In the run-up to the 50th anniversary of Francisco Franco’s death, on November 20, 2025, the left-leaning Spanish government led a vigil in honor of the many victims of the dictatorial regime.
Although exact numbers remain impossible to determine, historians estimate that Franco’s men killed up to 100,000 people during the brutal Spanish Civil War, and tens of thousands were executed during his dictatorial rule from 1939 until his death in 1975. Hundreds of thousands more were imprisoned, sent to labor camps or subjected to political persecution. To these figures we must add the approximately half a million people who fled or were forced into exile.
Among the multitudes of victims of Franco’s regime were women and children who suffered psychological and physical abuse in prisons, orphanages and asylums. Yet for decades their experiences remained marginal in the public narrative, highlighting the unequal recognition of different groups of victims amid Spain’s broader struggle to confront its past.
Even so, their stories remain alive in the testimonies of the women who were imprisoned by the regime. In the summer of 2024, I conducted research at the Historical Memory Documentation Center in Salamanca, collecting documented written accounts of traumatic experiences suffered by the Spanish female population under Franco. They reveal the extent to which Franco’s repression was structured through gender, presenting women as inherently subordinate and subjecting those who resisted the regime’s patriarchal order to especially harsh punishment.
Franco’s gender violence
My study explores the testimonies of women imprisoned during the civil war or the decades after, all of whom suffered because of their motherhood. While some were detained for their ideological loyalty to the republic that preceded Franco’s rise, others had no formal party affiliations or were simply related to men who did.
These women suffered what many survivors and historians have described as a “double punishment” – directed not only by their beliefs or associations, but simply by being women and mothers.
The oldest testimony I found was from a woman detained in 1939, just three years after Franco, a military general, led an uprising against the democratically elected government of the Second Republic that precipitated the civil war and his subsequent reign.
Under Franco’s dictatorial regime, women’s roles were rigidly controlled by the ideology of national Catholicism, which linked femininity, motherhood, and loyalty to the state. The church reinforced this vision, “dictating that women serve the country through sacrifice and dedication to the common good.”
Those who challenged patriarchy were criminalized and subjected to “reeducation” focused on religious values.
The so-called “redemption” of women under this reeducation was no less violent than their confinement. As one witness described, in May 1939 the Las Ventas prison auditorium was prepared to celebrate “two girls and a boy (…recently) born in prison.” During the ceremony, a choir “composed of forty inmates, including opera singers, music teachers, violinists and amateurs,” had to perform the national anthems with the fascist salute of raised arms.
However, the confinement itself was especially brutal.
According to Josefina García, a woman imprisoned during the 1940s, the guards regularly insulted and beat the inmates. “If you were at home behaving like decent women, you wouldn’t be here,” she recalled one saying. Garcia continued: “Of course, they used crude and sexist language. The police ‘used words’ in a way that sometimes leaves a mark deeper than a bruise.”
Gender also influenced the type of punishment prisoners received. Following their arrest, the women were subjected to head shaving, forced ingestion of castor oil, and the subsequent public humiliation of being forced to walk in circles while defecating. In addition, they were often victims of sexual violence by prison guards or interrogation officers.
Recounting her experience, another witness recounted the case of an 18-year-old sister of a guerrilla in Valencia who “was subjected to terrible torture, naked in a room with several civil guards who pricked her breasts, genitals and stomach with… needles.”
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Motherhood as a battlefield
One of the most painful aspects of Franco’s repression was the forced separation of mothers and their children.
When imprisoned, women frequently lost custody of their sons and daughters, who were placed in orphanages or adopted by families loyal to Franco and his regime. Such violent breaches of the maternal bond were more than an act of personal cruelty: they were a calculated political strategy rooted in broader Francoist ideology.
Since Franco’s regime promoted the image of women as obedient wives and self-sacrificing mothers devoted to the Catholic family model, Republican women were demonized as immoral, dangerous, and unworthy of motherhood.
By stripping women of their children, the regime punished them and reinforced its narrative that only “loyal” women could be true mothers.
Meanwhile, growing up or giving birth during incarceration was marked by fear and uncertainty. In certain cases, newborns were allowed to stay with their mothers for a short time. However, lack of proper nutrition and mental exhaustion made breastfeeding an impossible task.
Women who were beginning to breastfeed were sometimes denied the ability to breastfeed their babies, causing physical pain and emotional torment.
More often, babies were removed permanently, considered at risk of being “contaminated” by their mothers’ ideological values.
“When they arrested me, my son was five days old,” reported one victim, Carmen Caamaño. “A year later, they said he no longer needed to breastfeed and they took the boy out of prison. Some friends had to take him in because he had no family there.”
There were also countless cases in which children were imprisoned alongside their mothers. Without other family members to care for them, these children suffered hunger, illness, and lack of basic hygiene in their overcrowded cells. For mothers, the psychological burden was immense, as they were forced to watch their children suffer, but had no power to protect them.
In the summer of 1941, about six or seven children died daily in these prisons from hunger and disease, according to survivors’ accounts.
Trauma and resistance
Along with the trauma, there were also moments of resistance.
Mothers in prison were looking for ways to raise their children despite scarcity and fear. The testimonies I reviewed recounted cases of inmates sharing food, telling stories, and protecting children as best they could. These small acts of care were a silent but powerful form of defiance.
However, for many women, the trauma of these losses never healed. Survivors often speak of the pain of separation as an open wound that lasted a lifetime. Children raised in prisons or separated from their families carried the scars into adulthood.
Even decades after the end of the regime, many descendants still struggle with the weight of this silenced past. However, due to Spain’s 1977 Amnesty Law, which was granted for past political crimes, those responsible for atrocities committed under Franco have rarely been held accountable.
Stories from the Franco years often leave the pain of intergenerational trauma in the shadows. And for the victims themselves, the traumatic experiences of motherhood under their dictatorship reveal more than personal suffering: they expose how authoritarian power can reach the most intimate parts of life.
*Zaya Rustamova is an associate professor of Spanish at Kennesaw State University.
This article was originally published on The Conversation
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