Introduction
‘. . . the first thing that YOU have to do, young lady, is emancipate yourself economically, so that hardship does not obligate you to live forever with a man whom you could stop loving’.Footnote 1 This was the advice imparted by the editorial team of the anarchist periodical, La Revista Blanca, to a girl who had written to their advice column expressing curiosity about ‘free love’. It encapsulated the gendered dynamics of the anarchist sexual revolution: in theory men and women were equally free to decide the lengths of sexual partnerships, unburdened by marriage, but in practice women's sexual freedom was conditional on the overhaul of the patriarchal distribution of economic power. This article frames the interwar Spanish anarchist press as a venue of political, medical, and cultural thought which straddled the complex intersection between sexual revolution and ‘women's emancipation’. It explores how the anarchists harnessed advice columns as radical spaces to empower, educate, and provide medical care to readers, as well as platforming their concerns. Advice columns offer us insight into the connections between private and public morality, as they were forums for the discussion and resolution of intimate problems.Footnote 2 Using La Revista Blanca and interwar Spanish anarchism as a case study, the article interrogates how political movements have historically constructed socio-cultural – including socio-sexual – moralities via interactive media.Footnote 3
The periodical press was the foremost means by which the interwar anarchists exchanged ideas.Footnote 4 Published between 1898 and 1905 and then again from 1923 to 1936, La Revista Blanca was a weekly long-form political journal costing twenty-five cents per issue.Footnote 5 No periodical could have legitimately claimed to represent all Spanish anarchists since the movement was such a broad church, and indeed La Revista Blanca's co-editors, the middle-class Montseny family, had some long-standing disputes with other anarchists.Footnote 6 But in spite of its modest readership of 12,000 in its second period of publication, La Revista Blanca's multifaceted engagement with the anarchist community and particular fixation on sexual morality warrants historical attention.Footnote 7 From 1933 to 1936 it became one of the few Spanish anarchist periodicals to include an advice column (Consultorio) manned by the editorial team and an anarchist doctor.Footnote 8 The editorial team comprised Juan Montseny (alias Federico Urales), his partner Teresa Mañé (alias Soledad Gustavo), and their daughter Federica Montseny. Between 1934 and 1935, Federica took over managerial duties from her father who had fallen ill.Footnote 9 The doctor recruited to assist with the advice column was one Javier Serrano Coello (calling himself ‘Doctor Klug’ – German for ‘Doctor Clever’). Based in Barcelona, he had previously written for other anarchist periodicals under the pseudonym Doctor Fantasma and gave lectures on sexology at several Catalan anarchist community centres (ateneos).Footnote 10 Through his efforts and those of the Montseny family, La Revista Blanca – especially in its advice columns – self-consciously intervened in the construction of a new anarchist socio-sexual morality, opposed to that of the Catholic and bourgeois Establishment.
Spanish anarchism encompassed a range of class perspectives, political programmes, and activist strategies. The largest interwar anarchist current was anarcho-syndicalism, organised through the unions and thus connected to the working classes. In February 1936 the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT) boasted a membership of approximately 850,000.Footnote 11 This extent of power, considered exceptional in the history of anarchism worldwide, was a contributing factor to the anarchists’ inclusion in Spain's Republican government in 1936 in the context of the Spanish Civil War.Footnote 12 Although numerically impressive, the CNT did not represent all Spanish anarchists.Footnote 13 Some – like the Montseny family running La Revista Blanca – interpreted the anarchist ideology of ‘libertarian communism’ differently and situated themselves apart from union activism, which they considered to be too connected to capitalist structures and exclusionary to those absent from workplaces; instead they prioritised prefigurative political lifestyles such as ‘free love’ or naturism.Footnote 14 Concurrently, there were tensions within the anarchist movement between those who sought to actively trigger revolution through local insurrections and those who prioritised strengthening the movement numerically or (in La Revista Blanca's case) through propagandistic and cultural efforts.Footnote 15 Although these tensions were certainly not unimportant, there were spaces where anarchist affiliates with conflicting views interacted.Footnote 16 Anarchist ateneos taught local people to read and write, hosted lectures, and offered young people a recreational space away from their parents.Footnote 17 There were also formal rationalist schools, run by anarchist teachers (including Antonia Maymón, one of La Revista Blanca's regular writers), and naturist excursion groups which provided trips to the countryside for city-dwelling anarchists (Federica Montseny joined one in the 1930s).Footnote 18 ‘Sedentary’ anarchists based in political hubs like Barcelona corresponded with itinerant anarchists (often in exile) which widened the transnational web of knowledge exchange beyond Spain's borders.Footnote 19 These anarchist networks not only called for social and economic revolution, but also politicised the personal.Footnote 20
There is therefore a rich corpus of historiography on Spanish anarchism adopting socio-cultural perspectives: histories of everyday life, of the family, and of sexuality.Footnote 21 Despite the centrality of women as objects of such studies, however, it proves difficult to draw out female voices as subjects. There were few female anarchists in leadership roles, few who wrote frequently in the periodical press, and few who belonged to the network of anarchist medics intervening in discourse on gender and sexuality.Footnote 22 For these reasons it is all the more remarkable that so many of the queries sent to La Revista Blanca's advice columns came from women. Either using their own names or employing pseudonyms such as ‘One of the Libertarian Youth’ or ‘A Young Woman’, they belonged to a range of age groups and wrote from all over Spain. The anarchists’ revolution in sexual morality would incorporate new conceptions of gender and new stances on reproductive autonomy, placing women's bodies at their centre. In writing this history it is thus imperative to access women's own voices.Footnote 23
One woman whose contribution to Spanish anarchism is exceptionally well-documented is Federica Montseny (1905–94), the daughter of La Revista Blanca's co-founders and one of its most prominent writers from the age of eighteen.Footnote 24 When the Second Republic (1931–6) replaced Primo de Rivera's dictatorship (1923–30), female suffrage was granted which made political participation more possible for women. In this context she began writing for Solidaridad Obrera, the organ of the CNT, and these connections led her to be chosen from among Spain's leading anarchists for the role of Minister of Health and Social Care in 1936. In her first year in office, she oversaw the legalisation of abortion and contraception, as well as promotion of sex education and research into sexual science.Footnote 25 She and La Revista Blanca had intervened into anarchist debates about gender and sexuality for years prior to these reforms, yet on these matters this anarchist periodical has attracted somewhat less historical attention than others such as Estudios or Iniciales which were more singularly committed to sex-reform content.
