Spanish Women in the First International: Social and Political Profiles, Discourse and Affinity Networks

This article focuses on the pioneering Spanish women who embraced the internationalist movement that was newly introduced into the country following the Revolution of 1868. It seeks to reconstruct their life trajectories, forms of participation, and ideological commitments within an activism that contributed to the development of working-class culture in Spain. The city of Cádiz, a port city in southern Andalusia, was home to one of the first women’s sections affiliated with the Spanish Regional Federation of the International Working Association. It also produced pioneering figures such as Margarita Pérez de Celis and Guillermina Rojas Orgis, whose activism helped to shape female participation within the internationalist movement. This article examines their trajectories, both of which were previously linked either to Fourierism or to republicanism, affiliations that probably facilitated their subsequent involvement in the First International. Focusing on these women’s agency, I analyze the ways in which they publicly asserted their commitment to the dual emancipation of women and the working class. Their public meetings, speeches, and demonstrations, as reported in the press, brought them to the attention of a wider public that was not always willing to accept their presence or their demands. Conscious of the exceptional nature of their own position, they also demonstrated solidarity with other women activists, acknowledging and supporting their comrades. Their social feminism, situated at the intersection of gender and class, established a defining boundary for those women who forged their political identities within the emerging working-class culture of Spain.