S3E42: The Unwanted FIFA Kiss - Spanish Women's Long Struggle for Equal Rights

History Behind News Program

Do you remember the Unwanted FIFA kiss back in August - when Mr. Luis Rubiales, the former president of the Spanish Football Federation, forced a kiss on Ms. Jenni Hermoso? Well, this week FIFA banned him from all football-related activities for three years.

But this episode is not about him. Rather, it's about how women in Spain have persistently fought for their equal rights going back to the 19th century. And as you will note in this conversation, it's a history that is closely tied to the struggle for freedom, to different political movements and their priorities, to different regimes and republics, and also to world events and global movements, such as the suffrage movement in Britain and America, and Fascism and Nazism in Italy and Germany, respectively.

In this episode, I ask my guest, Dr. Marta del Moral, the following questions:

1. How did women's conditions and rights in Spain from the 19th century to 1933 compare to other European countries?
2. Were women deemed intellectually equal to men? And if so, were they given the same rights?
3. When did Spanish women gain the right to vote and how did they effectively lose it?
4. How did Franco's regime impact women's rights and conditions?
5. What is (was) permiso marital?
6. How were rapists treated in Spain?
7. What was the punishment for a man who killed his adulterous wife?
8. How did women's conditions and rights change after democracy returned to Spain starting in 1975?
9. The Unwanted FIFA Kiss - how did this fit within Spanish women's long struggle for equal rights and Spain's "Macho Culture"?

Dr. del Moral is a professor of gender equality at the Complutense University of Madrid. She directs the Research Group: Gender Relations in the Contemporary World: an interdisciplinary perspective from History, Geography and Law, where she has investigated women's participation in local governments.

By the way, during our conversation, Dr. del Moral recommended this book: New Perspectives on European Women's Legal History.

In this episode, Dr. del Moral tells us that the Unwanted FIFA kiss was an act of masculine power over a woman. And that’s not the first time we've had this in our program.

Back in 2021, when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was accused of sexual harassment and shortly thereafter resigned, Dr. Carry Baker of Smith College explained to us that at its core, sexual harassment is about power! Click for my conversation with Dr. Baker.

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1. Image description: Caricature of Gracia y Justicia, the conservative magazine of political humor published in Spain during the Second Republic. It shows a group of feminist women breaking into an office to claim the right to divorce, even though they are single. The vignette is part of the campaign organized by Catholic right media and parties in order to avoid the legalization of divorce. The following dialogue is read in the text that accompanies the cartoon: - The divorce! … the divorce! We want the [right to] divorce! - But how bad do your husbands treat you? - No, we are single. (Public Domain). In this episode, Dr. del Moral talks about family crises and women's anguish caused by restrictive and repressive divorce laws.
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