Health, home and hearth: how war nurses negotiated their place at the table during the dawn of Francoist Spain

During the Spanish Civil War, around 15,000 women were deployed as nurses or auxiliaries in the military health service of the Francoist army. Many of them worked behind the firing lines and came close to the combat and destruction. When the war drew to an end, these frontline nurses were demobilized and sent home to hearth and family. For some of them, returning home was a relief; for others, it meant the end to a professional career and meaningful vocation outside family control. Some of them used the tumultuous 'post-war' months to raise their voices, demanding the same treatment as male veterans. They wanted the same privileges these men enjoyed, such as free university access or ex-combatant status. Rallying together in support of such interests, they transcended several social borders, like Francoist ideas of complementary gender roles, concepts of nurses being acquiescent angels at sickbeds, and values of unconditional subordination and obedience. By pushing marriage into the future, they further violated Francoist expectations of a woman's 'proper' biographical trajectory. In all these endeavours to gain a place at the table of Francoist Spain, they found support from their male colleagues and superiors. Drawing from sources of the Francoist military health service, this paper argues that their petitions echoed the elitist and gendered views concerning the making of the victor's society. These perspectives reflected the intricate integration processes within the heterogeneous support base from which the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco drew his legitimacy and backing both during and after the war.