Patriotism and religion: religious women "in the urgency of the moment in Spain"

Abstract

Sixteen female congregations signed contracts with the government to serve in prisons between 1938 and 1945. Only a few had experience in the field of penitentiary and reform, but the patriotic and recrystallizing climate, and a certain submission of religious congregations to the hierarchy led them to centers of reclusion and reform. In this article we express the need to normalize the study of female religious congregations and their action in the program of redemption. This requires the opening of congregational archives and historical works contrasted from the perspective of gender and from the internal dynamics of the Catholic Church during the first half of the twentieth century.