The present article platforms a much broader range of female perspectives than that accomplished by Antonio Prado in the one existing book dedicated to La Revista Blanca, published in 2011. Prado's book presents an excellent introduction to the periodical and its foremost contributors, and how they tackled topics pertaining to marriage and family, but it does not adequately problematise Spanish anarchist ‘feminism’ and its limitations or explore contributions by women other than Federica Montseny, her mother, and Antonia Maymón.Footnote 26 By narrowing in on women's submissions to La Revista Blanca's advice columns, the present article builds a more comprehensive, complex, and nuanced picture.Footnote 27
So, what was anarchist about the Spanish anarchists’ sexual revolution? Anarchism was in theory best-placed to achieve gender equality compared to other radical political movements since it called for the abolition of all hierarchies – not only capitalism but also patriarchy.Footnote 28 However, Spanish anarchism was plagued by contradictions when it came to women's emancipation and sexual morality. The achievement of greater freedoms by women often curtailed the corresponding freedoms of men, who were accustomed to enjoying the privileges that came with patriarchy. Martha Ackelsberg and Mary Nash have drawn attention to the 1936 formation of Mujeres Libres: an anarcho-feminist organisation and journal that grew out of disillusionment among anarchist women.Footnote 29 Sharif Gemie and Alejandro Lora Medina concur that ‘anarcho-sexism’ – whereby anarchism reproduced sexist structures and attitudes learned in mainstream society – plagued many anarchist spaces.Footnote 30 These included political meetings and communes, where women were overlooked intellectually, relegated to auxiliary roles, and sexually exploited under the guise of ‘free love’. However, investigating self-defined ‘feminist’ organisations cannot tell us all we need to know about anarchism's relationship to ‘women's emancipation’ in Spain. Mujeres Libres offers limited insight into how anarchists conceived of gender relations, sexual morality, and bodily autonomy ahead of the 1936 sex reforms because their periodical never discussed contraception or abortion and, in any case, it was founded shortly before the reforms happened.Footnote 31 Moreover, dividing the cause by splitting off into a separate ‘women's’ movement was by no means uncontroversial; it was criticised by many, not least by Federica Montseny.Footnote 32 This article, by drawing on La Revista Blanca, instead sheds light on the evolution of gender and sexuality discourse in a mixed-gender, non-feminist space. There, tension between the core, diametric anarchist tenets of individual, libertarian autonomy and collective, social struggle provoked discord between revolutionary idealism and lived experience.
In addition, La Revista Blanca's sexual revolution was made distinctively anarchist by the way it appropriated contemporary scientific research. As veneration of science was central to how they contested and reconceived the ‘natural’ body and its evolution, anarchist discourse was intimately connected with interwar Western psychological, medical, and sexological currents.Footnote 33 The anarchist press discussed not only the works of anarchist-sympathising doctors such as Javier Serrano Coello, Félix Martí Ibáñez or Isaac Puente, but also those of non-anarchists like Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, Charles Darwin, and Spain's Gregorio Marañón.Footnote 34 Interwar anarchist conceptions of gender and inheritance were grounded in eugenic thought, albeit engineered to serve the political ends of the revolution rather than those of other contemporary political causes. As Jiménez-Lucena and Molero-Mesa have noted, the need to be ‘born well’ and ‘live well’ in a eugenic sense – to maximise the ‘quality’ of the human population – was central to the anarchists’ reasoning for focusing so much on sexuality as an integral part of the social revolution.Footnote 35 Degenerationist panic about declining male virility and neo-Lamarckian theories of inheritance were shared across the Western political spectrum, but the Spanish anarchists reconceptualised the eugenic ‘solution’ to make it compatible with anti-authoritarian libertarianism.Footnote 36 Indeed, Campbell's recent survey of scholarship on interwar eugenics highlights that gender and race, not the political left or right, were what defined eugenics in this period.Footnote 37 The Spanish anarchists integrated eugenics with neo-Malthusianism – a related intellectual current derived from the work of British economist and demographer Thomas Malthus which encouraged contraception to prevent impoverishment due to family growth and to limit population size in line with global resources.Footnote 38 Although elsewhere eugenics was pronatalist, in Spain many anarchists – who preferred voluntary birth control over state-led eugenic programmes – reconciled eugenic discourse on (un)desirable inherited characteristics with neo-Malthusian birth control.Footnote 39 They contended that children conceived deliberately by ‘healthy’ parents in loving relationships would be more ‘advanced’ than those conceived accidentally or by ‘defective’ or ‘unhealthy’ parents. To control biological heredity was to control the direction of the future, extending beyond mere Marxist economic change to encompass all aspects of life.Footnote 40 This fixation on evolutionary progress placed paradoxical limits on the sexual permissiveness of Spanish anarchism.
Motivated by the attitudes of the Montseny family and Doctor Klug, three central objectives were pursued in the periodical's advice columns: 1 – to sexually empower and raise the moral consciences of readers; 2 – to provide medical care to those who felt let down by Establishment medicine, could not afford ordinary treatment, or sought anonymity; 3 – to educate readers about the latest research into gender, sexuality, birth control and eugenics, paying particular attention to instilling good habits in young people. The legislative overhaul of reproductive rights and principles achieved under Federica Montseny's Ministry of Health and Social Care and its anarchist advisors could not have occurred without a more fundamental revolution in attitudes towards sexuality. La Revista Blanca's advice columns stand out as a remarkable point of interaction between influential anarchist figures and grassroots affiliates (from a range of genders, social classes, and generations), not to mention the fact that they were a space where Montseny experienced her initiation into politics.
