The Dystopian Times, 6. A Hundred Years and We Still Fight

It's around eight in the evening, but the light and the closeness of the waning day make it seem like it's ten. I have been harping on the weather, but it truly is depressing. Winter will be a killer.

This past day was the hundredth anniversary of women's suffrage in the United States. In Spain, women were given the right to vote in the Constitution of 1931, in the Second Republic. 

Franco took away our right to vote, but also the men's because there simply weren't any elections for some time. When they returned, though one party only, both "heads of households and married women" could vote. Women were badly treated as a whole by the dictatorship, wiping away all progress made during the first years of the twentieth century. 

Divorce and civil marriage had been permitted during the Republic; afterwards, women had to marry by the Church and could never leave the marriage. They became virtual slaves. But their slavery started during the Civil War. 

I came across a publication today, describing how the moving war front in Extremadura impacted upon women. While many Republican, and left-leaning, men had fled, the Nationalist soldiers took out their men's sins on the women they left behind. Many were killed and buried in mass graves.

Today, eighty years later, we are still trying to rise above our history, and claim our place next to men. Next to, not above and not below. The pandemic is pulling us down. Three quarters of the healthcare workers that have gotten infected are women. Women are the majority workers in what are considered frontline jobs that can't be shut down, such as canneries and supermarkets. Aside from that, most have had to take care of children and older relatives who had no one else to take care of them, especially in situations where the women had been temporarily laid off or lost their job altogether. 

And many who have been suffering abuse at home wound up suffering in silence during the lockdown, and still suffer. The pandemic has simply amplified problems that women have had for years. In Spain, many teachers are women, and, come September, will be in the forefront with our children, being not only teacher and parent, but also nurse and cleaner. 

In the region of Madrid, teachers are going on strike on different days this September to protest that the regional education ministry has left everything up to them to keep children from getting infected this school year. Again, mostly women.

We should look back and thank those women who came before us and fought terrible battles so that women now have the rights we have. We still have to fight many battles, but we're not starting from scratch. Our grandmothers did that for us.

Life continues.