others, see: Larraz Andía et al., Requetés; Fernández, Derrotados; Hurtado Díaz, Memorias del pueblo.

102. Expediente de Virginia Rodríguez Solís, see note 3; Expediente de Carmen Gómez Serrano, see note 3.

103. In Mercedes Milá’s correspondence, the issue appears repeatedly but no formal letter records the rules. The staff files of Carmen Gómez and Virginia Rodríguez, however, show that there was even a form to apply for it; so the procedure was standardized eventually. See, for instance, Expediente de Carmen Gómez Serrano, see note 3.