GENDERED ACTIVISM: THE ANTI FRANCOIST STUDENT MOVEMENT IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GRANADA IN THE 1960S AND 1970S

Abstract

This article focuses on the repression of the student movement in the University of Granada during the state of exception of 1970. It relates the experiences of two students, Socorro and Jesus, a couple who joined the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and suffered persecution and imprisonment. The Francoist university was governed by the University Regulatory Law (URL, University Regulatory Law) issued in 1943, which was replaced with the promulgation of the General Law of Education in 1970. As I explained in my previous work, the Catholic national rhetoric of the Franco regime forged an ideal "True Catholic Woman" based on the resurgence of the values ​​of purity and subordination of the 16th century counter reform as proposed by Luis Vives in The Instruction of the Christian Woman (1523) and Fray Luis de León in The Perfect Wife (1583). This ideal of a woman came to contradict the ideal of an intellectual built on the letter of the Ley de Ordenación Universitaria (1943). The transition to the consumer economy in the 1950s with the military and economic aid of the United States, as well as the social Catholicism of the Second Vatican Council in the sixties along with the arrival of tourism and emigration to Europe changed the social fabric and opened the doors of the classrooms to an increasing number of women, especially in the humanities careers of Philosophy and Letters. Through the analysis of interviews conducted in the late 1980s with two people who participated in the clandestine student movement, this article explores how young people transgressed the official discourse on the Catholic ideal of women, claimed the university environment for the working class and created a neutral space in terms of gender in which they could achieve their commitment to study, democratic freedom and feminism.