A woman writes a letter in which she recounts the hell that lives in her home from the first day of marriage. She recounts the “so abrupt” ways and the attacks that she suffers from her husband, who also hits the five-year-old son they have in common. She says that she still loves the abuser and confesses that she is terrified that the man could take the child from her. His request of her? She asks Elena Francis for advice so that her husband can become “a good and loving person.” The aforementioned responds: the woman is in this life “to suffer”, marriage “is such a great bond of union that it is impossible to break it” and recommends that she discuss her case with a priest because “husbands tend to have respect for men with habit”.
This is one of the letters that ‘El consultorio de Elena Francis’ received during one of its 10,000 programs broadcast from 1950 to 1984, the year in which it ended up succumbing to the loss of audience and influence and due to its inability to react to modern Spain and ambitious, who wanted to leave behind the darkest years of Francoism. However, during its prime, the program received up to 20,000 letters per month from anonymous women who trusted the encyclopedic wisdom of a female character who never existed.
In this context, and coinciding with March 8, La 2 premieres tonight (10:50 p.m.) the documentary ‘Elena Francis, the first influencer’, a production of the public channel in collaboration with Bing Bang (The Mediapro Studio) that delves into this insignia of Spanish radio broadcasting, which served to spread the prevailing morality during the Franco dictatorship and was used to indoctrinate women.
The origin, a commercial agreement
The documentary has extensive documentation work that has had the contribution of the RTVE archive, Super 8 images and unpublished photographs of the time, as well as the collaboration of specialists in history, psychology, sociology, documentation and marketing together with radio professionals such as Pepa Fernández, Mara Torres, Macarena Berlín, Nieves Herrero or Ángeles Afuera.
The origin of the radio space arises from a commercial agreement between the Elena Francis Institute and Radio Barcelona to sell beauty products. It was aimed at upper-class listeners and only aesthetic inquiries were made. Soon, the office was opened to the general public to attend to the human doubts of women who had no one to consult. «They were tied to the home, to marriage and to their parents. Anonymously, and always with pseudonyms, they took advantage of this space to have a window. It became an outlet for many women who had a rather miserable and poor life”, explains the director of the production, Mónica Artigas.
Every afternoon, around 7:00 p.m., the tune of ‘Indian Summer’ would sneak into the neighboring patios. The show became a social phenomenon that lasted 34 years. In 1966, the broadcast jumped to Radio Peninsular, then belonging to Radio Nacional de España (RNE). Letters began to be received from all over the country, especially from adolescent and young women, low-class and unhappy immigrants, who were fleeing the town in search of a better life. They wrote to Francis to ask advice from a person they didn’t know but idolized. They shared their deepest secrets and intimacies to receive comfort, support or behavior patterns. Everything was clandestine and some of them put the address of a third person on the return address so as not to be identified.
Marked by ‘R’
The confessions were received at the headquarters of the Francis Institute, where the letters were classified according to the theme. Those that were on the ‘R’ list jumped to the radio, but those that dealt with more lurid issues such as sexual abuse or homosexuality were answered in private by a group of ‘external answering machines’, hired through press advertisements. Those with an asterisk bordered on forbidden topics and would never come to light.
The Franco regime’s control over the content of the program was absolute and topics that did not fit with Christian morality were censored, such as abortion, homosexuality, divorce, incestuous relationships or politics. «Something positive that the office had was that it generated sorority. The woman who made a consultation listened to the problems of another and did not feel alone. A community was created”, highlights Artigas, who clarifies, however, that this radio space was “an instrument of the Franco regime to indoctrinate” women.
Elena Francis never appeared publicly. In fact, there were several voices that embodied the presenter, but Maruja Fernández, who worked as a singer in Antonio Machín’s orchestras, became the announcer who preserved her identity for the longest years. Juan Soto Viñolo, a bullfighting critic, took over the space as a scriptwriter for the radio program, siempre en la sombra. He responded to the questions raised by women through books, encyclopedias or consultations that he made with his friends. It was said that there was a priest or therapist on the team, but the names of the people are not recorded.
The office suffered a “slow death” and “agoned” until the end of its days, according to the director of the documentary. Democracy struck down this ultra-conservative space, despite the attempts to modernize it in its last years of issuance. After Franco’s death, the number of letters received fell and the influence was residual. “The women already had other mechanisms and organizations to turn to to solve their problems,” Artigas points out. However, the revelations in 1982 by the writer Gerard Imbert in a book struck down the credibility of the practice: Elena Francis had never existed. “A myth fell,” says the director. The Francis Institute tried to counter the claims with information in the press, where it published the image of a woman who was supposedly the owner of the clinic. “They never recognized the lie,” says Artigas.