Travessias (May 2018)
Between Home and Profession. The conduct books by Francisca Bohigas during the first Francoism (1939-1950).
Abstract
Francisca Bohigas was one of the most important conservative women in Spain in the first half of the 20th century. In spite of her affinity with Franco’s dictatorship, in the conduct books that she published during the first decade of the regime, she disagreed on some central aspects of the official gender model that the Francoist regime tried to transform into a hegemonic one. However, this does not mean that her thought was completely transgressive. She tried to strengthen the existing patriarchal structures in the private sphere, although as an autonomous and, at the same time, privileged subject, she was able to negotiate, question and/or openly resist the official gender norms and regulations she did not agree with. Firstly, she strove to salvage and preserve social acceptance and respectability that certain ways of remaining unmarried had traditionally enjoyed in Spain. Moreover, she fought to remove the social barriers that Spanish women faced to access almost any job. These are sufficient examples to argue that the elements of the official gender model that Bohigas chose to fight against were not mere details and nuances, but central aspects of the gender system that the dictatorship wanted to impose. The analysis of Bohigas’s conduct books provides a privileged framework for exploring the possibilities of action that conservative women -even those who supported the dictatorship- had when negotiating and questioning the roles that the Francoism strove to impose on Spanish women.
