Morality and Biology in the Spanish Civil War: Psychiatrists, Revolution and Women Prisoners in Málaga

The psychiatric study of women prisoners in the city of Málaga during the Spanish Civil War provides a starting point for a two-part analysis of the gendered tension between biology and morality. First, the relationship of organic psychiatry and bio-typologies to, in turn, liberalism and neo-Thomist Catholicism is discussed. The supposedly ‘biological’ roots of conditions such as hysteria and their link to women's revolutionary behaviour are examined. Second, prison records are used to examine the material conditions of women in the city and the gendered construction of their moral culpability during the revolution. Both medical science and Catholic doctrine could be exploited in declaring the indissolubility of gendered morality.

tionary violence in Spain, and the war itself, could be explained by a kind of pathological intensi®cation of female nature'. 3 The psychological epidemiology explored in this article was framed by these gendered associations between the mind, human anatomy and discipline. The pathological analysis was taken up and modi®ed in a Roman Catholic (and often contradictory) direction and propagated politically by Francoists during and after the con¯ict, as the quotation at the beginning about the`materialisation' of woman, from a work by two racial hygiene reformers, one man and one woman, from the Pen Äa-Castillo Sanatorium in Santander, suggests. 4 Gender continued to be expressed and experienced through medicalisation, as well as sancti®cation, during and after the war. Pathological and religious metaphors had basic epistemological functions. 5 The democracy of the prewar Spanish Second Republic (1931±39), which granted women the vote, legalised divorce and civil marriage and made birth control respectable, 6 was led by men accused of lacking a genetically rooted instinct of honour, dignity and decency, who worked to achieve a rampant disordering of sexual±social relations. In the ®rst elections when women had the right to vote (1933), they were warned that a vote for the left would put their faith, their children's education and the tranquility of their homes in danger, and leave their honour in shreds'. 7 Democratic Spain had become`decadent' and`barren', it was claimed, a`sterile womb', which could be regenerated only through social militarism and the implantation of the`military home': the morality of war. 8 After the Civil War, the Republic's defeat was explained by the`hystericisation' of its people. Meanwhile the victors were positively stimulated by a`paranoia of persecution' which was successfully converted (or projected) by`patriotic sentiments' and à sense of community' into a`delirium of imperial grandeur'. 9 These gendered categories found echoes across the political spectrum. According to the leading liberal Republican psychiatrist of the time,`primitive reactions' tended to accom-incarceration of Republican women. The frequent transgressions of the inscribed separate spheres model of the postwar era were more widely seen as a form of violation than they had been before the war.
During the Spanish Civil War a department of psychological investigations was created in the Francoist or`Nationalist' zone to ®nd`the bio-psychological roots of Marxism'. (The category`Marxist' has to be understood broadly: a Ma Âlaga doctor described one Republican militiaman as having`a very Marxist smile'. 14 ) This psychological`bureau' was established by the Nationalist Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, initially in Burgos, General Franco's wartime headquarters, later moving to Madrid following his victory in April 1939, to study Republican political prisoners in the hands of the National forces of salvation,`in very favourable conditions which perhaps will never be repeated'. 15 The studies would combine psychological tests as used in psychiatric clinics, forensic examinations, and racial anthropology. According to the director of the studies, the military psychiatrist and race hygienist Antonio Vallejo-Na Âgera, 16 research on`constitutional psychopathic inferiority', carried out since around the turn of the century (largely in Germany), into connecting heredity to criminality, could be useful in politics and the social sciences, perhaps even in`improving the human condition'. Several problems might thereby be elucidated: the mass and individual psychological reaction to imprisonment, the possibilities of`conversions' and an ideological or general affective change in prisoners, and the relationship between`the biopsychological qualities of the subject and democratic±communist political fanaticism'. War made these studies possible, but the theoretical basis was not invented during the war. Bio-criminological ideas had a national and international heritage, discussed and published in both liberal and anti-Republican circles in the face of the anti-clerical violence, rapid politicisation and social and sexual demands of the Republic.
The subject matter of these studies was principally composed of groups of male political prisoners:`Spanish Republicans' (`the agents and propagandists of Marxism'), Basque`separatists' (of unique interest because they`unite political and religious fanaticism'), Catalan`Marxists' (within whom were found both Marxist and`anti-Spanish' fanaticism), and foreign Republican prisoners (volunteers of the 14 Archivo General de la Guerra Civil Espan Äola (AGCE), Seccio Ân Politico-Social (PS), Extremadura, carpeta 24, relato, 28 January 1937. International Brigades) from Latin America, Britain, Portugal and the United States. 17 (International volunteers were of particular interest to the Gestapo and Nazi doctors who visited the Francoist camps and prisons and carried out simultaneous experiments). The majority in all of these groups were`degenerate', it was found. The materialism of Marxism was attractive to`mental de®cients'. Finally, a further study into the`psyche of Marxist fanaticism' of ®fty of the 900 women held in the provincial prison of the occupied Andalucõ Âan port city of Ma Âlaga completed the series of investigations. 18 Some of the ®ndings of this research were published in Vallejo's book, Madness and War, a`psychopathology of the Spanish war', which appeared in 1939. The female Marxist delinquents of Ma Âlaga, with whom this article is primarily concerned, were tried, much like their Parisian forebears of 1871, by Councils of War for`horri®c murders, burnings and sackings' and`egging-on' their menfolk to all kinds of disorders. Thirty-three of them had been sentenced to the death penalty by a military court for crimes against the Patria, although the`magnanimous' General Franco commuted the death sentences to life imprisonment (30 years) for those who took part in the experiments. 19 Ten others had life prison sentences, three had 20-year terms and four faced sentences of twelve years. In fact, many hundreds of men and women, throughout Spain, had their sentences of death commuted after months of painful uncertainty. In many cases this leniency' was possible because the original sentence had been questionable or obviously unwarranted. The surviving records of the Ma Âlaga women's prison bear this out.
