Search results

Dictatorship and civil society: explaining the roots of a New Associational Milieu -- "Measuring" civil society: the scope and vitality of the New Associational Milieu -- Gender and the role of women in the Associational Milieu -- "What is a Family Association?": the civic discourse of Familiarismo -- Women and Familiarismo: the civic discourse of the Homemaker Associations -- The civic discourse of the Neighborhood Associations of Madrid: from community improvement to "Citizen Movement" -- The civic community in practice: Family and Neighborhood Associations as "Schools of Democracy" -- Conclusion/Epilogue

The book explores the grass-roots contribution of ordinary men and women to Spain's much-celebrated democratic transition of the 1970s, through the lens of their participation in civic associations founded under the dictatorship. In neighborhood, family and homemaker associations established in an expanding civil society between the early 1960s and the late 1970s, Radcliff argues that participants experimented with new practices of civic participation that put pressure on the authoritarian state and constituted the building blocks of a future democratic citizenship. Whereas most studies of the transition begin with the formal institutional changes of 1976-78, this book situates its origins in a complex process that involved changing state policies, economic and social transformation and a growing culture of participation. In this analysis, the 1978 Constitution marked the culmination, rather than the start, of 'making democratic citizens' and, by extension, of Spain's democracy.

This article analyses the contestation over female citizenship in Spain's transition to democracy in the mid 1970s. It posits that the transition opened up a discursive space for the construction of a new concept of female citizenship, which was filled with competing images of female citizens, from the Francoist housewife to the consumer activist to the feminist. Through a close reading of the democratic press, the article explores the contradictions and tensions involved in imagining a new female citizen for a democratic Spain. With a focus on the representation of feminist citizenship, the article argues that the central tension surrounding female citizenship was the contradiction between new modes of female participation, new sets of rights and a framework of meaning which could not make sense of these changes. As a result, there was no comfortable place for the female citizen in the emerging master narrative of the transition.