Women on the Verge: Spain’s Women – an Introduction

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Women on the Verge: Spain’s Women – an Introduction

I’m starting a column for a new Barcelona website about the superlative women who live here. I’d been collecting information about women in Spain here and there, scraps of paper tucked away in boxes and between the pages of books and journals. I started looking through them this morning. Now it’s the afternoon and I absolutely have to get to work on my query for my book so let me hand off a bit of a primer to get you started.

First there’s photographer Cristina García Rodero whose images make me want to run to the nearest bookstore to find a biography on the woman (or, theoretically, ‘Nook reader checkout page’ but I don’t have one of those). In a word: brave. In another world film critics love to use: unflinching. Another word, okay two, would be: what the?

self-portrait of Cristina García Rodero, 1972. She says "sentimental striptease doesn't interest me."

I implore you to check out the magnum photo essay of her otherworldly images deep inside the cultures of god-knows-what. They are disturbing glimpses of ritual and fanaticism – and a most profound expression of pain, passion, suffering, desire, feverish ecstasy and intense darkness. A Pandora’s box of questions leap off the screen. Some of the images make Diane Arbus’ images seem like Mad Men family portraits.

And then there’s the more quiet images of husband and wife team María Bleda and José María Rosa, studies in time and history, layers of architecture and earth, sand, space, expanse, and lush green. Reminds me a bit of my husband’s interests.

Then there are the filmmakers whose number are too few. One struck me in particular: Icíar Bollaín who made last years “También la Lluvia” (Even the Rain) which was the Academy Awards Spanish entry for foreign film this past year. Here’s the trailer:

and I’ll end with

Women and Zapatero

quotes via Today’s Guardian article, entitled “José Zapatero’s feminista agenda”

“One of Zapatero’s first legislative areas in 2004 was domestic violence, a huge issue in Spain. Nuria Bienert, who works for Amnesty, says: “A fact that proves a background of gender persecution is that in Spain there is a lot of sexual violence. It’s one of the countries where there is the largest number of people killed by their partners.” In 2007, 71 women were killed by their partners in Spain, up from 68 the previous year and more than Germany and the UK.”

“(Zapatero’s passed laws to help working women)..The surprising flipside to this picture is the number of young women who find it impossible to get a job in Spain.”

“According to Gestha, Spain’s national statistics office, women earn ¤5,300 (£4,700) less than the average male wage of ¤21,433 (£18,960), making their average earnings 24% lower.”

“Spain had, until Zapatero, very low economic growth, and part of that was attributable to the low female workplace participation (that age-old problem, they wanted to swell the GDP but couldn’t find a babysitter).”

ah, there’s always work to be done and more to discover..

Happy Sunday

-Chauncey