Inherited' national and bodily`degeneration' in the period from the 1890s to the 1930s coincided with an accelerated development of medical specialisms like eugenics, neurology, endocrinology, gynaecology, paediatrics, forensics, criminology and psychiatry. 20 At the same time, women and particularly the urban poor were making increasing demands on the state. Doctors and criminologists contributed to theses about the moral and debilitating dangers to the physical and mental `caste' or`stock' presented by urban life. 21 In psychiatric theory and practice, degenerationism was associated with the avowedly anticlerical French school of Jean-Martin Charcot in the 1870s and 80s, 22 and the concept of hysteria in Spain had been captured by liberal and progressive theorists and practitioners by the turn of the century who were often critical of the deleterious effects of religion: Hysterical women are very commonly beatas [devout women or lay sisters]. In their confessor they do not seek a pardon for their sins, but one more person upon whom to vent their complaints.' 23 Overtly Catholic doctors were occasionally less ready to accept openly the category of hysteria, precisely because it tended to be negatively associated with religious women and their`mysticism'. 24 One essay on`hygiene of the intelligence' by the head of the Spanish Central Laboratory of Legal Medicine and director of the Spanish Society of Hygiene, published in 1898, sought a national regeneration in the relationship between the physical and the moral in men and women. The weakest nations, he argued, would be those where women had most autonomy:`degradation' was produced bỳ functionally mutilated' and`feminised' men and`masculine women', where promiscuity compensated for an absence of masculine personality. The blend of biology and temperament which was the human constitution could not be cast aside and forgotten. Woman had`to be female [hembra] all her life, or at least during all of her sexual life . . . sweet, patient, resigned, full of abnegation . . . proper virtues of her sex'. The moral antidote represented by woman's maternity was partially in her care for the education of future generations, not in renouncing marriage in order to become independent, manly and knowledgeable. More essentially, her infecundity was`a crime against nature', a kind of anaesthetisation of femininity, which could only with great reluctance be pardoned by her taking religious vows. This psychosexual vision, curiously admired by the nineteenth-century high priest of Spanish Catholic nationalism, Marcelino Mene Ândez y Pelayo, was argued not from the position of orthodox Catholicism but with the aid of Rousseau and Charcot's theory of hysteria and psychological`excitation'. 25 During the Spanish Civil War, although both men and women would be tried under the rubric of`military rebellion', one of the principal political charges against women was`excitacio Ân a la rebelio Ân' or`excitacio Ân militar' (Article 240), coupling a psychological concept with 21  crime, whereas men tended to be accused of the less emotional and more activist crime of`agitation'. Women were construed as both being more prone tò excitation' and of constituting the metaphorical`psychic centres' which`excited' the whole body of the nation. 26 Opposition to the liberal concept of morality and biology was formally located in militarist±Catholic nationalism, although, again, important similarities with`freethinking' notions revolved around gender. The military±religious kinship was supposedly traceable to myths of the Reconquista, but was not static. The glorious Africanista cultural codes of heroism, bravery, grandeur, the`gentlemanly' protection of women which`lifted them out of vice', and the nationalist crusading mentality shaped the views of Spanish military mental doctors who were formed in the shadow of the 1914 war and German organicism. This military group was associated with the organic, histological Madrid school of psychiatry. The Madrid school had, since around the time of the First World War, gained the upper hand from Barcelona, where theory and practice, exempli®ed in the work of Emilio Mira Lo Âpez (1896±1964), an early Spanish exponent of psychoanalysis, had, by contrast, a strong psychological direction. 27 The Africanista mentality rhetorically interwove militarism, patriotism and God in a spiritual world-view to extinguish the primitive instincts of luxury and materialism, germs attacking the morality of the nation, severely at odds with the dictates of austerity and sacri®ce. 28 Though this credo ®tted well with orthodox Catholicism, it was not peculiar to Spanish military culture. Germanic infusions, from the late nineteenth century, contributed to making militarism a relatively modernising force within Spanish nationalism. To pro-German militarists, the Great War had produced a misery and disgrace of patriotic spirit across Europe that was related to mass psychoses and mental disequilibrium. Women had been made`slaves of the factory', free rein had been granted to personal, endogenous reactions (like hysteria) and psychopathic cruelty had been justi®ed ideologically by`the doctrine of social crime'. 29 While criminologists were cradled by Italian positivism, virtually all Spanish psychiatrists of the ®rst half of the twentieth century, and not least military psychiatrists, were steeped in German organic psychiatry (many eventually ®nding a circuitous way to Freudian thought via biology as a result). 30 Distinctions between racial and mental hygiene and between neurology (neurosis) and psychiatry 26  (psychosis) were to be complicated and conditioned by the German experience of trench warfare, and seemed con®rmed by Spain's experience of war in Morocco in the 1920s. 31 In Spain, as elsewhere, human classi®cation was pursued, during the pre-Civil War decades, through physical and mental`bio-types'. The typology and methodology formulated by the German organic psychiatrist and professor at the University of Marburg, Ernst Kretschmer (1888±1964), outlined in his in¯uential post-First World War study, Physique and Character, was the principal theory employed in the Civil War tests. 32 Kretschmer's immanently gendered theory was a treatise on the relationship of bodily constitution to character. Dispositions towards pathological states and behaviour were bound up with an individual's`whole inherited groundwork' ± the cellular and humoral elements of the body ± though Kretschmer also insisted on the environmental adaptability of this relationship. 33 He began by famously identifying three basic body types and associating them with particular temperaments: ®rst, the`Pykniker', or`globular', bodily ®gure of man and woman, whom tests showed to be prone to an extrovert temperament and, therefore, predisposed to cyclothymic disorders like manic-depression; second, thè spindle-shaped' man or woman or`leptosome'; and third, the so-called`athletic' body. Both of these latter types were linked to an introverted temperament, and therefore, according to Kretschmer, to schizophrenic conditions and a`coldness of the affective life'. 