Comradeship, Gender, and the Making of Anarchist Womanhood in Spain c.1923-1939

This thesis applies history of emotions methods to the study of Spanish anarchist history (c.1923-1939), to demonstrate for the first time that this anarchist movement cultivated mobilising and moral emotions, strove to re-shape affiliates’ enduring affective relationships, and reimagined the very meanings of certain emotions such as love. As a result, the thesis transforms historical understandings of how social movements construct comradeship: comradeship is not only a shared belief in an idea but an emotionally intimate affective bond. Anarchists in Spain theorised comradeship in discourses about ideal work, friendship, and love and constructed it processually in everyday encounters which altered their sense of identity. The thesis focuses on how constructions of comradeship touched women’s lives: it argues that anarchist womanhood—an intersection of gender identity with political identity—was ever-contested throughout the period such that women, especially, felt comradeship to be precarious. The thesis draws on oral histories, memoirs, advice columns, fiction, newspapers, and document archives to examine how and why women came to feel this precarity. It illustrates that: gender inequalities in activism work were emotionally destructive for the movement; friendships enabled women to persevere in the movement despite those inequalities; and these women supported themselves and each other to lead one of the movement’s greatest historical contributions—the transformation of love.