Poor but Honest
Bourgeois Lust and Proletarian Honour
in the novellas of Federica Montseny
Pedro García Guirao
Instituto Cervantes de Praga
A little-known anarchist wrote a story titled "The Hunting of Flesh". It describes how a rich old man pressures a young artist to be his lover. She refuses, but the contacts that the old man has with her boss and the threats of dismissal make the girl give up, full of disgust and pity. “Poor, poor woman, condemned in this bourgeois society to being inevitably a victim everywhere!” –laments the narrator.
That Federica Montseny was able to express brilliantly the spirit of this last exclamation is demonstrated by the more than forty romance novels and novellasshe published in the collections of LaNovela Ideal and La Novela Libre. In all these texts, the social mission of the anarchist writer is focused around three points: a description of social reality, a denunciation of this reality if it is corrupt and, finally, a correction of particular social practices through education and anarchist morality in order to achieve social redemption through a revolution in all spheres of life.
The purpose of my work is to analyze how Montseny managed this social mission in the specific case of women through the following issues: a conscious glorification of motherhood (in general and single mothers in particular), defence of freedom (sexual) and independence of women, separation between sex and love, birth control, incorporation of women into the working world, denunciation of the double standard regarding male and female about virginity... We will also see that there are two large human stereotypes or archetypes in the novels of Montseny, both locked in the class struggle of two opposing worlds: the bourgeois man (libertine, jobless, ruthless) and the proletarian woman (weak, helpless, healthy, and above all, poor but honest). From the real struggle of these two forces, according to Montseny, will be born the new woman and, of course, the new people (pueblo), because we must not forget that these women are the daughters of the people and therefore, if they are raped, humiliated, exploited, dishonored, seduced and abandoned by the bourgeoisie, these are considered as a denigration of an entire community(pueblo) and not just the women: "This episode, which appears in countless libertarian works, in fact comes to represent an archetypal myth of humiliation of an entire class" (L. Litvak, 2003, p.36)