Sexual empowerment and the reframing of moral consciences would, from an anarchist perspective, challenge the exploitative grip that the Church held over popular mentalities. The importance of pudor (shame or modesty) to the normative Spanish experience of womanhood, in particular, was testament to this.Footnote 41 A future archbishop, Isidoro Gomá y Tomás, wrote in a 1928 treatise that ‘the woman, more than the man, perhaps because she was more sinful than the man, feels in her body the phenomenon of embarrassment and the law of natural shame’.Footnote 42 It was common in Spanish households for women's bodies to be discursively constructed as asexual and innocent; lived experiences like sexual pleasure were not appropriate topics for discussion in couples or families as they could imply unnatural desires or morally inadmissible values.Footnote 43 Spanish anarchism – being a movement that drew inspiration from science and the ‘natural’ – offered a platform for the dismantling of ‘irrational’ taboos, especially those attributed to the Church, and so La Revista Blanca harnessed its advice columns to break these silences surrounding sexuality and love. By separating procreative sex from recreational sex, anarchist morality elevated pleasure as a self-empowering experience for women and men. In addition, they sought to instil mental fortitude in their followers – from casting off shame around their bodies to overcoming ‘unhealthy’ vices like masturbation.
The provision of medical care in La Revista Blanca was to a large extent shaped by the doctor whom the editorial team employed. Besides his work at the periodical, Javier Serrano Coello (Doctor Klug) was well-known for his advocacy around sex education, his treatment of poor patients for free, and his involvement in the Social Services Department of the Catalan Generalitat during the Spanish Civil War.Footnote 44 Motivated by concern over accessibility of care, Doctor Klug's treatments in La Revista Blanca were often holistic and lifestyle-based, and only used ingredients purchasable cheaply in chemists to avoid the fees charged by doctors and pharmacists.Footnote 45 La Revista Blanca received a large quantity of anonymous submissions, affording additional privacy to discuss intimate symptoms. It is also notable that several enquirers had already visited medical professionals but had either been misdiagnosed or left uncured. That La Revista Blanca provided an alternative to mainstream medical institutions through recruiting Doctor Klug reflected their anti-authoritarian ethos.
Both inside and outside anarchist circles, interwar Europe saw doctor-led campaigns advocating for sex education in the home and in schools.Footnote 46 These attitudes were connected to broader social hygienic discourses, concerned with the size and ‘quality’ of populations perceived to be undergoing decline and degeneration.Footnote 47 Human degeneration was blamed on the corruption of morality and corporeal decline, both of which were also concerns of ‘bourgeois’ eugenicists.Footnote 48 The roots of these discourses differed between nations and societies: in Spain, they were connected to a decline in natality and the crisis of national identity provoked by the loss of its last colonies in 1898.Footnote 49 Although most overt eugenic language disappeared from La Revista Blanca by the 1930s, as Hitler's Germany illustrated a catastrophic potential outcome, its ambition to physically and morally perfect the body through the improvement of reproductive health would endure. La Revista Blanca's advice columns made evident the gaps in popular knowledge surrounding bodies and sexuality. As a high proportion of Spain's population were illiterate, and Catholic and bourgeois morality limited the openness with which such matters could be discussed, there persisted many taboos, rumours, and ill-informed practices.Footnote 50 Doctor Klug and the editorial team sought to correct this in the advice columns by engaging directly with readers in a pedagogical capacity underpinned by eugenic motivations. In this sense, the advice columns of periodicals such as La Revista Blanca fitted into the anarchists’ broader pedagogical project to provide rationalist (empirical, positivist, and non-religious) education to the masses – boys and girls, men and women – which concurrently took place in in-person spaces such as the libertarian ateneos.Footnote 51
La Revista Blanca's new socio-sexual morality centred on gendered bodies, platformed discussion of birth control, and advocated ‘free love’; the article will elaborate on each of those themes in turn. It will illustrate that the relationship between sexual revolution and ‘women's emancipation’ in the periodical was complex and replete with contradictions, and that as such it spoke to wider tensions in thought and praxis across early twentieth-century anarchism globally. In anarchism, the emancipation of one individual was considered possible only alongside the emancipation of all.Footnote 52 In terms of gender and sexuality, this principle of shared struggle was what many anarchists, including Federica Montseny, called ‘humanism’ – in place of ‘feminism’.Footnote 53 When it came to sexual revolution, there was consequently tension in the discourse of the anarchist press between the individual, libertarian freedom from patriarchal oppression that women aspired to, and the expectation to connect that freedom to a collective, unified, genderless struggle for emancipation and evolutionary progress.Footnote 54 This tension shaped how La Revista Blanca's editorial team and Doctor Klug handled their objectives of empowerment, medical care, and sex education.
