Partner América Barroso
Queer Places:
Cementerio General de Valencia
Valencia, Provincia de València, Valenciana, Spain
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Lucía Sánchez Saornil (Madrid,
13 December 1895 –
Valencia,
2 June 1970) was a
Spanish poet, militant
anarchist
and feminist.
She was active in the CNT and helped found Mujeres Libres; she wrote for numerous anarchist publications and edited the journal Threshold. She was part of the SIA in London with
Emma Goldman, and she urged Goldman to return to Spain before leaving for Canada;
she worked for Spanish refugee children in Paris. The Second Republic would
usher in a period where women had more rights under the law, and where women
were politically empowered for the first time. Homosexuality was also stripped
from the penal code, though there were still ways for which lesbians could be
charged, for example by being deemed dangerous to the state, or simply being
detained by the state even if their behavior was not criminal. Prominent
lesbians of this period included
Lucía Sánchez
Saornil, América Barroso,
Margarita Xirgu,
Irene Polo,
Carmen de Burgos,
María de Maeztu,
Victoria Kent and
Victoria Ocampo.
Raised by her impoverished, widowed father, Lucía attended the
Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. At a young age she began
writing poetry and associated herself with the emerging
Ultraist literary movement. By 1919, she had been published in a variety
of journals, including Los Quijotes, Tableros, Plural,
Manantial and La Gaceta Literaria. Working under a male
pen name,
she was able to explore
lesbian
themes[1]
at a time when homosexuality was criminalized and subject to
censorship and punishment.
In 1931, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, who had been working as a
telephone operator since 1916, participated in a strike by the
anarcho-syndicalist labor union,
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), against
Telefónica. The event was a turning point in her life, serving as an entry
into political activism. From this point forward, Lucía dedicated herself to
the struggle for anarchist
social revolution.
In 1933, Lucía was appointed Writing Secretary for the CNT of Madrid,
producing their journal in the run up to the
Spanish Civil War. In May 1938, she became the General Secretary of the
Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA), an anarchist aid
organization similar to the
Red Cross.
Lucía Sánchez Saornil and Emma Goldman
Writing in anarchist publications such as Earth and Freedom, the
White Magazine and
Workers' Solidarity, Lucía outlined her perspective as a feminist.
Although quiet on the subject of
birth control, she attacked the essentialism of
gender roles in Spanish society. In this way, Lucía established herself as
one of the most radical of voices among anarchist women, rejecting the ideal
of female domesticity which remained largely unquestioned. In a series of
articles for Workers' Solidarity, she boldly refuted
Gregorio Marañón's identification of
motherhood as the nucleus of female identity.
Dissatisfied with the chauvinistic prejudices of fellow
republicans, Lucía Sánchez Saornil joined with two compañeras,
Mercedes Comaposada and
Amparo Poch y Gascón, to form
Mujeres Libres in 1936. Mujeres Libres was an
autonomous anarchist organization for women committed to a "double
struggle" of
women's liberation and social revolution. Lucía and other "Free Women"
rejected the dominant view that gender equality would emerge naturally from a
classless society. As the Spanish Civil War exploded, Mujeres Libres
quickly grew to 30,000 members, organizing women's social spaces, schools,
newspapers and daycare programs.
In 1937, while working in
Valencia as the editor of the journal Threshold, Lucía met América Barroso, who would become her lifelong partner.
With the defeat of the Second Republic, Lucía and América were forced to
flee to
Paris, where Lucía continued her involvement in the SIA. With the
fall of France to German forces, it was soon necessary for them to move
again and they returned to
Madrid in 1941 or 1942.
In Madrid, Lucía worked as a
photo editor but quickly had to relocate again after being recognized as
an anarchist partisan. She and América moved to Valencia where América had
family. Due to the rise of fascism and Catholic moralism, their lesbian
relationship now put them at significant personal danger and was maintained in
secrecy. During this time, América worked in the Argentine consulate while
Lucía continued her work as an editor until her death from cancer in 1970.
During this time, her poetry demonstrates her mixed outlook, embracing both
the pain of defeat and the affirmation of struggle. She left behind no memoir.
Lucía's tombstone
epitaph in
the General Cemetery of
Valencia
reads, "But is it true that hope has died?" ("¿Pero es verdad que la
esperanza ha muerto?").
My published books:
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