You've Come a Long Way, Baby

I remember seeing that slogan on billboards over thirty years ago back in Boston for a brand of cigarettes that was aimed at women. And while the company was telling women that they were a long way from the days when smoking was frowned upon in women, the truth is that women have travelled a long way in this past century. Though they still have a long way to go to be considered a complete social and work equal with men. Of course, in countries like Spain it seems they have travelled two centuries in just over forty years.

"Guide for the good wife."

To begin with, during Franco's regime they were treated as minors practically all their lives. Men came of age at twenty-one. Women came of age at twenty-five. And they could not leave the parental home before that. They could only leave to get married, with parental permission. When my mother was married, back in 1953 (she was twenty-four), she ceded all legal power over to her husband. That meant she couldn't get a job, open a bank account, obtain a passport, or buy any property without her husband's consent. She couldn't even buy a mattress without his signature. If she had to travel a certain distance from home, even within Spain, she needed written permission from her husband. I remember looking through old papers in my parents' house and finding a document from when my grandfather had died. It simply stated how his property and money had been distributed among his children, and his children's signatures showing their compliance. He had four children, three girls and one boy. The son had only his signature, but the daughters had their husbands' signatures next to theirs, agreeing to allow their wives to inherit. My mother and aunts could not sell or rent their inherited property without their hubands' permission. Though they were luckier than women before the Second Republic because their husbands couldn't sell them, either. 

I remember shortly after moving here I went to a little corner grocery and bakery to buy a loaf of bread. While I waited in line an older woman was talking to the owner, a woman probably in her sixties back then. They were talking about how some men still abused their wives despite the changing times and the freedom women had won since Franco died in 1975. And the customer mentioned the long-dead mother of someone she knew. Back at the beginning of the twentieth century, that woman's husband had left for Argentina and had never written nor sent any money home. The woman was left to raise her children alone and take care of her aging father. When her father died, he left her the house and some land to grow vegetables and keep body and soul together. Her husband in Argentina learned of his father-in-law's death and from Argentina sold his wife's inheritance, including the house she and their children were living in. I must have heard that anecdote about twenty years ago, but I've never forgotten it.

Many American women have taken divorce and birth control for granted since long before I was born. Spain finally approved divorce in 1934, only to have it taken away after Franco's victory, in 1938. After that if a woman was caught in an unhappy marriage she could not leave it. It didn't matter what the husband did to her. The only marriage counselors were the priests, and they would tell the woman that it was her lot in life to bear her husband. In 1981 women were finally liberated from that prison. Abortion had also been legalized during the Second Republic but was short-lived. It was legalized once more in 1985, though only in the cases of rape, malformation, and psychical damage to the mother. It has since been changed in 2010 to being totally legal in the first fourteen weeks of pregnancy for any reason. The only contraceptive legal in Spain before Franco's death was the Pill, but only for dermatological reasons. It could not be prescribed as a contraceptive. Contraceptives as such were legalized in 1978.

Now women are almost everywhere in the work force and public life. They make up more than half the college graduates. Many women hold important laboral and political positions, where they shine with the same honesty, intelligence, and creativity as men, or stink with the same dishonesty and incompetency as their male counterparts. Nothing is forbidden us by law, and by the next generation we'll probably have a queen, as well. Long gone is the Salic law that forbade it. However, there is much more work to be done. What is left is the invisible fight. While the Salic law is gone, no law has yet been passed making the first born child the successor to the throne, regardless of sex. There has been no woman prime minister nor is there any sign of one in the future. Women earn less than men working at the same job, having the same experience and qualifications. Women are still expected to be supermoms. While it is normal to see men after work stopping for a beer or coffee, a family woman who does so is considered to be neglecting her family. Stereotypes still abound and differences are made on a basis of sex in areas where it doesn't really matter if the person is a man or a woman. 

At least now women in Spain have caught up with their counterparts in the rest of Europe. Now we have to join them to obtain full social and economic equality, though looking back, we have come a long way.

"The fight continues."