Gendered Bodies
Interwar medical discourse was grounded in what has since been termed ‘compulsory heterosexuality’: male-female attraction was considered the human default state, so deviation from cisgender externalisation or heterosexual orientation was treated as a correctable social and biological abnormality.Footnote 55 This reductive ‘imaginary logic’ demanded that identification and desire be mutually exclusive, even though this unrealistically implied that there was only one type of masculinity and one type of femininity.Footnote 56 In the interwar period, people were categorised into ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ to protect the former from contamination by the latter.Footnote 57 Gregorio Marañón, whose research dominated interwar sexual science in Spain, pathologized sexual deviance by claiming that biological traits in ‘normal’ humans conditioned the ‘correct’ gendered behaviours for one's sex.Footnote 58 Of course, the existence of intersexuality and more recent advances in gender theory illustrate that ‘sex’ is actually an ideal construction never able to fully materialise no matter how many regulatory norms are put in place by society.Footnote 59 Even though by the late 1920s some research found ‘female’ hormones in the endocrine systems of people with ‘male’ gonads and vice versa (illustrating that ‘sex’ was a continuum), this did little to ease popular concerns about gender inversion or sexual deviance.Footnote 60
Influenced by this binary definition of gender and sex, La Revista Blanca's advice columns addressed the negative stereotyping of women raised in several submissions. The editorial team, in line with many interwar Spanish feminists, asserted that women and men were biologically distinct, with different capabilities, though complementary and equally valuable.Footnote 61 This reflected that by the interwar period much of the anthropological research belittling women's natural intelligence had been de-bunked, although the idea that women were more emotional and less rational than men endured.Footnote 62 When asked, ‘why is the female gender weaker than the masculine one?’, they pointed out that rural-dwelling women were often physically stronger than city-dwelling men, and contended that women's mental capacity was only lesser than men's because the former were denied a decent education.Footnote 63 Yet when asked, ‘are women naturally more sensitive than men?’, they replied, ‘by nature . . . women feel sensations and emotions more strongly than men’.Footnote 64 Federica Montseny did not consider women inferior to men, though; she asserted that she was ‘more inclined to see superiority in women than in men, because they love more and are more emotive’.Footnote 65 In these interactions with readers, the Montseny family did not accept that women were innately less strong or talented than men, but ultimately fell back on the socio-scientific orthodoxy that men and women's social values were connected to their ‘biological’ characteristics.Footnote 66 As a result, the periodical's empowerment of men and women was deeply gendered.
Pride in one's ‘natural’ male or female body was paramount in La Revista Blanca's consciousness-raising efforts. To this end, nudism was considered by its anarchist practitioners to challenge the revulsion towards unclothedness perpetuated by the Church, and to be an egalitarian form of expression because clothing – a visual indication of social stratification – was cast aside.Footnote 67 Nudists across Europe, anarchist and non-anarchist alike, saw connection to one's own body as something genuine in an increasingly artificial world.Footnote 68 Although the editorial team expressed confidence in nudism's social value when asked about it in the advice column, this did not prompt them to foment what we would now call ‘body-positivity’.Footnote 69 Rising public discussion of physical fitness and fashion at the turn of the century widened the gap between socially legitimate female bodies and real female bodies, leaving many women feeling ‘dis-embodied’ – unable to attain the corporeal perfection that society expected them to.Footnote 70 La Revista Blanca's exacerbation of this problem likely contributed to the limited take-up of nudist practices.Footnote 71 One advice column response discussing controversially short skirts concluded they were only recommendable to women with ‘well-toned’ legs, and when asked about whether hats were unhygienic the answer was that regardless of hygiene they were a good option for women who unattractively cut their hair short.Footnote 72 They also chose to print a submission which seemingly advocated that women undergo cosmetic procedures to please their partners: ‘I have a girlfriend – certainly very pretty – but made ugly by the hair on her face. What remedy is there to remove it?’Footnote 73 Western thought traditionally established a binary between nakedness, associated with embarrassment, and nudity, connoting artistic beauty.Footnote 74 La Revista Blanca aspired to replace the former mentality with the latter, but was restrictively grounded in a eugenic worldview that subjectively considered some bodies to be closer to perfection than others.
By extension, Federica Montseny found the label ‘feminism’ to be problematic as it was associated with the Western ‘modern woman’ trope.Footnote 75 This was characterised by scandalous fashion, flirtatious dances and other rejections of feminine domesticity and docility that implied a desire to enjoy the same lifestyles as men.Footnote 76 In a 1924 article Montseny had employed sarcasm to convince readers that modern ‘feminist’ causes were laughably trivial: in response to a US company granting women the right to wear trousers at work, she quipped, ‘we, upon hearing the news, have become filled with immense jubilation, thinking about such a transcendental and revolutionary triumph’.Footnote 77 García-Maroto claims that anarchists disregarded these small feminist triumphs because they took ‘women's emancipation’ too seriously.Footnote 78 But this overlooks the fact that androgynous gender-externalisations like wearing trousers also challenged La Revista Blanca's binary ideal of femininity.Footnote 79 Montseny's management of La Revista Blanca's advice columns a decade later continued to reflect her fundamental belief that gender deviance, sartorial and otherwise, ran contrary to the eugenic aims of the anarchist movement and therefore contravened the cause of ‘women's emancipation’.
This conditional empowerment of gendered bodies certainly injected tension into discussions of sexuality and childbearing. However, Doctor Klug was careful to avoid its contamination of discourse surrounding embodied traumas, such as miscarriage and menstrual complications, which he instead elevated as topics that warranted better public awareness and sympathetic medical care. Identifying mentions of miscarriage within La Revista Blanca's advice columns is tricky as the noun ‘aborto’ in Spanish can signify either miscarriage or abortion, only distinguishable by interpreting context, and it is sometimes impossible to tell which is referred to.Footnote 80 Advice around those two female experiences therefore often overlapped, especially given that many of the after-effects on women's bodies were similar. On one hand, the fact that abortions could be misinterpreted as miscarriages might have helped protect women and practitioners from legal confrontation, as until 1936 abortion was punishable by indefinite incarceration; on the other hand, the fact that miscarriages could be misinterpreted as abortions likely reinforced the stigmatisation of women who ‘lost’ their unborn children as Catholic morality viewed abortion as homicide.Footnote 81 In this context, the frequent mention of miscarriage in the advice columns helped to validate and garner sympathy for this embodied trauma.
