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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 9, No. 3

Publication Date: March 25, 2022

DOI:10.14738/assrj.93.12031. Escudero, C. (2022). The Audacious Searching of Spanish Mothers: The Appropriation of Babies During and After the Dictatorship.

Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 9(3). 134-143.

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

The Audacious Searching of Spanish Mothers: The Appropriation

of Babies During and After the Dictatorship

Carolina Escudero, PhD

University of Missouri, Global Programs

Carrer de Ramón Turró, 169 (08005) Barcelona, Spain

ABSTRACT

Throughout the dictatorship in Spain, many strategies were used to manipulate and

silence mothers’ voices. During this period (1940-1975) and also in later times of

democracy, a total of 300,000 babies were stolen (Anadir, 2011). Currently, family

organizations are looking for their children, stolen between 1940 and 1999. Their

calls for memory, justice and reparation found a space for action in social media as

the campaigns “We Are Looking for You” (2017, 2018), where they could their

search after surviving obstetric violence and stigmatization. Transcending these

deeds from a space of action, the precepts proposed by Frankl –on accepting pain,

taking responsibility for what they feel in order to give meaning to the tragedy– are

observed. Through this ethnographic study, carried out during the recording of two

social media campaigns, we will endeavor to confirm the following hypothesis:

their active participation in the campaigns, the members of SOS Stolen Babies of

Catalonia are developing the virtue of audacity. This audacity is linked to Frankl’s

theory of assuming suffering, asserting destiny and taking a stand before it (1987).

This study used participant observation and interviews of the 20 families belonging

to the Catalan organization.

Keywords: audacity, stolen babies, TEB campaigns, appropriations

INTRODUCTION

Within the framework of this ethnographic study, we are interested in demonstrating the

relationship between the victims of the theft of babies and their process of giving meaning to

their pain -through their active participation in media campaigns- and how this process is

closely related to Frankl's theory about the importance of recognizing and taking responsibility

for pain, giving it meaning. Faced with the acceptance of pain (and tragedy), a decision is made

to adopt an attitude and begin a process of transcendence in which we can observe their

audacity.

For a better understanding of the political and social context in which the theft of babies was

conceived, in this introduction we will present the controls and the type of manipulation of

ideas that were employed in the framework of the dictatorship in Spain; we will also specify the

gender roles imposed by the regime that will allow us to advance towards the concepts of

motherhood and eugenics used by the representatives of the regime to justify the

“Appropriation” of babies through networks linked to the regime. Faced with all these devices

of appropriation and domination, the first organizations of the families of stolen babies and the

"Public Testimonials" appeared, allowing us to broach the notion of “Learning and Sense of

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Escudero, C. (2022). The Audacious Searching of Spanish Mothers: The Appropriation of Babies During and After the Dictatorship. Advances in Social

Sciences Research Journal, 9(3). 134-143.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.93.12031

pain” that the studied population gave to their stories, and leading us to the idea of “Audacious

search” and the “Conclusion”.

During the dictatorship that took place in Spain under Francisco Franco, there was not only the

control and manipulation of the ideas, thoughts and actions of the population in general, but

special attention was given to the behavior of women, considered as potential mothers and

bearers of the future population of the country. Along these lines, drastic changes were carried

out to the way the Spanish population could live, think and act, in accordance with the religious

precepts imposed by the regime from 1939 until 1975.

For a better understanding of the historical facts, Franco came to power after winning the

Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and established a dictatorship. In this socio-political context, its

victims lived under repression; more precisely, the Republicans (known as the Reds) were

terrorized under Francoism. Extra-judicial executions had taken place once the Civil War was

over, making the Republicans very weary of exposing themselves by denouncing human rights

abuses (Valverde, 2012).

As far as women are concerned, which is what we are interested in reflecting in this work,

during the dictatorship, women were ordered to preserve their chastity and re-conquer the

household. Various books were made available to women on this role imposed by the state,

such as: “The Wisdom of the Home. Before you get Married” (1946).

Women’s chastity was to be considered the most valuable of all feminine virtues, and those

women violating in any way these public morals were to be considered a danger to the social

order (Morcillo Gómez, 2015).

