Lali, one of the ten women who star in ‘Les nostres mares’ (Proa), is fed up with the insatiable sexual appetite of her brute husband. She doesn’t respect her even after her deliveries and she, exhausted after raising three children practically alone, is not willing to have a fourth. The problem, alas, is finding a gynecologist. The year is 1976, and although apparent winds of change are blowing -in the auditorium of the University of Barcelona, 4,000 women gather at the Jornades de la Dona to learn how to do a breast self-examination and talk about the clitoris-, the truth is that national Catholic morality continues to govern the majority of intimate relationships within marriage.
Who was going to tell Gemma Ruiz Palà (Sabadell, 1975) when she was writing ‘Les nostres mares’ (Proa), a mosaic novel starring women born in the 50s, that some of the thorniest issues in the book such as consent or obstacles to abortion they would be rabidly topical again. “It’s business as usual: women’s rights are the only ones not to be taken for granted. They will always be at risk and we will have to fight for them. It is something that the left has done all their lives: tell us that now is not the time. Meanwhile, we continue to be worse than in the Republic, dear left-wing Democratic friends, ”she ironically.
All-terrain women
About that generation of women educated with the Feminine Section of the Falange, today retirees without mincing words, liberated and enjoying enjoying a second youth (as long as the grandchildren allow it), “women with a journey of centuries in their bones”, goes ‘Les nostres mares’. Ruiz Palà was very clear that he wanted to write the history of all those mothers who, like his, fought so that their daughters could do everything that they were denied. “Women who they have always had broth in the fridge, as Rigoberta Bandini sings, but they also fought with the bank, managed the family finances and in many cases worked. Women who, ultimately, taught us to go around the world. Born as second-class citizens in the Franco regime and capable of subverting the pincers of the ideology that considered them a zero to the left. I think we have minimized how repressive the laws of the dictatorship were with them. It was Afghanistan today. It never ceases to amaze me how they have been able to educate their daughters in a completely different way”, says the journalist, editor-in-chief of news on TV3.
The Transition was also theirs
Ruiz also intends to amend a historical debt that has to do with the story of the transition, where the protagonists are almost always men. “Women are never mentioned when we explain how this country came out of Francoism. And they were there too: in neighborhood movements, in strikes like the running of the bulls at Motor Ibérica… We are always told about a sexual revolution, the uncovering, which was actually for them”, complaint. “The famous photographs of Marisol in ‘Interviú’, as the photographer later confessed, were published without her knowing anything. That is also consent, ”she points out.
Ruiz has been inspired by real women to write the novel. “They are the ones I have met in my reading clubs, this novel is for them. There are also stories from my mother’s friends.” But let it be clear that it is not a women’s novel for women. “I really want it to be read by men like my father, who doesn’t know how to make a French omelette but is the most feminist in the place. There is a whole generation of men like him, who have unconsciously enjoyed the privilege”, he confesses.
a feminist novel
Ruiz was the winner of the last Sant Jordi Prize for novels, an award that had not been awarded to a woman for 19 years (in fact, only nine writers have achieved it in the 63-year history of the award). Her speech when picking it up, very combative and feminist, raised more than one blister. “For a moment I thought: they have given you an award and you come here to criticize it. But then I thought I couldn’t not. In the end we have to verbalize these things, precisely because it does not interest them to be said ”, he explains. That day Ruiz recited the names of 30 Catalan writers with his fist raised, emulating that “shared victory” to which Annie Ernaux also alluded when collecting the Nobel. “It gave me a lot of strength to say all those names. It was also a way to disarm that myth of wanting to make us compete all the time with each other. I verified that when you feel part of an ecosystem, the energy shot is beastly ”, she confesses.
The crier of Sant Jordi
The truth is that the City Council has already contacted Ruiz to be the author of the Saint George’s proclamation and the only thing that is clear is that his speech will have to do with Maria Aurelia Capmany. “I recently discovered it, in one more example of how the cultural system and feminist genealogy have cheated us. How can it be that I have discovered, at the age of 46, Capmany, who is our Betty Friedan? Her ‘La dona a Catalunya’ seems essential to me, it is our ‘Mystique of Femininity’”.