The queries on this topic tended to be asked anonymously, and usually asked for medical advice. One wrote in about a friend who after a miscarriage was experiencing haemorrhages two or three times a month, another described a woman feeling physically weak after a miscarriage, and a third reported that a friend had struggled to get pregnant again after miscarrying and that doctors had tried (and failed) to treat her with painful electric shocks on her ovaries.Footnote 82 Doctor Klug advised the women in question to take ‘reconstitution’ medicines or warm baths, or provided medicinal recipes that the women could assemble themselves.Footnote 83 He also debunked some myths surrounding the causes of miscarriages, overturning any agnotological ignorance surrounding female physiology. One reader asked if their sister-in-law's miscarriage might have been caused by eating ice cream or using machines; Doctor Klug suggested that the machine, not the ice cream, might have been a valid cause but also that syphilis was a possibility.Footnote 84 To other readers, he explained that many illnesses aside from venereal disease could provoke miscarriages, which contributed to disassociating miscarriage from dirtiness or irresponsibility.Footnote 85 In responding to a more general question about the relative responsibility of men and women in fertility, Doctor Klug emphasised that ‘to blame does not seem fair to me, because no one is to blame for their nature nor their health’.Footnote 86 All these sympathetic responses from Doctor Klug normalised and destigmatised female bodily dysfunctionality, even though anarchist and mainstream society alike hoped women would be perfect child-bearers.Footnote 87
Another theme which La Revista Blanca destigmatised was menstruation; between 1934 and 1936 almost every issue included at least one advice column entry relating to it. To some extent, La Revista Blanca's choice to publish the queries of dozens of women surrounding menstruation stemmed from eugenic concerns: if a woman menstruated healthily, she was more likely to have frequent and healthy pregnancies. Aside from this motive, though, the periodical gave insight into the workings of the menstrual cycle, only just becoming understood in scientific research, and offered women reassurance that any anxieties or difficulties they faced relating to this ‘private’ embodied experience were shared by many others. The periodical gave women medical advice and tackled rumours that had long stigmatised them – for instance that washing while on one's period was dangerous or that menstruating women had sinister supernatural power.Footnote 88 By platforming this topic, Doctor Klug not only dismantled misinformation but also once again normalised bodily dysfunctionality.
Early on, Doctor Klug explained the biological process of the menstrual cycle to the extent that it was known by scientists at the time. Experiments on mice to determine the role of hormones in menstruation only began in the 1920s so this was a brand new field.Footnote 89 He emphasised that the day when eggs are released into the uterus is variable, which offered women insight into the relative normalcy of their own experiences.Footnote 90 Several women wrote in after experiencing multiple bleeds per month, to which Doctor Klug typically advised taking either the synthetic ‘ovarian hormone’ Sistomensina or the ‘thyroid hormone’ Tiroidina or both.Footnote 91 Other women's queries surrounded the absence of menstruation: that their period was delayed in commencing, or that it had ceased entirely.Footnote 92 Acute period pain also featured frequently in these conversations between anarchist women and Doctor Klug, so the burden of bodily trauma was shared and validated. Female readers wrote in to describe symptoms which in many cases were very severe, including cramps, changes in appetite, inexplicable crying, breast pain, backaches, headaches, vomiting, and even fainting.Footnote 93 Often these women emphasised that they were otherwise healthy; many were in their late teens or early twenties, and some had enjoyed successful pregnancies in the past. In a 1934 advice column response to a question about the variability of menstrual cycles between women, Doctor Klug lamented: ‘research into this sexual topic is very unadvanced due to difficulties imposed by governments and bourgeois morality’.Footnote 94 In other words, lack of sponsorship of research into menstruation left doctors like him unable to deliver well-informed advice. Non-knowledge surrounding menstruation was socially, politically, and culturally constructed, as its rectification would not directly benefit men.Footnote 95
La Revista Blanca's inclusion of menstruation in published advice column exchanges was radically subversive. As Kate Lister has explained, patriarchal societies consider menstruation to be proof of women's biological function and their inherent irrationality that necessitates total supervision from men.Footnote 96 Thus, La Revista Blanca's tackling of shame and taboos pertaining to this female embodied experience not only afforded it the medical attention it had long lacked, but also contributed to restoring dignity to female bodies and proving their capacity for autonomy. So long as they conformed to binary gender expression, male and female bodies were empowered, dignified, treated medically, and better understood as a result of advice column exchanges between anarchists. Here lay the tension between the anarchist individual and society: if one conformed, one was granted freedom.
Maternity and Birth Control
Central to the struggle for female bodily autonomy, which many anarchists considered an essential facet of sexual revolution, was a couple's ability to control when they conceived. La Revista Blanca exalted the beauty and social value of raising a child, while at the same time contraception and abortion were discussed openly in pedagogical and medical exchanges. The periodical highlighted women's maternal duty as the creators of the next generation, and emphasised women's biologically ‘natural’ maternal instinct.Footnote 97 This was far from unique; even anarcho-feminists in Mujeres Libres elevated childcare as women's most important role in life.Footnote 98 The anarchist press aspired to prepare readers for post-revolutionary society, which meant guiding the creation of future generations. At the same time, though, many anarchists also believed that childbearing should happen deliberately and on the mother's terms. Famously Federica Montseny proclaimed in a 1927 article, ‘A woman without children is a tree without fruit’; however, she then continued by clarifying, ‘The question lies in knowing how to be a mother and to do so consciously and voluntarily’.Footnote 99 La Revista Blanca's advice columns raised readers’ awareness of methods to control conception. Doctor Klug and the editorial team, adhering to libertarian principles, trod a fine line between letting couples do whatever suited them and suggesting why certain practices, eugenically speaking, were not in the interests of society as a whole.
