Matilde de la Torre: Sex, Socialism and Suffrage in Republican Spain

Women’s political emancipation was amongst the most revolutionary of the feminist reforms enacted by the II Spanish Republic (1931-1939). Matilde de la Torre (1884-1946) was one of Spain’s first female politicians, winning a seat for the Socialist Party (PSOE) in Oviedo in the 1933 and 1936 elections. A vocal advocate of women’s and workers’ rights, De la Torre played an active role in seminal moments and debates in Republican Spain, including the struggle for women’s suffrage, the 1934 Asturian revolution and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). In the first comprehensive study of De la Torre’s life and works, Deborah Madden interrogates the intersection of socialist and feminist discourses in De la Torre’s writings, focusing on how she navigates tensions between the two, often conflicting, ideologies.

Deborah Madden is a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University, Nijmegen (2022-). She was awarded the 2019-2020 AHGBI-WISPS Dorothy Sherman-Severin Fellowship to conduct research for this monograph, and was formerly a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Fellow at the Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2020-2022).