34 Kretschmer's thesis was most rapidly taken up in Spain by the psychiatrist, Jose Â Marõ Âa Sacrista Ân, director of the women's section of the private sanatorium-asylum of San Jose Â at Ciempozuelos, south of Madrid, in the 1920s, where Vallejo-Na Âgera was later director. 35 Unlike his better-known contemporary Emil Kraepelin, Professor of Psychiatry in Munich, who believed that political doctrines in¯uenced mental sickness and who saw crime as a social disease, Kretschmer did not identify left-wing extremism as a particular psychological problem, though his work was later exploited by the Nazis. 36 Building on breakthroughs made in the decade prior to the Great War, Kretschmer stressed endocrine formation, seeing the glandular complex and hormonal secretions as the ultimate stronghold of the chemistry of the body. 37 This is of signi®cance when looking at Spain, because endocrinology had been a particularly advanced specialism by the 1930s thanks to the work of Gregorio Maran Äo Ân (1887±1960). Maran Äo Ân was reviled by orthodox Catholic doctors for his political liberalism rather than his scienti®c argumentation. Meanwhile, somè spiritualist' fascists continued to resist explaining human acts scienti®cally`through chemical reactions', and emphasised human`values'. 38 From his protracted study of endogenous constitutional and endocrine elements and of exogenous`cosmic' elements, Maran Äo Ân theorised that masculinity and femininity were not opposed entities, but successive degrees in the development of a single evolution. 39 (In the 1920s Maran Äo Ân controversially pursued organotherapy, including testicular grafts, for`intersexual conditions'. He was the only signi®cant Spanish doctor to meet Sigmund Freud.) His theory admitted a phase of undifferentiated sex as the normal starting point for all human beings. This was controversial, and during the Civil War Maran Äo Ân was accused in Ma Âlaga of having republicanised Spanish women'. 40 The importance of the theory here is that evolution`from the feminine to the masculine' was traced not only anatomically but also psychologically. 41 Women's physical and mental evolution was`arrested' at the threshold of puberty when a corresponding maternal development was acquired. Feminine qualities of hypersensitivity, tenderness, spirit of self-sacri®ce, and`a conservative tendency', were propitious for maternity, the biological and social end par excellence of the female sex. Maternal woman's eroticism was blunted and her libido less intense, because in women these were used simply as means to reproduction and`not as terminal objectives as in men'. Only with the decline of ovulation is`progress' resumed. The female prototype of`voluptuousness' ± dark, corpulent, slightly hirsute, with a passionate temperament (`like Carmen') ± and thè polyandrous' type (who has frequent sexual partners) were`commonly sterile'. The eugenic and criminological implications of such treatises on endogenous constitution and temperament were, as those of the related Italian positivist criminology had been in the nineteenth century, refracted through Spaniards' ideology and theology, rather than ever wholly rejected. 42 While historically the Civil War projects an image of well-de®ned divisions sundering virtually every social sphere, the reality was more complex. There existed a level of commonality in several political camps in such ®elds as psychiatry and criminology that occasionally stretched even to the political extremes.`Anti-positivist' medical doctors who de®ned themselves primarily as Catholics were fearful of`socially destructive',`materialist' ideas which dismissed the hierarchy of body and soul. But those who conducted the Civil War research described here, like some of their Republican counterparts, hovered, theoretically speaking, between`treatment' for constitutionally determined or`materialist' deviancy and punishment for immorality and evil. 43 The post-First World War location of unsocial behaviour in alienation, mental abnormality and anomalous weaknesses of the constitution were famously corroborated by the Belgian criminologist Louis Vervaeck, who concluded that`biological individuality' was the preponderant factor in criminal aetiology, and others, such as the`post-positivist' Italian criminologist, Salvador Ottolenghi, who worked on the endocrine dysfunctions which were part of the`constitutional sickness' leading to criminality. 44 Ideas of anthropometric calibration and`curing'`diseased' delinquents, in preference to a policy of`vengeful coercion', cross-fertilised with similar work in Spain which traversed political boundaries. 45 Republican penal reformers employed and developed some of this in the early 1930s in legislating for`social defence', 46 and the Republican Anti-Vagrancy law (Ley de Vagos y Maleantes), of 4 August 1933, was repressively employed into the Francoist era, against, for example, hungry and `degenerate' country women who stole fruit from the ®elds, though this legislation was supplemented under Franco by a barrage of other measures of social control. 47 The broad issue of eugenics, so fatal in the German postwar experience, was central to political debate in the Spain of the 1920s and 30s between Catholics, who saw the family as the ultimate social bedrock, and so-called`neo-Malthusian' reformers. 48 Catholic doctors distanced themselves from Nazi extremism by following the strictures of the papal encyclical, Casti Connubi (December 1930). They upheld marriage as a means to the sancti®cation of man and were against the control of births and the`negative eugenics' of sterilisation and abortion, which were a function of the over-bearing state and, for instance, allowed women freedom to work outside the home. They equivocated, however, about`positive' measures of`moral eugenics' to regulate`healthy' marriages and guard against the hereditary transmission of mental and social`defects'. 49 As in Mussolini's Italy, Franco's victory eugenics and Catholic-inspired policies of pro-natalism and maternology overlapped with little dif®culty, although they were discussed in the language of`moral and racial hygiene'. 50 These issues were also taken up and discussed in the pages of the conservative intellectual review, Accio Ân Espan Äola (AE), founded in 1931 as a rallying point for anti-Republican thought, and modelled on Charles Maurras' Action Franc Ëaise, with its call for rule by an`aristocracy' of`intelligence and the Sword'. According to the Spanish organisation's most recent historian, its professed doctrinal debt to the Inquisition, and its general tendency towards Catholic determinism in its intellectual output suggests a less secularised range of opinion than its French counterpart. 51 This`traditionalist' argument does not wholly ®t with the injection of counterrevolutionary positivism in AE, represented by several articles on such themes as medical science, racial improvement, revolutionary constitution and psychology, modern warfare and defence, technology, the corporate economy, and Fascism, which gave a modernist edge to the nationalist, Catholic±moral, spiritual±essentialist aura of AE and its leading light, Ramiro de Maeztu. 