Sex education was central to this ‘conscious maternity’. However, although preventing venereal disease was considered essential, contraception for the purpose of preventing pregnancy was more controversial among anarchists.Footnote 100 Federica Montseny and many others were sceptical of ‘unnatural’ methods involving chemicals and insertion of foreign objects, so instead trusted in menstrual tracking. This strategy was thought to have been perfected by Austrian doctor Hermann Knaus in 1928, built on the belief that women are only fertile for a very small window each month.Footnote 101 This widespread distrust in contraceptives was more complex than just a consequence of patriarchy, though. In interwar Spain contraceptives were hard to access, in some cases difficult to use, and their promotion attracted legal attention.Footnote 102 Moreover, before the advent of hormonal contraception these methods carried personal risks; a woman might avoid contraceptive vaginal irrigations because she feared infection, not because she did not seek bodily autonomy. On the other hand, there had been intellectual interest in sexual science in Spain throughout the early twentieth century, shown by the establishment of Spain's first family planning clinic in 1906 in Barcelona and the Institute of Social Medicine in Madrid in 1919.Footnote 103 Anarchist birth control advocates like Doctor Isaac Puente argued that the medical and legal risks of contraceptives were offset by their diminishing of complications, like miscarriages or death in childbirth, that correlated to the number of pregnancies a woman endured.Footnote 104 Once the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera was replaced by the Second Republic in 1931, sex-reform legislation (including contraception provision) became a real possibility so discussion of this matter – within and without the anarchist movement – gained momentum.Footnote 105
Despite the Montseny family's personal views on the matter, they did publish a large number of questions about contraceptives in La Revista Blanca's advice columns for Doctor Klug to answer. In contravention of Mary Nash's claim that early-twentieth-century Spanish women – including anarchist women – did not publicly discuss contraception, in La Revista Blanca a mixture of men, women, and anonymous contributors asked questions on this theme, typically upon commencing their first sexual relationships.Footnote 106 Doctor Klug gave detailed advice. For example, when asked about the risks of the ‘Fermita’ pessary, he emphasised that it must only be worn during intercourse and upon removal the woman must rinse herself with a vaginal irrigation of water and vinegar or boric acid.Footnote 107 This method was dangerous; we now know that vaginal douching can cause infections and has been linked to cancer.Footnote 108 More typically, when asked for a general recommendation of a contraceptive method he suggested condoms, irrigations of lemon or vinegar, or the medication ‘Blenocol Curi’.Footnote 109 Latex condoms, cheaper and much more comfortable than their rubber predecessors, had been invented in the 1920s.Footnote 110 Doctor Klug often emphasised contraception's fallibility, and thus he typically advised readers to use two methods at once.Footnote 111 He also once recommended the illustrated safe-sex manual L'Education Sexuelle by French anarchist Jean Marestan, and the work of Swiss Auguste Forel, both of whom were involved in networks which debated eugenics and neo-Malthusianism.Footnote 112 That being said, Doctor Klug appeared reluctant to endorse overdependence on contraceptives and only enthusiastically encouraged their use on one occasion: when a reader described his partner's worries about passing on an inherited illness.Footnote 113 This suggested that he had a more eugenic view of contraception than a neo-Malthusian one – that a couple's decision to not conceive should be based on social utility rather than free will. The scale of real-world contraceptive use among anarchists is disputed by historians: García-Maroto claims that their use was widespread, whereas Nash suggests that there were too many barriers preventing working-class access to them.Footnote 114 La Revista Blanca's advice columns, though they cannot offer an answer, do indicate that at the very least there was curiosity around contraception and willingness on the part of anarchist medical experts to provide birth control advice. Engaging anonymously with the anarchist press in this way allowed men and women to become educated discreetly about safe sex.
Discretion through anonymity was also used in enquiries pertaining to abortion, typically asking for abortifacient recommendations. Although we cannot be sure, it would make sense that many of these came from the pregnant women themselves.Footnote 115 In a message directed to those women, Doctor Klug emphasised that ‘abortion is a consequence of lack of care in avoiding fertilisation and it is dangerous’, concluding ‘one should not attempt it’.Footnote 116 Notably, though, he used the reflexive form of the verb ‘attempt’, which indicated that he took issue particularly with abortions which were self-inflicted, that is to say, homemade abortifacients. Abortions were illegal, which forced them to be performed clandestinely, but this should not be taken to signify that all possible abortion procedures in the interwar period were dangerous. In a 1934 answer, Doctor Serrano (writing under his real name this once) warned against home remedies used to induce abortion, such as intrauterine irrigations of soapy water or the insertion of a probe into the uterus, as they frequently caused haemorrhages or infections which could become fatal.Footnote 117 However, when asked whether medically safe abortion was possible, he explained that doctors could perform abortions via a ten-minute, ‘almost painless’ operation after dilution of the cervix, ‘without losing a drop of blood and without danger’.Footnote 118 Some doctors already used this technique in extreme circumstances.Footnote 119 He concluded that personally he disagreed with abortion because with proper use of multiple contraceptives it was unnecessary.Footnote 120 Nonetheless, in response to a question about the dangers of abortions, Doctor Klug used the unemotional medicalised terms ‘embryo’ and ‘foetus’ rather than ‘baby’ or ‘child’, which suggested that he was comfortable raising awareness of safe abortions in his professional capacity.Footnote 121 Other anarchist doctors, like Isaac Puente, much more firmly defended abortion as a tool for women to control their own bodies, though he too warned against unsafe methods.Footnote 122 Doctor Klug evidently took issue not with abortion itself but with its widespread practice in conditions lacking medical knowledge or hygiene. These exchanges in the advice columns helped those considering the possibility of legalising abortion to envision what medically regulated, hygienic, safe procedures could and should look like, and challenged those who claimed that abortion always harmed women.
