Abstract

Dr Roseanna Webster is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge with expertise in the history of modern Spain and its relationship with the wider world. She is currently completing a book that focuses on women’s activism during the last decades of Franco’s dictatorship and its aftermath. The book draws on photographs, archival sources and more than fifty oral history interviews with former activists, half of which she conducted herself. It captures the stories of working-class Spanish women who joined together to fight for urban change, labour rights and reproductive and sexual freedoms from the 1950s to the 1980s. In this talk Roseanna will discuss how Spanish women in marginal neighbourhoods transformed their surroundings from the middle to the late twentieth century, and how their self-perceptions changed in the process. These findings, she will argue, challenge widespread assumptions about both twentieth-century feminism and recent Spanish history.