More specifically, throughout the dictatorship women were silenced and subordinated to men,

medical doctors, church representatives and the State. As the authors Bueno-Morales and

González-Besteiro suggest: “Women not related to the dictatorship were persecuted,

imprisoned and murdered - like many men- but at the same time they also had to face sexual

violence, electric shocks and the theft of their children” (2018, p.48).

To manipulate, control and silence women, various instruments were used, such as the

pathologization of their emotions through medical writings as well as their marginalization

within the educational, political and labor spheres through "moralist" messages. In Franco's

propaganda, women were treated as superior beings to men thanks to their physical virtues

(motherhood) and for their moral attributes (sweetness, protection, understanding) dedicated

to the providing man, who had little patience for listening.

Even gender roles, justifying male domination, were presented as law; article 57 of the Civil

Code sanctioned, even within marriage, that: "The husband must protect the woman and she

must obey him." Until 1958, a woman was not authorized by law to be a guardian or a witness

in wills, and a married woman still needed her husband's permission.

Women's freedom of professional choice was also subordinate to the patriarchal control

imposed by the state: women were obliged to stop working once they got married, and only

after 1961 were they allowed to continue working, with their husband’s permission. And while

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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ) Vol. 9, Issue 3, March-2022

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

many women were financially independent since they earned their own money, even in these

cases, they also needed marital permission for certain business transactions (Barrenechea

Lopez, 2018).

Until 1973, single women could not leave the paternal home and become independent before

the age of twenty-five. Hence, the marginalization of women in the labor market may be

understood and more so if it was to obtain positions in the administration of justice. In these

cases, it was considered that a woman would jeopardize certain attributes that she should not

give up, such as tenderness, delicacy and sensitivity (Women's Political, Professional and Labor

Rights Act, 1961; in Ortiz-Heras, 2006, p.9).

LITERATURE REVIEW

Given all the mechanisms of control that were implemented throughout the dictatorship, the

control of the body and women’s health was of great interest since it was aligned with the

theory of eugenics that in certain aspects shared the aims of Lamarckian or Mendelian eugenics:

the homogenization of the population. Historically, the term has been used to refer to anything

comprised between prenatal care of mothers to forced sterilization and genocide.

The modern formulation of eugenics stems from the work of Sir Francis Galton in the 1860s.

According to him, eugenics was the science of improving the human race. For this, it would be

necessary, on the one hand, to detect the best physically and mentally endowed beings and

promote their marriages (positive eugenics) and, on the other, to detect all those who, with

their various defects, could contribute to the deterioration of the human race and avoid their

marriage and, therefore, their reproduction (negative eugenics) (Álvarez Peláez, 1999).

Eugenics arrived in Spain thanks to Ignacio Valentí y Vivó, professor of Legal Medicine and

Toxicology at the University of Barcelona (who attended the First International Eugenics

Congress, organized in London in 1912 by the Eugenics Education Society as Spanish

representative), and Nicolás Amador, also a doctor and member of said society. In 1928, the

First Spanish Eugenic Course was held, becoming the first public platform for discussion of

eugenics in the country. The repression of the Primo de Rivera regime, alleging pornography

and public scandal, prevented the continuation of the activities planned in this field (Nash,

1984).

This eugenicist vision had already been adopted and applied in countries such as Nazi Germany,

and led to a rigid and utopian notion of the human body as stable, controllable and beautiful,

racially and gender determined (López-Durán, 2018).

The Franco regime made institutional use of eugenic theories designed by the psychiatrist

Vallejo Nagera to denigrate and to disqualify the losing side in the war and to justify repression.

Nájera would make his theories known through various publications such as: “Eugenics of

Hispanity and Regeneration of the Race” (1937), “Social Medicine and Mental Hygiene” (1943),

“The Wisdom of the Home. Before you get Married ”(1946). In the first book Nájera explained

that in his veins runs inquisitor blood that he had inherited genetically from his parents and

justified his position; in the second book he justified why the race needed to be cleansed and

improved, and how to achieve this goal; and in the last specifies: “It is impossible to achieve a

strong race without a thorough preparation of the youth for marriage thanks to Catholic