However, even as discussions of contraceptives and abortion gained momentum in La Revista Blanca's advice columns right up until 1936, they continued to be published alongside consciousness-raising and pedagogy that exalted parenthood and promoted lifestyle changes with childbearing in mind. Elsewhere in the magazine's pages there were, for example, prints of paintings with captions such as ‘What profound and moving beauty this painting has, in which the sensitivity of the mother and the artist has expressed the happiness of young and healthy maternity!’Footnote 123 Furthermore, Doctor Klug's insistence about the virtues of ‘naturist’ practices such as vegetarianism stemmed from his belief, shared by likeminded anarchists such as Antonia Maymón, that they aided reproductive health as well as strengthening the genetic traits of future generations.Footnote 124 As Maymón asserted in a 1925 article, ‘the anarchist must evolve in a progressive sense, because a healthy organism works more and better towards human perfection and because, upon bestowing upon his descendants a deteriorated organism, he obstructs the progressive march of humankind’.Footnote 125 In anarcho-naturism, one's entire lifestyle had to be geared towards the perfection of one's future children. The implications of this worldview were most blatant in La Revista Blanca's advice surrounding love and relationships.
The Limits of ‘Free Love’
Birth control through accessible contraception and safe, legal abortion would enable the anarchist sexual revolution's central tenet to take shape: the separation of recreational sex from reproductive sex. As a 1936 article remarked: ‘Perhaps we are living through one of the most intimate phases of the human revolution: the revolution of sex. The conversion of coitus into a pleasure for free people and not into an intercourse that's often mechanical, indifferent and even painful’.Footnote 126 In this revolution, the formation of sexual partnerships would be overhauled too: La Revista Blanca was one of many anarchist publications that imagined a future society built on ‘free love’.
In its advice columns, Doctor Klug and the editorial team advocated for ‘free unions’ to replace marriages. These involved ceremonies akin to weddings except secular, not based on material wealth, and without any legal expectation to keep one's vows for life.Footnote 127 Although divorce was legalised in Spain in 1932, ‘free unions’ were presented as a means to avoid marriage in the first place.Footnote 128 This was ‘not only to dispense with the judge and the priest’, in line with their antiauthoritarian principles, but because they believed firmly that ‘one falls in love multiple times’ in life, and therefore committing to only one relationship was senseless.Footnote 129 The editorial team were aware that at present economic uncertainty – disproportionately felt by women – made living in such freedom difficult, but promised this issue would be resolved in the post-revolutionary anarchist society.Footnote 130 Men were often reminded of this gendered burden: when a man wrote that he regretted marrying his wife, he was urged to ‘bear in mind that poor women do not receive social assistance or sufficient economic means to be able to do the same things as men. It's not acceptable to take advantage of them!’Footnote 131 Pluralidad amorosa (having more than one monogamous relationship in one's lifetime) was advocated in other anarchist periodicals too, by individuals like Frenchman Han Ryner and Brazilian María Lacerda de Moura.Footnote 132 Federica Montseny herself entered into a ‘free union’ in 1930 with the anarchist Germinal Esgleas, with whom she would raise three children.Footnote 133 ‘Free love’ in theory offered individuals the liberty to enjoy sexual partnerships with whomever they chose, for however long they saw fit.
However, despite this emphasis on individual freedom, anarchist socio-sexual morality demanded that these relationships be heterosexual.Footnote 134 Machismo, rule-following ingrained in local Catholic culture, and the ‘menace of homoeroticism’ prevented anarchist men from comfortably subverting gender norms.Footnote 135 This was all the more heightened by the ‘cult of virility’ pervading Europe in the early twentieth century – a leading motivator of eugenics.Footnote 136 Words like ‘invert’ were used by anarchists to derogatorily label their opponents like clergymen or politicians, because it insinuated their poor virility and consequent weak masculinity.Footnote 137 For these reasons, Enrique Álvarez regards interwar Spanish anarchism as homophobic, arguing convincingly that although the term is anachronistic it is important to recognise the role of homophobic masculinity in anarchists’ lived experiences.Footnote 138 Homophobia was expressed explicitly on several occasions in La Revista Blanca's advice columns. Summarising the editorial team's views, an advice column response in 1935 read: ‘To us in matters of love and sexual relationships between men and women nothing surprises or shocks us. The only thing that we condemn, because it disgusts us, is sexual behaviour between two men or two women’.Footnote 139 Same-sex attraction between women, just like that between men, was medicalised and pathologised. Two months later, a male anarchist wrote in asking if a lesbian woman could love men after having loved women, to which Doctor Klug replied that it is only possible ‘when the sickness is not from birth, that is to say when it is not a sickness but a vice’.Footnote 140 When a woman wrote in the same year to ask what the editors thought of a young woman ‘being madly in love with another woman’, they replied that: ‘We would consider her to be sick, that she should undergo treatment, to normalise the function of her sexual organs, so that her feelings wouldn't be directed against nature’.Footnote 141 These attitudes reflected turn-of-the-century sexological research from Europe and the United States which alleged that homosexuality was an atavism, a rare evolutionary error whereby gender differentiation had not been fully achieved in an individual.Footnote 142
Although restoring dignity and autonomy to women was considered necessary in the realms of sex and pleasure, Spain's anarchists nonetheless delineated clear circumstances in which sexual pleasure was morally and hygienically acceptable. Female sex workers, in particular, continued to be associated with dirtiness and disease, even though they were simultaneously pitied by the anarchists as the ultimate representatives of social victimhood and exploitation.Footnote 143 In La Revista Blanca's advice columns, the editorial team urged men not to visit sex workers. On multiple occasions male readers wrote in seeking advice about their sexual dilemmas: they struggled to find girlfriends, but also felt morally uncomfortable about visiting brothels.Footnote 144 The replies emphasised that visiting sex workers contributed to social injustice and reassured the men that they would find love eventually.Footnote 145 They believed that ‘resorting to prostitution is just as degrading to the man as it is to the woman’.Footnote 146 The association between sex work and indignity in the interwar period did not only pertain to venereal disease but also to spermatorrhea: a (now disproven) illness characterised by excessive loss of semen.Footnote 147 Seminal loss had been a key concern of doctors in Europe and the United States since the nineteenth century; some even invented special devices that they claimed would inhibit ‘nocturnal emissions’.Footnote 148 Men who engaged in sexual intercourse too often and with too many women, as well as those who masturbated, were thought likely to fall prey to this illness, which could apparently cause symptoms such as erectile dysfunction, infertility, and decline in intelligence.Footnote 149 Particularly worrying to many early twentieth century Spanish doctors was the seemingly ‘psychic’ nature of this illness, which connected it to a more fundamental loss of masculinity in the patient.Footnote 150 Many men sought medical advice from Doctor Klug through La Revista Blanca to treat their spermatorrhea.Footnote 151 They were told that by swearing off masturbation and visits to sex workers and seeking stable relationships, they could avoid this medical affliction.Footnote 152 The advice columns of La Revista Blanca evidently did not advocate for total sexual freedom, but for a specific model of sexual morality that aspired to safeguard the reproductive health of all anarchists. The advice columns did not berate sex workers for their loss of virginity because many of La Revista Blanca's writers saw ‘virginity’ as an oppressive, unnatural construct invented by the Catholic Church.Footnote 153 Indeed, the editorial team emphasised in one advice column response that former sex workers should be free to shake off that stigma once they walked away from the profession (contrary to prevailing social attitudes at the time).Footnote 154 However, reconception of sex work as a legitimate, dignified profession was never an option, because the apparent risk it posed to fertility via venereal disease or spermatorrhea was too great.