52 State institutions in the Spain of the 1930s were highly centralised but did not extend effectively across society. Although a relatively developed medical and penal institutional framework existed, material resources and an infrastructure to implement psychiatric reform were lacking. When Gonzalo Lafora, director of the newly established Consejo Superior Psiquia Âtrico, visited the Ma Âlaga public asylum in late 1931, he found`an enormous mass' of patients, effectively in custody, without bread to eat, living from whatever non-mental patients in the main Hospital Civil left. Many were naked, sleeping on the¯oor or outside on verandas. 53 Measures taken by the Republican administration on the conditions of committal, reclusion, treatment and discharge of patients in asylums and to professionalise psychiatry were not well resourced and were generally ineffective. 54 The war forced most of those doctors who had sided with the Republican government into exile, thereby debilitating modernising impulses. In the end, policy as developed to deal with the problems presented by the Civil War settled for penal pragmatism', a rhetorical compromise, which balanced the spiritual requirements of Francoism's moral order with the fait accompli of what modern science explained as the biological order. This unconvincing conciliation between tradition and modernity was encapsulated in what became propagandised as Catholic Spain's great contribution to modern penal doctrine: the Patronato Central para la Redencio Ân de Penas por el Trabajo, which imposed disciplinary labour on thousands of prisoners (both men and women) from 1938, as a means to personal redemption and to a gradual remission of sentences. It was the closest that the state came to a kind of mass therapeutics in a society which lacked permanent biopsychological penal clinics. Within a mental structure of repentance and expiation, work was enshrined as the inevitable punishment for sin. 55 Feminine bodily weakness was the counterpart of masculine punishment through manual labour. Castigation for original sin was biologically con®rmed. But women prisoners could still redeem themselves through virtuous female activities, like religious classes, nursing the sick and household tasks ± washing¯oors or cleaning toilets, as women in Ma Âlaga  The psychiatrists claimed that many had not been willing to overcome this situation and`ascend in the social hierarchy through work'. Since most had employment, it was said that they could not have been drawn to the revolution through hunger. 58 In fact, the three pesetas daily which the best-paid women textile workers in Ma Âlaga were able to contribute to the family economy in the 1930s, at a time of rising unemployment, economic dislocation and shortages, would only narrowly, if at all, prevent a catastrophic fall from poverty to destitution. Social±spatial marginality was also de®ned by a north±south divide in the city. Chaotic and speculative expansion spread northwards as well as westwards with the crisis of subsistence in the countryside. A further sixty-two (35 per cent) women prisoners lived in this zone, now to the east of the river, in the area around La Goleta, to the north of the historic city centre and the calle Carreterõ Âa, which formed a recognised social barrier. The effects of poverty were obvious. Three hundred children in the city died before reaching one year in 1931, and nine hundred per year were dying before the age of ®ve. The general mortality rate in Trinidad in 1930 was almost four times that of the middle-class district of the 57 E.g. Amanecer, 6/7 January 1933. 58 PFM1, 175.
Alameda. 59 By 1931, begging had reached`plague' proportions and mendicancy was increasingly theorised and criminalised. 60 By the time of the inauguration of the Second Republic it was estimated that 50,000 people were dependent on the special sanitary assistance of the municipal authorities, although provision was rudimentary and did not remotely cover needs. 61 The respectable city was, therefore, enclosed by`dark forces' to the west and north. According to the records, the remainder of the Civil War prisoners lived in pockets of marginality, such as the poor worker district of El Palo at the far eastern end of the city along the coast (7.3 per cent), or in rudimentary home-made settlements by the water's edge, or shacks on the dry river bed under the city bridges, or on the`camino Antequera', connoting temporary dwellings, at the extremities of the most unhygienic zones of the city, along the westward extension of Trinidad, where livings were made through various forms of prostitution. Pilar VE, a forty-year-old woman from Ma Âlaga, ought to have dedicated herself to`sus labores' (literally,`her labours'), meaning housework and care of a family, so the Military Court proclaimed, but was living on the beach in 1937 when she was detained. Subsequently she was denounced as being a`leftist' and was reported to have supported anticlerical incendiary assaults on her parish church in the Republican years prior to the Civil War, later`displaying happiness' at killings and, like other women, of`celebrating' the expulsion of religious from convents and ecclesiastical residences. She received a sentence of six years for`excitacio Ân' and was suspended from holding any public or private employment, of®ce, or having any right to aid, assistance or suffrage. Her case, as was automatic for political convicts until 1942, was referred to the Court of Political Responsibilities for the possible order of reparations and con®scation of her property and that of her family. 62 The pre-Civil War intellectual activities of Eduardo M. Martõ Ânez, head of the health service of the provincial prison and director of its Psychiatric Clinic, who assisted Vallejo in the Ma Âlaga study (and may have instigated it), were pursued amid the increasingly politicised atmosphere of pro-amnesty protests, riots and incendiary violence in the divided city. His publications included a work on the`bio-psychic study of the delinquent', an essay on the`psychopathology of incurable delinquents', and a study of the creation of anthropological laboratories in penitentiaries, although, he observed somewhat ambiguously, modern criminal asylums could not house`the crowd of perennial disrupters of social tranquillity', which existed`in an intermediate zone between abnormality and madness'. 63 During the early months of the war, in the summer and early autumn of 1936, as the Republican authorities of the city attempted to regain control, the Ma Âlaga penitentiary was besieged on several occasions in response to Nationalist bombing raids, which killed many women and children and were so thunderous as to make the walls of the prison tremble, although it was situated some distance from the centre of the city. Those deemed to have supported the military rising of 18 July, mainly middle-class business people, local politicians, and military and religious personnel, had been imprisoned, and many were taken to be executed by the crowd, accompanied by women and children from working class barrios,`satisfying their cruelty and common instincts'. 