From National Catholicism to Romantic Love: The Politics of Love and Divorce in Franco's Spain

Abstract

In the early 1970s, when the Franco dictatorship (1939–75) was coming to an end, some Catholic intellectuals began to defend people's right to end their failed marriages and seek happiness with a new partner. In so doing, they recognised that love was the primary purpose of marriage; if it was absent the union ceased to be valid. These intellectuals thus broke with a discourse that had until then been deep-seated in both Catholic theology and Francoist morals and laws. According to these, love was only a secondary end of marriage and the conjugal union was indissoluble, leaving people no choice but to tolerate it if it was an unhappy one.

Mothers of Mid-century Spanish Families: Agents of Social Change in the Context of Dictatorship and Patriarchy

“…16 Consistent with this tenet, for the Spanish Church and many Catholic opinion leaders marriage was more a matter of obligation, restraint and reproduction than of romantic love, affection and companionship. 17 Nevertheless, '(f)or the majority of the youth of the late 1950s and early 1960s marriage was a paramount aspiration, so much so that a cloud of failure hung over single people and especially single women'. 18 Not surprisingly, the percentages of unmarried women sharply declined between 1950 and 1975.…”