The translation of socialist feminisms in post-Francoism: Juliet Mitchell and Sheila Rowbotham

Abstract

Throughout history, Hispanic feminism has been endowed with ideological mothers and sisters. The dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–75) prevented their reception for years. However, in the late Franco era, the foundational essays of Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir were published. Later, at the height of the women’s movements, other foreign voices arrived, such as those of the Anglo-Saxon socialist feminists Juliet Mitchell and Sheila Rowbotham. After contextualizing the feminisms of the Transition and their physical and intellectual spaces, this article focuses on the reception and censorship of Mitchell’s and Rowbotham’s essays in the 1970s. Published under the Barcelona publishing imprints of Anagrama and Edicions 62, as well as the Madrid-based Debate, six of the eight books have censorship files, which show how the censorship apparatus continued to act after the death of the dictator. Almost half a century after their publication, now that the essays of the second wave are once again a source of inspiration for contemporary feminism, this research aims to pay tribute to them and remind us that the socialization of their texts, through translation, was one of the key elements of social and political change in the post-Franco period.