Lucía Sánchez Saornil is writing poems and taking names
The place! Spain. The time! 1931. Telephone operator Lucía Sánchez Saornil (pronounced according to here like “sour-NEIL”) goes on strike against the telephone company! She is 36 years old. It’s her first political action.
Dissatisfied with the chauvinistic prejudices of fellow republicans, Lucía Sánchez Saornil joined with two compañeras, Mercedes Comaposada and Amparo Poch y Gascón, to form Mujeres Libres in 1936. (x)
What is Mujeres Libres? For those who didn’t take Spanish in school (are there any of you left??), it means Free Women. Its goal was to empower working class women and said that women’s liberation and a social revolution should be strived for concurrently, which is pretty much an early implementation of intersectional feminism! Neat! For anyone who DOESN’T study women’s rights history for fun, it feels like about 98% of women get into working for women’s rights because they were involved in another social justice movement and the men behaved like real assholes towards them.
Saornil (on the left) with Emma Goldman, woman on the right is unknown
At meetings of groups, like the FIJL, women were laughed at before they even spoke. (x)
Sánchez Saornil and the two other women who founded Mujeres Libres fought for the education of women. They disagreed with the anarchist movement’s idea that women’s equality would happen after social revolution (this was an anarcho-syndicalist group – yes, like in Monty Python) and said it needed to happen now. Legit. Mujeres Libres eventually had 20,000 affiliates.
She wrote poetry from at least her teen years until her death from cancer in 1970, and from 1937 to 1970, she lived with her partner, América Barroso. They made their home in France until the Germans invaded because as queer women, they could be sent to concentration camps. Lucia Sánchez Saornil saw a problem and did something about it. For which I greatly admire her.
If you’d like to read an article by Sánchez Saornil, you can do so here: The Question of Feminism