Women who carry

Artists and Images of Motherhood in the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

Based on the analysis of works by the artists Francis Bartolozzi (1908-2004), Juana Francisca Rubio (1911-2008) and Kati Horna (1912-2000), this article proposes a rethinking of the profusion of images of mothers during the Spanish Civil War. The “miliciana” (militia woman) and the “madre combativa” (combative mother) were the two female stereotypes most represented in the iconography of the period, but the images proposed by these artists problematise them by proposing an alternative model of woman that situates maternal work, care and relationality as places of emergence of the political. The mothers who carry take motherhood away from the propagandistic rhetoric of both sides. They distance themselves from the self-sacrificing mother of fascist ideology, but also from the combative republican mother.