64 Eduardo Martõ Ânez had been tolerated as prison medical of®cer during the seven months of revolutionary Republican jurisdiction in the city. He had witnessed mass executions carried out before what he described as a`baying, clapping and unconscious multitude, animalised by the bestiality of the moment', and had had to certify the deaths of the victims. 65 The violence of the Nationalist occupation of the city, re-establishing the former social equilibrium, was more ordered and extensive than the revolutionary violence of the left. The`sickly bride' which was Ma Âlaga would now be`cured'. Amid funerals for those killed during the period of`Popular Justice' in the early months of the war, summary Councils of War began for political crimes committed by thè badly born' (mal nacidos). The local Francoist state political party, the Falange, called for denunciations of`the criminal low-life' which had`by commission or omission, bloodied the streets of Ma Âlaga', and the Civil Governor threatened ®nes for anyone intervening on behalf of those detained. In an era of martyrdom there was no place for sentimentalism. 66 Denunciations and vengeful stories, reports by Falangist of®cials on public and private conduct, by priests on degrees of religiosity and repentance, and by Daughters of Charity on levels of culture, rather than evidence as such, formed the basis of military trials. The records which remain to us, partial and fragmentary though they are, show that at least ®fty-®ve Republican women were executed in the city of Ma Âlaga, two of them by garrote vil, a brutal form of strangulation. 67 Women's anticlerical violence seemed incomprehensible, as the military courts and other authorities commented, since`these kinds of women', even those who declared themselves to have`no religion', had always taken an emotional part in and been excited by the Holy Week processions of the many invocations of the Virgin in the city in the years before the Republic. The procession of the Confraternity of the Santõ Âsimo Cristo de la Expiracio Ân and the Holy Virgin of Sorrows, from the Perchel parish church of St Peter, always amazed those present, with the Magdalen at the feet of the Saviour and the elegant Virgin so dark,`like a Perchel woman' on her redoubtable throne, and the sound of ejaculatory saetas (sung prayers in¯amenco style) from kneeling singers, and the perfume of incense ®lling the air. It was dif®cult to explain how many of these same women who applauded the perennial rites at Easter could within a few weeks participate in the destruction of churches and burnings of the processional treasures they guarded. 68 This incomprehension relates to the duality of purity and impurity in the ideological construction of potential threats to Catholic Spain, as a comparison of racial with sexual differences may con®rm. During the Rif wars of the 1920s, virtually the only ®ghting men who displayed`hysterical reactions', somewhat likè nervous tendencies' in women, according to military psychiatrists, were`Moors.' This was due to their`primitive personalities' and consequent lack of conscience. They were oblivious to the complexities of the modern world, like`solid blocks', devoid of interior life, in perpetual communication with the external world and had`the nervous system of animals'. 69 As in the ambiguous interpretation of Moorish`sedimentation' in the Spanish`race', in women there lurked an irrepressible attraction simultaneous with a dread fear which was expressed psychologically.
The dirt, misery and`hatreds' of the popular barrios of the industrial city resided beside images of the most typical quarters, Perchel and Trinidad, and most prominently their women, as the`real representation of the Andalucõ Âan soul', with its`peculiar purity' (casticismo). In this combination of the pure and the impure, certain dangerous areas of the city seemed to represent a kind of exaggerated, voluptuous femininity:`the woman of castiza Perchel, with beautiful eyes, bloodred lips, heart of ®re, body of pagan Goddess . . .', Perchel,`heart and pride of Ma Âlaga . . . cradle of its poetry, of its beauty [majeza] and elegance [garbo]'. 70 This duality was re¯ected in bio-criminology. Physical and sexual infantilism were linked to criminality, as they were associated by Clavero Nun Äez, in a 1940 study, with`extraordinary psychic suggestibility, fabulations, fear, lying and negativism'. More maternal feminine anatomies produced`joyful optimism, untiring industry, satisfaction and intensely deeply felt enjoyment with the spouse, children and things of the home, and a great tolerance for suffering and a disposition to sacri®ce, self-assuredness with nothing of envy . . .'. The`erotic behaviour' of these feminine bodies was also usually`normal'. Meanwhile, women stigmatised with virile features' tended to feign maternal sentiments as a way of escaping their sexual ambivalence. However, characteristics of sexual masculinity abounded in prostitutes 68  and criminal women, it was claimed, in`paradoxical combination within feminine physical and psychological characters'. 71 Thus, danger lurked even within the seemingly harmless, like women of religious faith, who could be merely`spiritual' without being genuinely`pious'. Lower-class women's apparent religiosity was a ritual display of exaggerated paganism:`a violent and unconscious manifestation of a sentiment of frustration': the irritation of repressed desire. Ownership of such displays was coveted, it was argued, but was out of reach and would always appear as strange and distant from the way of life of the people. 72 A related argument was that both apparent expressions of religiosity and anticlerical violence were simply forms of innate female fanaticism. But the predominant view was that religion, at least in middle-class women, was an essentially calming in¯uence. Vallejo-Na Âgera maintained that study of the`criminal pathological form' during the Civil War con®rmed`the feminine cruelty of woman' when she had lost her religious sentiments and`operates exclusively stimulated by her natural tendencies'. 73 Of 290 women still recorded in Ma Âlaga prison, sentenced for political crimes related to the Civil War, 189 (over 65 per cent) are described, occupationally, as dedicated to`sus labores' (the term`su casa' ±`her house' ± was occasionally used, and more often,`su sexo'). This ®tted the accepted image of virtuous womanhood, but many almost certainly worked in further ways to help feed the family. Some were factory workers, in textiles or tobacco, for example, a possibly militant status which women may not have wanted to divulge. 