Abstract

OSBORNE, Raquel. "Entonces ellas se convertían en rojas": desencuentros y amistades entre prostitutas y rojas en las cárceles franquistas. Mora (B. Aires) [online]. 2009, vol.15, n.2. ISSN 1853-001X.

The Spanish Civil War and Franco´s regime created a strong repressive machinery. Prisons were full of female political prisoners, as well as female ordinary prisoners, many of them prostitutes as a result of the war and post war great poverty. While the first ones suffered long sentences -if not death sentences-, prostitutes stayed several months at worst. Moreover, Franco never recognised to political prisoners their status as such. Thus, they strongly vindicated this condition. Whereas political prisoners had an iron organization to avoid repression, the staff of the prisons pushed for great confrontation between the two groups of female prisoners. If prisoners were divided the staff could better control them. For female political prisoners and in order not to be vulnerable in front of the authorities, sexuality became an insurmountable divide with respect to the ordinary female prisoners. The political prisoners employed hygienistic arguments related to the degeneration of prostitutes to inferiorize them. Francoist´s employed similar arguments to degrade political militancy. As a result, many prostitutes were scared to remain in prison close to the "red whores", as the female political prisoners were labeled. There was a liberal bourgeois republican prisoner, Carlota O´Neill, who experienced that situation. After close contact with female political prisoners, prostitutes changed their attitude towards them. In its turn, O´Neill wrote about them, bringing us a legacy, otherwise impossible to be known, about common and mostly illiterate women, in particular prostitutes, about their problems and the way they were treated in the early post war Franco´s era. The source of the information for this article comes from the testimonies -auto-biographies and novels- of political prisoners, with a special attention to the one by O´Neill, as well as from the reconstruction of the period made by historians.

Keywords : Franco´s prisons; Female political prisoners; Ordinary female prisoners; Sexuality.

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