Voices of the Vanquished: Spanish Women of the Left between Franco and Hitler

FAIN: FA-232937-16

Gina Ann Herrmann
University of Oregon (Eugene, OR 97403-5219)

Archival research for a book-length study of Spanish Republican women who resisted European fascism from the 1930s through the 1960s. 
 

Voices of the Vanquished is a book about Spanish and Catalan women’s oral histories that recount and grapple with their participation in anti-fascist movements in Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), their fight against the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975), their involvement in the French Resistance during World War II (1940-45), and for some, their survival of Nazism. The first three chapters of the book are written. NEH support would allow me to complete the last two chapters, comprising a section which brings the story of these women to their work in the French Resistance, and finally to Germany, at Ravensbrück. My project contributes to four areas of inquiry: the history of anti-totalitarian women’s movements in Europe; gendered violence against women political prisoners; oral history; and studies of identity as developed in response to intensely lived ideological affiliations.