74 Twenty-two of the sample were declared as textile workers in some way: as`dressmakers', bleachers or press operators, and some as outworkers. One thirty-seven-year-old mother of four children sewed curtains at home, and attended left-wing meetings and was known to be`talkative', and to`encourage the rebels'. She was sentenced to six years' imprisonment for`excitation of the rebellion' under article 240 of the Code of Military Justice. 75 Sixteen women are starkly described occupationally as`campo' (`countryside'), referring to farm labour of some kind and were possibly recently arrived in the city. Six were laundresses or washerwomen, four were teachers, and three were prostitutes. One midwife was detained in`preventive custody' for making`statements hostile to the Glorious National Movement', and another was imprisoned for organising meetings with nurses at the local headquarters of the socialist party, and giving shelter to`fugitives'. 76 A sixty-three-year-old woman who lived in the north of the city was claimed to be`a signi®cant extremist element', who`realised acts of occupation' in the house of a priest in the Alameda de Capuchinos, a little while after he was shot. 77 No evidence was produced or claim made that this woman was involved in the murder of the priest, and the housing and shelter of thousands of refugees in the ®rst months of the war possibly explains this occupation'. From July 1936 to February 1937 the bombed city's population had increased by some 15 per cent to around 212,000. Political activists, like Lina Molina, of the Comite Â Provincial of the Communist Party, who was director of the Ma Âlaga Republican supplies committee, found shelter for these 30,000 refugees, using all means possible including the conversion of convents and churches. A committee of voluntary women did what they could to keep order, and two proletarian committees attended to sanitation and provisioning. 78 A high proportion of female political prisoners in the city of Ma Âlaga (thirty-one of the sample from the prison archive) were household servants. (Of the ®fty women in the psychological tests of 1939, ®fteen were servants, the largest occupational group. Thirteen are listed as`hogar' [`home'], eight as factory workers, and three as`prostitutes'. 79 ) Many domestics were young women who were relatively newly arrived rural migrants. One seventeen-year-old maid living in El Palo was sentenced to twelve years in prison for`aiding the rebellion'. 80 Domestics were seen as`unattached', lacking education and religious training and drawn towards prostitution'. Their mental activity was absorbed, and their instinct for self-abnegation destroyed, by what one doctor, director of the prestigious medical review, Clõ Ânica y Laboratorio, described as the Republican period of`pre-Revolutionary sensuality', and infected by what another who practised in Ma Âlaga called the`Marxist virus'. 81 Maids were also drawn to feminism and`spiritualism', symptoms of a broader heterodox culture in the city. 82 These young women could be forgiven if they read and were confused by the ambiguous messages of the leading Republican mouthpiece of the early 1930s in Ma Âlaga, the daily newspaper El Popular, which tended to be critical of`capricious' and`frivolous' behaviour, like following fashion, which did`not correspond to women's moral and social condition', and argued that a woman could not acquirè grace' without`physical and mental equilibrium'. Women who had to earn their 77 She was sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment. APPM, EP, no. 349, C3, L2. 78  own sustenance, it argued, ought to dress with modesty and pay heed to intellectual and spiritual elevation:`Modernism yes, but this does not consist in frivolities. No serious man will come near women with poor taste.' 83 An embodiment of women's rising claims for autonomy in Ma Âlaga was the federalist and feminist politician Bele Ân Sa Ârraga. Little seems to be known about Sa Ârraga's local society for working women, which claimed a staggering 20,000 members in 1900, who were mainly`country women', but its in¯uence must have been considerable. 84 According to Falangists, writing after the Civil War, and referring to her prewar secular educational work on behalf of women,`the ®rst Marxist microbe was introduced into Ma Âlaga by Bele Ân Sa Ârraga and poisoned the workers who stoned the image of Christ'. 85 Meanwhile, the homesickness of domestics was interpreted as a`primitive psychological reaction'. 86 They were seen as particularly prone to`the psycho-physical intolerance and social inadaptability of the psychopath when faced with external stimulus': Everything', including, one supposes, political propaganda and hunger,`excites them'. 87 One young servant from La Goleta was reported by her employer, because, although she had been of`normal conduct and antecedents' before the war, she later announced that she had`joined the anarchists'. Afterwards she was supposed to have declared that the householders would probably be killed like many others because`if the situation had been the other way around, they would have been doing the killing'. 88 Another, who lived nearby and was a cook, was sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment for`aiding the rebellion'. Another had her death sentence for organising a domestic servants' union commuted to thirty years' imprisonment by the Head of State. 89 In the aftermath of the Civil War domestic servants were speci®cally targeted for religious education and spiritual exercises. 90 Feminist spiritualist groups, so the myths of danger in Ma Âlaga claimed, had signi®cant in¯uence in the worker barrios like Perchel, especially on those with particular psychopathic personalities and ethnic groups with their southern propensity towards fantasy inherited from the Arabs. One of the well-known spiritualist meeting houses, where, incidentally, food was distributed to the poor, was in the heart of the`infectious' working-class barrio of Trinidad. 91 According to Gustavo Garcõ Âa-Herrera, a native of Ma Âlaga and a medical doctor born in 1900, who, like Vallejo-Na Âgera, served in the army medical corps in Morocco, mediums were able to lose consciousness because they were`psychopathic',`hysterical personalities' and found a climate of suggestibility in hungry, diseased and overcrowded working class districts. 92 Spreading spiritualist ideas to the`barbarous',`semi-savage' suburbs of the city caused violent reactions among the`vulgar' women there, who, in their faces, revealed`the most complete ignorance and stupidity'. 93 More popular myths saw mediums as secularised counterparts to miraculous and protective invocations of the Virgin. The ®rst Holy Week celebrations in Ma Âlaga after the city's occupation by Francoist forces were reduced to a single procession of the Virgen de los Servitas in April 1937. It was silenced and darkened when artillery ®re was heard during the proceedings, although some residents of Perchel had already been reassured by a medium that they had nothing to fear, as the Virgin interceded with different social groups to prevent wartime catastrophes. 94 Before the Civil War, however, the Virgin could appear in working-class districts, even in factories.
