Thousands of girls were locked up by Board for the Protection of Women for ‘rehabilitation’
Spain is to formally pardon a group of 53 women who are among thousands who were incarcerated by the Franco regime on the grounds that they were supposedly “fallen or in danger of falling”.
The women were locked up as adolescents by the Board for the Protection of Women, a collection of institutions run by religious orders. The board, which had echoes of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries, was overseen by Carmen Polo, the wife of the dictator Gen Francisco Franco.
Originally founded in 1902 to stamp out sex work, in 1941, two years after the end of the Spanish civil war, its role was extended to clamp down on female behaviour that deviated from norms laid down by the Catholic church. The board was not closed down until 1985, 10 years after Franco’s death.
In a ceremony next week, the government will pardon the 53 survivors and recognise them as victims of Francoist repression. A statement from the ministry of democratic memory said that any punishment, whether legal or administrative, they had suffered was null and void as it resulted from “the repression and violence exercised by the Board for the Protection of Women for political, ideological reasons or because of their gender”.
