Independents, Institutionalists, and the International Feminist Fight in Late Twentieth-Century Spain and Europe

Spanish feminism was originally a grassroots movement, but the founding of the Instituto de la Mujer (Women’s Institute) in 1983 created a government-aligned institutional feminism that split feminists into two warring factions: independent feminists and institutional feminists. With this new development, independent feminists understood institutional feminists’ position as evidence that the latter were feminists in name only. Nevertheless, independent feminists recognised that they sometimes needed institutional feminists’ political leverage and international networks. This shift and the resulting conflict between Spain’s independent and institutional feminists paralleled changes in the international feminist movement as, increasingly, international institutional feminists used their networks to lobby organisations like the United Nations and European Economic Community (and later the European Union), which were receptive to them but not to independent activists’ appeals. The evolving relationship between independent and institutional feminists, domestically and internationally, shaped Spanish feminism and the imagined possibilities for women’s rights policy in the closing decades of the twentieth century.