The Spanish Civil War studies politicised constitutional theory, postulating a relationship between a determined biopsychological personality and a`constitutional predisposition towards Marxism'. They consisted of clinico-psychological typi®cation and bio-metric investigation: detailed measurements of, for example, the length, breadth and depth of the skull, the genitals, the distance between the eyes, the length of the nose, and the abundance and placement of body hair, and descriptions of skin colour, indicating any`morphological stigmatisation'. 95 The Neymann-Kohlstedt`introversion test', using spoken responses, and the Marston personality-rating system, were used together to identify the type of primary temperamental reaction of subjects, sorting them into the`introverted' and extroverted'. 96 The 1921 Robert M.Yerkes revision of the Binet-Simo Ân (mental age) intelligence scale, which in other contexts was notorious for ignoring social factors when labelling groups, such as blacks in the US Army, as`inferior', was used to ®nd the`intellectual coef®cient' of each subject.
The`fundamental qualities of moral activity' of each specimen were gauged by completion of a 200±item questionnaire with information about family, sexual, political, religious and military antecedents. These were based on interrogations introduced in Nazi-run centres of biological±criminal investigation, principally in Munich, which graded political prisoners and racial enemies according to the Kretschmerian`biological±hereditary inventory' which enabled the`spatial circumscription' of particular groups. 97 First there was investigation of the`family tree', including parents and siblings, with questions referring to drunkenness, criminality, social position, economic wellbeing, spiritual predispositions and state of mind, and to characterological properties such as temperament, level of education, types of psychic reaction and familial conduct. Other`anomalies' of the family, such as pauperism', emigration, illegitimacy, economic crises and mental illness, were minutely annotated. Questions referring to the record of the female parent as housewife and mother ± miscarriages or abortions, her reputation in the neighbourhood, her moral and educating qualities and her inclination to controversy and to adorning her person completed this part of the process. Using these data, the roots of the lamentable conditions from which the ®fty Ma Âlaga women prisoners were said to be suffering would be`established' as hereditary and`genetic'. Among the parents, siblings and other blood relations of the subjects were a high proportion of mentally sick',`psychopaths',`criminals',`bigots',`vagrants',`homosexuals',`alcoholics' and`suicides'. Many were`revolutionaries' or`non-Catholics', and this in a country that had`struggled for Catholicism' and whose racially`select' had been esteemed as Catholics. According to results from the Neymann-Kohlstedt test, thirty-six of these women (72 per cent) had`degenerative temperaments'. Some revealed defects which were the`collateral inheritance of schizoid or cycloid bases', but most were drawn to`hysteroid criminality', a category not used in the male studies. 98 The next section dealt with prisoners' own education, religiosity, propensity towards begging, theft, alcohol, work, family break-ups, conduct during military service (in the case of men), marriage, children (antecedents, state of mind, criminality of spouse and children), health (from childhood), type of behaviour when inebriated and personal attitudes towards crime. The Yerkes/Binet-Simon tests revealed that half of the group were of`inferior' or`weak' intelligence; 80 per cent were of a`low' cultural level or`illiterate'; 38 per cent had received no schooling at all. 99 The`social personality' of the subjects con®rmed the ideological presuppositions of the doctors. Only eleven (22 per cent) had`normal' female personalities, which meant`being moral', working, living a social life without con¯icts, being non-delinquent, and not given to`sexual perversity', kept on the path of virtue by piety, maternity and constitutional weakness. Thirteen were`born revolutionaries', a variant of the questionable positivist category of`innate crimin- ality'. These women instinctively sought to overturn the social order because of the congenital peculiarities of their bio-psychic constitutions. Four others were labelled as`congenitally immoral', although the distinction between this and`born revolutionaries' is not explained. 100 Twelve were described as`anti-social psychopaths', à plague' category that Vallejo believed could be identi®ed society-wide, under an authoritarian government, and its sufferers`segregated' during infancy. 101 The others (ten) were part of the multitude of uncultivated, crude,`suggestible beings', lacking spontaneity or initiative,`who form the majority of anonymous people', and were condemned as`social' or`moral' imbeciles'. 102 The questionnaire ®nishes with a description of general characteristics, clinical analysis of the nervous system, signs of degeneration and hormonal assessment. Vallejo and his colleagues decried any attempt to explore the relationship of delinquency to sexuality, and were reluctant to make physical examinations of the Ma Âlaga women because of the`impurity of their surroundings'. This did not prevent them from concluding that there were substantial peculiarities about women's violence related to sex. They investigated the age and circumstances of loss of virginity and enquired about male and female`sexual perversions'.`Anomalies of sexual development' and`morphological stigmatisation' were particularly common among criminals. Male delinquents, for example, showed frequent signs of femininity and either of sexual infantilism or`hypersexualism'. 103 Superior psychological qualities had been overtaken by the`hyperexcitability' of`infantilism' and base instinct. Political revolts allowed women to`satisfy their latent sexual appetites'. 104 A contemporary study of one hundred prostitutes housed in the Clõ Ânica de Proteccio Ân a la Mujer in Madrid during 1939±41, using the same basic methodology, concluded that 60 per cent had mental and criminal antecedents where`the instinctive life predominates'. 105 In`red women', it was found, an`unnatural' active sexuality was opposed to maternity. 106 Gregorio Maran Äo Ân, as we have seen, also posed sexuality negatively in relation to maternity, though he had also prescribed a social re-evaluation of`conscious motherhood', within a framework of economic reform, as a kind of social prophylactic. 