“Guardians of the Race”. The “National-Agrarian” discourse and the conservative political mobilization of Spanish rural women (1880-1939)

Abstract

This article intends to direct the attention towards the rural environment, with the proposal to study, in the chronological period between the late decades of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century, the history of the peasant women, these authentic unknown for the specialized historiography on contemporary age. As we will try to demonstrate, these peasant women began to be seen and recognized as essential and irreplaceable for the specialized observers of the period covered by our study. The political, social and economic changes that occurred in the above mentioned period, facilitated the gradual and differentiated incorporation of rural women into the reflections and discourses elaborated by many theorists, social analysts and politicians, mostly belonged to the ideological field of nationalist traditionalism. All of them began to highlight the essential role that rural women should play in the realization of a great and vast plan of national regeneration and homeland revaluation.