Spain Pardons Women Imprisoned Under Franco for ‘Moral Crimes’

Over half a century since the death of dictator Francisco Franco, Spain has — for the first time — formally pardoned 53 women imprisoned in moral reformatories founded during his dictatorship. 

The El Patronato de Protección a la Mujer (Women’s Protection Board) detained thousands of girls and young women between 1941 and 1985 who were deemed to have strayed from the strict Catholic morals of the time. Women were institutionalized for so-called crimes that ranged from falling pregnant outside of marriage to wearing miniskirts and smoking in the street. Many victims of sexual abuse and incest also found themselves in the care of the Board after being abandoned by their families.

Whilst its original function in the early twentieth century was to curb sex work across Spain, two years into Franco’s authoritarian dictatorship, the Board was remodeled to incarcerate any women who were thought to be “fallen or in danger of falling.”

In the Board’s institutions, inmates suffered physical and psychological abuse, were forced into unpaid labour, and had their newborn babies forcibly taken. 

The official pardoning, held in Madrid’s National Music Auditorium on March 20, was organized by a commission set up last year to mark five decades of Spanish democracy, alongside the Ministries of Equality, Justice, and Democratic Memory. 

This official recognition follows years of campaigning on the part of survivors, including Consuelo García del Cid, whose research and activism has spearheaded the fight to bring this once-hidden period of history to light. After writing Las desterradas hijas de Eva (The banished daughters of Eve) in 2012 about her experiences, she received death threats.

She hopes the Board, which she labels “a Spanish Gestapo for women,” will now be remembered by future generations for what it clearly was: “a hidden prison system for girls and young women who had committed no crime, yet found themselves trapped in a hell from which escape was extremely difficult.”

One of the most striking aspects of the history of the Board is its longevity. While Franco’s death in 1975 freed Spanish citizens from his dictatorial rule, thousands of women remained incarcerated and forgotten. It took a decade of Spanish democracy for the last reformatory to close its doors. 

“They forgot about us. When Spain was in a hurry to bring in the so-called Transition to Democracy, tens of thousands of girls remained locked up in a hidden penitentiary system, deprived of their rights…where self-harm and suicides went unheeded,” Consuelo told More to Her Story. 

The apology acknowledged that the Board remained in operation during the first decade of Spain’s transition to democracy.

“We cannot erase the cruelty you endured, and I want to express our shame that this institution continued to operate during the early years of democracy. The state failed you, but you have not failed democracy,” Spanish Justice Minister Felix Bolaños said via video during the ceremony. 

Freedom from the Francoist regime arrived late for these women, as did the state’s recognition of their victimhood. The women invited to last month’s ceremony received documents that recognize them as victims of Franco’s dictatorship, a symbolic act of reparations laid out in the Law of Democratic Memory. When the law was first enacted in 2022, the survivors of the Board were not included. 

Consuelo hopes that following the state’s apology, a fuller picture of the actions of the Board will now be painted. She demands that the accounts of the religious congregations that managed the reformatories be made public.

“The nuns themselves have admitted that they lived off our slave labor. We want to be included in the Memory Law and we demand an inquiry into all of the congregations that were a part of the Board,” she stressed. 

Marina Freixa Roca, whose mother, Mariona Roca Tort, was sent to a reformatory by her parents, said further investigations were needed. The pardon, she said, “may be important on an individual level, but it is insufficient collectively.”

“What we need is truth, justice, and reparations — and for that we need state-led investigative commissions.”

After learning of her mother’s experiences decades after her detention, Marina Freixa Roca went on to direct the Goya-nominated short film Els Buits. The title, which translates from Catalan as “The Gaps,” refers to the fragments missing from her mother’s memory of her time in a reformatory, where she was subjected to electric shocks in an attempt to “cure” her disobedience.

Marina hopes the pardon will shed light on this period that maintains “an almost ghostly presence nowadays in public spaces, collective memory, and many families.”

The state ceremony comes a year after survivors rejected an apology from the Conference of Religious Orders (Confer), a body representing the congregations which managed the reformatories. Consuelo was one of the women who interrupted the ceremony by calling for “truth, justice and reparations”. 

“We felt deceived. It was a half-hearted, insincere apology… no one is going to pull the wool over our eyes,” she noted. 

Confer’s apology may have recognized the role the Catholic church played in the Board’s repression, although it failed to “facilitate access to the documentation that would allow for a more precise understanding of what happened,” according to historian Carmen Guillén. 

Carmen, whose investigations into the reformatories culminated in the book Redemir y Adoctrinar (Redeem and Indoctrinate) published earlier this year, hopes that this official gesture will open the door to further research. 

While “the repression of women has tended to take a back seat in the history of Francoism,” she sees the tireless work of survivors and the recent progress in Spain’s policies on memory as signs that awareness of the Board will continue to grow. 

For survivors like Consuelo, this progress is imperative. 

“Some lost their lives trying to escape… they are the true victims, those who did not live to tell the tale,” she told More to Her Story. “We are survivors, and it is our moral duty to continue spreading awareness of a completely unknown story that I have been working on for 15 years of my life. It is a mission, as I see it, and they will bury me with it.”