The Spanish Falange was established in Madrid in November 1933 in an attempt to offer new solutions to the severe social and political problems which assailed Spanish society throughout the years of the Second Republic (1931-36) and to the perceived inability of the conservative Right effectively to face the growing threat to Spain’s religious and territorial unity. The Sección Femenina of the Falange (SF), which was founded in June 1934, existed for 43 years, reaching at its height a membership of over 680,000. Yet despite its impressive size and diverse activities, it received little attention from historians prior to the 1990s, partly due to a prevailing tendency of Spanish historiography to view women in right-wing entities as having little autonomy or independent authority. This article demonstrates that by using its relative organizational autonomy the SF was able to construct a new ‘discourse on femininity’ and to offer its members an identity which would take into account their self-perceptions as both women and Falangists in Francoist society. ‘Naturalizing’ and appropriating some so-called virile attributes such as heroism, forcefulness and intelligence served to establish a meaningful place for both the SF and its members on the public stage of Franco’s ‘New Spain’.

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The Sección Femenina de la FET was founded in 1934 as part of the Spanish Falange. Starting in April 1937 the SF functioned as the sole secular women’s organization of the Franco regime, employing a network of professional, provincial and local delegates throughout the country. Despite its adherence to a radical right-wing ideology and its functioning within an authoritarian regime membership within the SF offered many women a life of unusual public activism, both professionally and politically. The current paper offers a reading of the SF’s gendered discourse, which takes into consideration the relationship between both its progressive and conservative elements. My contention is that in the case of the SF one cannot talk of a model of ‘old-fashioned’ femininity, which was replaced over the years by a model of ‘modern’ femininity, but rather about modernist and conservative elements, which existed in the organizational rhetoric side by side from the beginning. Within this context the ‘modern’ elements were highly significant and their definition was more or less constant as long as the messages were aimed at a population of a specific socio-economic standing and education.

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