It would seem that the international interest on Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, in particular its repression of women, is only recently taking shape. In December 2008, a conference was organized in Madrid to bring to light the complexity of the phenomenon. At the same time, it is interesting to note the extreme difficulty of accessing the many records written by all those women who suffered the unfair restrictions imposed by the government. From the extracts, it is possible to grasp the terrible hygienic conditions of the overcrowded female prisons, the starvation the women suffered, their fight against the “power”, and the physical and psychological abuses perpetrated by Caudillo’s officers in the police stations, in the houses and in the streets. The reasons for the abuses against women were not only political (all those women were communists, republicans and anarchists), but also gender-related: they were persecuted for the only fact of being women.…
