![cover image](https://wikiwandv2-19431.kxcdn.com/_next/image?url=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4b/Coat_of_Arms_of_Spain_%25281939-1945%2529-Bureaucratic_Variant.svg/640px-Coat_of_Arms_of_Spain_%25281939-1945%2529-Bureaucratic_Variant.svg.png&w=640&q=50)
Women's media in Francoist Spain
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Women's media in Francoist Spain suffered as a result of Francoist Spain policy. Many writers, translators and others were forced into exile, or faced stifling censorship and harassment if they remained. Spanish restrictions meant writing became one of the few acceptable occupations for women, and literate women with few other outlets for participation in Spanish society became voracious readers.
Internationalism disappeared in the early days of Spanish literature. The 1940s and 1950s saw the most popular form of women's literature being romance novels. Despite important literary contributions like Carmen Laforet's 1945 novel Nada, the 1940, 1950s and 1960s were a period where the broader male dominated literary establishment refused to take women's literary efforts seriously. The major theme in women's literature was trying to understand women's place in society in the period between the 1940s and 1950s, changing in the next decade with women beginning to challenge their role in society and to argue more for women's rights in literature. The death of Franco in 1975 would see women writers liberated in the themes they could explore.
In the early Francoist period, comic reproduced the gender roles advocated by the state, and were used to push this ideology onto children. Explorations of women's roles in society began to appear in comics in the 1970s, while women also began to appear as more three dimensional people and less as pure sex objects. Women were often portrayed as chaste, saintly figures who submitted to male authority in government approved domestic films. Starting in the 1950s, foreign movies in Spain presented women with images of beautiful and glamorous women who had their own agency.
Censorship became a new reality for many women writers in Francoist Spain. Publishers were subject to government control, and the Catholic Church was highly influential in what was allowed to be published. This would not begin to change until the 1970s, when some restrictions were relaxed.