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Q. You left the Spanish Communist Party [PCE] at the time of the elections. How long were you in the party, what made you leave, and what perspectives do you have?
A. 1am not a typical case among the PCE opposition women. / entered the party with serious disagreements with its political line, but thinking that it was a party with a big implantation and great possibilities for work. I joined in 1972 and left for two reasons. The first was personal. I was personally exhausted, and when you are a militant and have difficulties in discussing what you are doing - lacking any concrete evaluation of your work - it is not very gratifying.
The second reason was the political line of the PCE. This caused problems long before the elections. But particularly at the time of the elections I became conscious of great contradictions. I could only go on being a militant in the party if I could see real possibilities of struggle as a feminist. I didn't see them, so l quit.
I think now that despite the serious contradictions a person might have between their ideas and actions and the party line, it is important to practise entryism - with the object of advancing feminist consciousness within political organisations. So i think it is important to struggle within the Socialist Party (PSOE) - a party backed by five million voters, which allows a certain amount of autonomy on what its members do on women's issues. Today there are few women in the PSOE, and they are not under excessive control.
Although I work in a political party, I think that if the autonomous women's movement does not have sufficient force to impose a determined political line on the parties, they are not going to carry out important changes.
The main reason I left the PCE was because of the party's idea that it would present itself as the 'party of women's liberation'. To do this, it used 'the woman question' as a way to implant itself and gain votes. Women working inside the PCE never thought the party was any more 'the party of women's liberation' than were other parties. After it had maintained an incorrect line - at least during these recent years — we couldn't allow it to characterise itself in this way.
The leadership of the women's organisation of the PCE - the
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I am also an adulteress' reads the placard carried by this demonstrator outside a Barcelona court. Inside a woman was being jailed for this 'crime', but the CP refused to extend its amnesty demands to include such 'women's crimes'.
More groups were involved in the Woren's Days, but the MDM bore the brunt of organising the event. It marked the beginning of the debate about feminism in Spain. Five hundred women attended. The event was held 16 days after Franco's death, in clandestinity. The MDM was the major force - although women attended from women's collectives and other left organisations like the Labour Party (PTE) and the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR).
The debate was very fruitful. Fundamental problems were raised. For example, why does the women's movement organise and what form of organisation should it adopt. The MDM advanced several political positions which caused nearly half the women in the hall to clash with its members. There were two main points of conflict.
First, the MDM wanted to send a telegram to Juan Carlos asking for amnesty. The radical feminists' proposal was to include amnesty for specifically women's crimes. The MDM refused. It was incapable of understanding the political importance of this approach. The second conflict arose over a demonstration the next day. It was called at Carabanchel prison. Some women proposed that we should march out to ine women s prison of Yeserias - where there were both political prisoners and women condemned for women's offences'. The MDM once again refused to support this proposal.
After these days of action, some women in the PCE began to think that a political alternative could exist in organising women outside the MDM. The polemic between the opposition in the MDM and the leadership centred on two questions. Women of the opposition felt that the women's movement should be unitary and autonomous, independent of political parties. They thought it was an error for the MDM to act as a transmission belt for the PCE, and argued that Communist women should work in the feminist movement alongside women of other parties and non-aligned women - rather than simply in the MDM itself.
Secondly, the opposition took up the MDM's limited political line in the neighbourhoods. It maintained that specific problems like sexuality, contraception, equality at work and so on should be included in the party's internal concerns. The women who led the MDM disagreed.
Communist women at the University of Madrid participated in a women's group with a feminist platform. Theoretically, all political parties and independents worked in this group. The CP women tried to carry out a political intervention autonomous from the MDM. After a long fight - supported by the University Committee of the party — the women won the right to prohibit the leadership of the MDM from intervening in the University. They were then able to organise meetings and even to join activities with which the MDM was not in agreement.
Of course this caused problems for the party. In the Women's Platform of Madrid, Communist women from the MDM were often present at the same time as Communist women from the University with different positions. An extremely anomalous situation existed because democratic centralism was lamentably lacking. This situation created plenty of confrontations, though all very much below the surface. Just as happens with all oppositions in the Communist Parties, these confrontations never broke the surface of the party. And this situation lasted until the First Conference on The Woman' which the PCE called in 1976.
Women from the whole country were supposed to attend the conference. We women from the University asked for the right to speak and vote, and to present a paper to conference. Through a series of manoeuvres, the leadership of the MDM tried to stop the University women from presenting their positions to the conference because the party leadership would be present (a thing that could be very dangerous so far as their control of the party was concerned). But the Madrid opposition succeeded in getting five representatives, and in presenting their paper. At that conference there were women from the Workers Commissions, who had a neutral position at the beginning.
The debate was very fierce, and very badly run. It was impossible to bring a single vote to a conclusion. The MDM leadership tried to get through a resolution explicitly stating PCE support for the MDM. The opposition women refused and threatened to put out a public paper explaining the lack of unanimity on the resolution if a vote was taken. The conference ended at loggerheads, so they agreed to publish an external pamphlet presenting all the conference papers. But the opposition paper 'got lost", and so the book appeared with only the positions of the MDM leadership.
