Labor Unrest , Ideology Formation and Female Participation in the 1930 s ú (original) (raw)

Labor Unrest, Political Activation and Female Electoral Participation in the 1930s

2024

Economy workshop at Stanford (2017) for helfup feedback and advice. Our research assistants Pau Vall and Rosa Canal for excellent support; and the enormous support provided by the "Arxiu Històric de Girona" (AHG) and the "Arxiu General de la Diputació de Girona" (AGDG). This paper belongs to a series of contributions aim at studying voting patterns in early democratization periods. The order of the authors rotates across the different articles.

From Political Mobilization to Electoral Participation: Turnout in Barcelona in the 1930s

The Journal of Politics, 2020

Full democratization and the extension of the franchise to low-income, illiterate populations was historically followed by a drop in turnout, pointing to the difficulty of making voting rights truly effective. Political parties had to develop powerful electoral machines and tap into existing social networks to bring citizens to the polls. In this paper we explore that process in the context of 1930s Barcelona, taking advantage of a unique panel data set of official registers that include individualized information on turnout as well as other personal characteristics (such as age, gender, address, literacy and occupation) of almost 25,000 electors for two elections in Spain's Second Republic (1934 and 1936), and matching individual voting roll-calls with relevant precinct-level socioeconomic , political and geographical data. We show that voting (particularly among unskilled, left-leaning voters) was driven by the direct mobilizational strategies developed by political parties and those social organizations (such as trade unions) that encompassed an important part of society and often acted in tandem with party machines-to that effect we exploit the short-term change in anarchist trade union's electoral strategies. We also show that voters were mobilized indirectly-through the social networks in which they were embedded. Partisan and organizational resources and strategies were especially important for previously abstentionist unskilled workers and in heavily working-class neighborhoods.

Revisiting women's labour force in Catalonia (1920-1936)

This study aims to reconstruct women’s activity rates in the fourteen leading textile areas of Catalonia, which represented 20 percent of the Catalan textile labor force in the first third of the twentieth century. This contribution proposes to review explanations offered by neoclassical labor economics with regard to the determinants of women’s labor participation. It assumes that some of these hypotheses stem from the frequent under reporting of women’s activity, particularly those who are married with children. Nominative linkage techniques have been used to correct the underregistration of women’s activity in the Enumerator Books with information from the Labor Census from each village. Descriptive as well as analytical statistics provide new estimates of women’s activity rates for those villages and fresh interpretations on the labor supply behavior of women through the life cycle.

Life-Course Effects of Women’s Political Activism: Public and Private Trajectories from Anti-Francoism to the 15-M in Spain

Mobilization: An International Quarterly

Using life stories, this article analyzes the effects that youthful political participation during the final years of Spain’s Francoist dictatorship had on the public and private life-course trajectories for a group of activist women. Noteworthy among our conclusions is the fundamental role that political engagement plays, becoming a key element of the interviewed women’s identities. They associated political activity with mainly positive emotions, learnings, and empowerment, as well as with the creation of social networks that became especially relevant when reengaging in activism later in their lives. Similarly, their political activism favored the development of heterodox attitudes and behaviors. In general, their personal trajectories were marked by political and social commitments, regardless of the differences in relation to formal participation in political parties and other organizations.

Women's labor force participation in Spain: An analysis from dictatorship to democracy

2010

In Spain, women’s labor force participation has drastically shifted in the decades since Francisco Franco’s dictatorship collapsed. Changes in government policy and evolving social attitudes have affected the treatment of women and their access to economic opportunities. Using The World Bank and OECD labor force statistics for Spain, this study compares Spain’s historical data with that of France, Germany and Portugal. My results suggest that the dictatorship inhibited women’s labor force participation in Spain in contrast to nearby countries over the same period. 1University Honors Program, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa 50614-0129; kristip@uni.edu. A special thank you to my advisor, Dr. Shahina Amin, for her many suggestions along the way.

The divergent aims of the struggle for women’s suffrage in Spain (1918–1924)

Women's History Review, 2021

This article seeks to explain why groups of women working for women’s suffrage in Spain from 1918 to 1924 failed to agree on a unified strategy. It focuses on three of the most important groups working for the right of women to vote in Spain: the Women’s Socialist Group, the Catholic Workers’ Trade Union of the Immaculate Conception and the Crusade of Spanish Women, a suffragist group. All three groups were united by the development of strategies which contested male-dominated discourses and spaces in the public sphere, but were ultimately divided by their aims. Their ideological incompatibilities explain why these groups were unable to agree on a common strategy and why the campaign in support of the vote for women failed.

Gender and Social Movements. The case of the Indignados movement in Spain

This research digs into the treatment of gender in social movements. Continuing the work on how gender appears in social movements after the new social movements of the 1960's, this study looks into two aspects that are considered key to understanding gender in contemporary social movements: their internal organization and the ideology they produced. For this purpose, the research follows the work of the feminist and queer groups -called assemblies- that participated in the recent “Indignados Movement” in Spain in 2011. An interesting factor of this movement is that it occupied public spaces to install their headquarters, which differs from other social movements and gives special relevance to gender dynamics. Many people camped in those squares with very different backgrounds, working and sleeping in the same place. It seemed a representation of society in a smaller scale, and the patriarch logic that governs most of our society was obviously present in the movement.

Blitzkrieg Against Democracy: Gender Equality and the Rise of the Populist Radical Right in Spain

Social Politics, 2021

Populist radical right parties (PRRPs) are generally considered detrimental to democracy. Research on their damaging potential tends to focus on their influence in triggering policy backsliding but leaves the promotion of gender equality out of the equation. This study explores the case of Vox in Andalusia, a southern region of Spain, to show how PRRPs also contribute to de-democratization through their capacity to erode the equality framework. We demonstrate how they can effectively dismantle and reframe crucial policies, even when not in office. This opens new analytical pathways for studying the role of PRRPs in undermining democratic systems.