August 1, 2026

Given that most of the menfolk - and a fair amount of the women, too - were fighting in the Spanish Civil war of the mid 1930s, the education of the children was left in the hands of women whom hitherto might have been deemed unsuitable, but who now saw an opportunity to champion new doctrines of freedom, liberty and - perhaps more importantly - a right to an education. There was an education system before the war, but this was mainly run by men … read the rest.

Given that most of the menfolk - and a fair amount of the women, too - were fighting in the Spanish Civil war of the mid 1930s, the education of the children was left in the hands of women whom hitherto might have been deemed unsuitable, but who now saw an opportunity to champion new doctrines of freedom, liberty and - perhaps more importantly - a right to an education. There was an education system before the war, but this was mainly run by men in conjunction with the Catholic church so was maybe not the most open-minded when it came to empowering the females in the classrooms beyond what I suppose nowadays we would call "home economics", but despite the difficulties and often intransigences from their own side, these determined women set about empowering their own sex. Using a surprising amount of contemporary archive, press headlines, government documents and verbatim reports from contemporaneous diaries this sets out to give us an insight into just how difficult it was for these women during the war and nigh on impossible under Franco's government thereafter. Now there is a great deal of talking going on here, and the very generic appreciation of their efforts does skirt over what could reasonably be questioned as indoctrinating practices from teachers determined to impart their own social and political views on those studying, but at the same time it also spotlights the profound ridiculousness of sexual compartmentalising in the first place - a situation usual to Spain, but more unusual in other European nations where teaching was already carried out predominately and successfully by women. It's one of those documentaries that provides food for thought and ought to encourage further exploration into the still very active practice of the politicising of education.

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