As every opposition within the party is very marginalised and isolated, it is difficult to contact other sectors to be able to discuss and gather forces. Our objective was to reach the women in the workers movement, because we thought that if the leadership of the MDM managed to influence them, the political battle would be lost. Clearly everything had to be done clandestinely. They didn't know who we were, where we came from, or anything. We managed to contact women in the legal sector and women from Telefonica, for example.
After the conference we asked for a meeting with the PCE's Provincial Committee of Madrid to explain our positions. In that meeting the Provincial Committee supported the autonomy not only of the women in the University, but also of other women who were not militants within the MDM.
The leadership of the MDM accepted the decision of the provincial leadership and set up a body which, in theory, would bethe political leadership on the woman question in Madrid, and where the University would be represented. But while they had representatives on it from all 30 housewives' associations (one per neighbourhood), they only had one representative from the University. There was another from the professional sector, but we were still a tiny minority - the delegates from the workers movement were either neutral or supported the MDM.
The last skirmish took place at the time of the election campaign over the MDM's proposed slogan: The PCE is "The Party of Women's Liberation"". Once again it was the women of the University who opposed this, proposing a completely different type of campaign. But this time the PCE's Provincial Committee and the University Committee vetoed the autonomy of the women from the University. The arguments were that, faced with elections, the party had to be one, united and strong, and therefore there was no possibility of autonomy. The women from the University refused to participate in the election campaign and Heft the party.
After the elections, and the failure of the campaign, the party leadership saw that the MDM was incapable of playing the role mapped out for it in relation to the mass of women. It could not become hegemonic within the women's movement, and so they were forced to come up with an alternative solution. Carrillo understood that it might be more advantageous to allow Communist women to enter the women's groups which had political possibilities, such as the FLM (Women's Liberation Front), rather than persevering with a body that had lost its reputation and was stagnating without any reai influence. The resolution that seems to have been passed will maintain the MDM but with a leadership which has a more flexible idea of how to intervene.
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Q. The PCE programme of October 1975 [written before Franco's death] defines the autonomous women's movement as a flexible movement, open to all currents, whose organisational independence vis-a-vis political parties is a guarantee of its action and effectiveness. Of course, there is a gulf between these declarations and the practice of the MDM, which elsewhere proclaims itself to be the autonomous women's movement. But weren't you able to make use of that programme in your work inside the party? A. Yes, this was one of the fundamental weapons which the opposition used, demanding that the adjective 'autonomous' take on an actual substance. But this discussion was ruled out right from the start. The official position was to say: we accept autonomy, so that more political parties can participate in the MDM. But of couse the PCE had most influence, and were not prepared to work for a unitary platform with other organisations which could mean a different relationship of forces.
Q. How has the political practice of the MDM and the PCE prevented women from understanding the real roots of their oppression?
A. Well, I wouldn't say the PE's work has been absolutely negative. It began work in this sector when nobody was working there, under very difficult objective conditions. In 1965 the word 'feminism' was something that repelled people in this country. Nobody understood it. So the PCE's initial work fulfilled a certain important function.
But this first phase is over. Today there is sizable support for the movement in Spanish society. But the PCE has taken a step backward so far as women's consciousness goes. Its fear of allowing women to think and organise for themselves has kept them from advancing and discussing other topics. By limiting them to issues such as the cost of living and a role of simple solidarity, women have been hindered from questioning their own role within the family and their role within society.
draw along. to take place that could be irreversible. unprecedented in the Arab world. But at the same time life in the refugee camps remains in general deeply conservative.
The following remarks are an attempt to outline the contradictory processes affectFor a long time the MDM maintained that sexuality was not something which concerned women from the neighbourhoods, that debates about sexuality, abortion and contraception were counter-productive in this sphere as they were the problems of radicalised women who belonged to a cultural vanguard. It was only when the women from the neighbourhoods began to support the campaign for contraception, signed letters demanding contraception, and attended talks held by various women's groups, that the MDM took up these problems. And so there was an important section in the propaganda pamphlets of the election campaign talking about contraceptives and abortion.
The political leadership of the party is now beginning to discuss sexuality and is starting to realise the importance of feminism as a specific struggle. So the struggle which women wage inside the party can be very important. But it also means questioning other things, like how the party should function internally, and the hierarchy within the party. The fact is that you can't isolate the problem of women from the general political line of the PCE. The PCE simply cannot risk taking steps that could cause it to clash in some way with sectors which it reckons it can It's the same as with the 'historic compromise in Italy. The PCI cannot come out in favour of abortion, however much the women in the party ask for it, because that would mean confronting the Church while trying to make an alliance with the Christian Democrats. So in this sense there will always be a clash between a feminist strategy and the strategy of the PCE.
Nevertheless, even by allowing women Communists a limited amount of autonomy, Carrillo has taken a very dangerous step. Given the political line of the PCE, an opposition is inevitable in the short term. If the PCE women enter autonomous women's organisations, they are going to be raising a series of problems in their demands which the PCE's line cannot tolerate, because the latter is one of a pact with the bourgeoisie. So clashes are going factors which operate here are common to other colonial peoples, as is the distrust of contraceptive programmes as a method of imperialist control. However, a high birthrate has also become a crucial political