Evidently, the relationship advice provided by La Revista Blanca's advice columns placed myriad limits on the sexual ‘freedom’ promised by the anarchist revolution and its prefigurative practices. Alejandro Lora Medina has accordingly argued that, in reality, very little change in mentalities was aspired to, let alone achieved, in their movement.Footnote 155 Indeed, Mujeres Libres's Lucía Sánchez Saornil criticised ‘free unions’, conducted under the auspices of trade unions, for merely replacing the Church and state with a new form of authority that held couples to account.Footnote 156 However, at the same time as delineating the limits of ‘free love’ in practice, La Revista Blanca did also work towards notable mentality shifts. As this article has illustrated, it conversed directly with readers in its advice columns to raise awareness of gendered bodies’ physiologies and potential traumas, ascribe dignity to enjoyment of sex, and intervene in contemporary movements for reproductive autonomy. Employing a three-pronged approach encompassing empowerment, medical care, and pedagogy, the periodical's editorial team and Doctor Klug involved grassroots anarchist affiliates from a range of classes, genders, and generations in the evolution of discourse and practice surrounding bodies, birth control, and free love. These advice columns negotiated the unstable intersection between individualist ‘liberation’ and obligation to collective prosperity – fundamental, yet diametric, anarchist principles.
Conclusion
Historians of sexuality often struggle to obtain personal testimony from everyday people about their experiences of sex.Footnote 157 Indeed, Chris Waters suggests that many such histories have ended up relying on the self-justifications of sexologists whose written record of the history of sexuality is more forthcoming.Footnote 158 La Revista Blanca's advice columns, by contrast, presented testimonies surrounding gender and sexuality from lay perspectives – of all genders. Even accounting for the biases of the periodical's editors in selecting which queries to publish, this genre of material has much to offer historians.
The advice columns of La Revista Blanca represented a microcosm of the explosion of anarchist press attention devoted to sexual revolution in the interwar period. As a venue of political, medical, and cultural thought they platformed the voices of men and women from a range of social classes and generations, giving them the opportunity to feel empowered, obtain sex education and receive medical care, as well as adding their contributions to the ongoing evolution of radical discourse surrounding bodies, birth control, and free love. Responses to their queries, from the Montseny family or Doctor Javier Serrano Coello, on one hand destigmatised women's embodied traumas, instilled pride in readers’ bodies, offered practicable guidance about reproductive hygiene and safety, and granted dignity to sexual pleasures outside of procreative marital sex. On the other hand, their advice was ever underpinned by eugenic motivations, concerned with the (subjective) evolutionary betterment of the human species, which placed significant limits on the permissiveness of the sexual revolution that they envisioned and prefigured. The obligation to serve a collective revolutionary struggle was forever in tension with the impetus to ‘free’ oneself as an autonomous individual.Footnote 159
Spain's anarchist sexual revolution was intimately bound up in the broader history of the interwar period. The Spanish Civil War propelled the anarchists into government where they finally (albeit for a short time) were able to make sex reform a reality, and in this context revolutionary anarchist hubs like Barcelona saw record numbers of ‘free unions’.Footnote 160 Moreover, despite anarchism's firm rejection of state-led eugenic programmes, we cannot entirely detach the interwar Spanish anarchist press from concurrent eugenic movements across Europe and the Americas – regions whose own diverse anarchist movements were in direct communication with that of Spain.Footnote 161 Indeed, further investigation is needed into the involvement of anarchist women in the construction of these interwar transnational networks, as many of those active in Spain had connections and lived experience abroad and it was women's bodily autonomy that constituted the centre of the anarchist sexual revolution. Constance Bantman has outlined several methodological approaches which may be of use here, such as focusing on ‘hubs’ of anarchist networks, ‘informal internationalism’, or the personal networks and intercultural connections of individual anarchists.Footnote 162
The relationship between anarchism and feminism was complicated, especially when it came to fighting for a utopian vision of love and family. Spain's anarchists could vehemently criticise what contemporary ‘feminism’ stood for, yet at the same time empower women to achieve economic independence, bestow dignity on sexual exploration, and advocate for birth control access. The case of interwar Spanish anarchism therefore provides further evidence to support Lucy Delap's contention, in her recent pluralising study of global ‘feminisms’, that categorisation of such movements into a series of increasingly progressive ‘waves’ is unhelpful.Footnote 163 The interwar Spanish anarchists’ interactions through print media demonstrated that the politicisation of the personal, via campaigns for reproductive autonomy and sexual revolution, pre-dated Europe's post-war era.
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