The Representation of Republican Women during Spanish Civil War in Cinematography

During the Second Republic, with the desire to break patriarchal system, Spanish women were given new rights, which allow them not only accomplishing traditional roles, but also occupy positions in socio-political space, such as militia, volunteers trying to overcome the stereotype about war as male space. According to popular myth, after war, Francoists evaluated women’s participation in the war as immoral and sinful and propagated this view in public and media space, while in post-Franco period, predominantly in 1990-s, they were represented as heroines or as victims. The subject of this research is to analyze how these views reflected in cinema and investigate the development of images of «red» women in the cinematography of the 1970-2010s, showing different types of women as militia, anarchists, rear women; redefining new roles of women, motherhood, sexuality, relationships between domesticity and public sphere. I focus particularly on post-Franco cinema such as «Thirteen roses» (Martinez-Lazaro E., 2007), «Anarchists» (Aranda V., 1996). Analyzing the participation of women in the social revolution, I show how the Republican women portrayed them fighting a war against patriarchy.