107 The`red woman' also symbolised the impulsive, passionate and`feminine' multitude in general, whatever its sex. This`multitude' was distinguished from`the soul' of the nation (`the masses'), on account of its`infantile hyperexcitability', possessing inferior physical and psychological features ± a`pathological sickness', with`many points of contact' with the`psyche' of children and animals. While`the masses' (the`fascist' zone) reacted psychologically with masculine qualities such as order, discipline and labour, the suggestible`multitude' displayed only`licentiousness, voluptuousness, indiscipline and crime'. 108 The Marxist women of Ma Âlaga were accused of being`united with the crowd' which committed revolutionary murders, anticlerical destruction, bodily mutilations, and necrophagous acts (literally,`feeding' on dead bodies, though here it referred to`venting anger' upon bodies, taunting and jeering, and encouraging their display). Primarily they were accused generically of`animating men' to disorder and the`excitation' of revolution. This ambiguity of responsibility is underlined by the inclusion of crimes such as`Marxist af®liation', and labelling women as`revolutionaries'. They seem more often than not to have been members of no political party, although some joined the Communist women's Mujeres Antifascistas. Other transgressions were wearing the distinctive,`masculine', blue overall (the`mono' 109 ), typical uniform of the militia-woman, inciting others to declare themselves against fascism', and making negative statements about Nationalist generals. It is a feature of the summary hearings, which implicitly recognised that a broad range of women's activities were, in some sense, political, that women were accused for their community association outside the orbit of the family, of deleterious activities in groups. Some were simply`habladoras', a somewhat ambiguous label which can implỳ great talkativeness', or`gossips', maliciously transposed as`oral propaganda'. 110 Others attended revolutionary meetings, acts and demonstrations,`pressing the rebels towards the commission of excesses and outrages'. 111 A ®fty-four-year-old woman was tried by a Ma Âlaga Military Court for being a`Red' who assiduously attended the local socialist meeting house, the Casa del Pueblo, and public political meetings. 112 A sixty-two-year-old woman from El Palo was the mother of à known criminal of the city' and was sentenced to six years imprisonment. 113 Another woman had`distinguished herself during the Marxist domination by her manifestations and phrases encouraging the extermination of persons of order, plotting the perpetuation of registros (searching of houses), and making up insulting verses . . . inciting with her words the commission of violent outrages'. 114 Another was sentenced to death for the profanation of bodies. She was accused of having wretched antecedents and conduct' and of being`an active communist and propagandist of dissolute ideas' and of having taken part in the sacking of homes and the destruction of a church and the burning of its sacred objects. Of`maximum social danger' and`perverse instincts whose monstrosity is beyond human conscience . . . [including] the re®ned profanation of cadavers', she`incited' the killing of enemies. Later, in this case, the death sentence was commuted by Franco to life imprisonment and an amnesty was conceded in 1945, liberty being granted ®nally in 1946. 115 No explicit connection was made between such acts (whether they were stories or not) as urinating upon dead bodies and the multiple popular superstitions about bodily substances, excretions, the devil, or the healing power of dead bodies in Andalucõ Âa. 116 They were re¯exively translated in terms of`danger', as if symptoms of a plague carried by the swarms of¯ies that infested the working class barrios. Another woman, a ®fty-seven-year-old widow, who`incited' her son to military rebellion, for which he was executed by Nationalist forces, was considered hugely dangerous' because of the`sexual nature' of her`profanation and ridicule' of the body of a dead victim of the Republicans. Her death sentence was commuted to a prison sentence of thirty years, although she was eventually granted Conditional Liberty as part of a partial amnesty in December 1943, having, it was noted, redeemed three months of her sentence by passing the`Curso elemental de Religio Ân'. 117 Other women were condemned for visiting the sites of execution of rightists during the war, as female onlookers had been in revolutionary France. 118 A thirty-year-old woman with four children, married to a man at the Republican front, was denounced for showing support for the Republican ®ghters as they passed through in lorries bound for the war. When the city fell, she left and did not return voluntarily thereafter. 119 Of the women made the subject of the psychiatric study in Ma Âlaga, 62 per cent (thirty-one women) were`guilty' purely of`inciting' anti-Nationalist sentiments, by supporting left-wing or Republican political groups. They were, in the majority of cases, not sentenced for acts of violence at all. 120 Revolutionary power and military occupation produce possibilities for experimentation on enemies, although organised military authority is usually more systematic than mass violence. This was true of the Civil War in Ma Âlaga, where`communist experimentation' existed in the sense of an improvised and bloody attempt to create a new social order. Given the nature of Catholic nationalism and medical and military cultures in Spain, it is not surprising that in the Nationalist psychiatric studies revolutionary conduct was almost exclusively viewed through ideas about morality and biology, or that conclusions were highly coloured by sex and gender. In contrast, it was possible to look at the same events by concentrating on the sociopsychological dynamics of revolutionary behaviour. The head of the wartime Republican psychiatric services (Vallejo-Na Âgera's counterpart), Emilio Mira, who was exiled after the war, attempted to explain the revolution both historically and psychologically. It was within this context, rather than in the realm of`disordered' constitution or sexuality, that each individual revolutionary was`created', according 115  to Mira. 121 Collective existential crises, associated with social change or growth, demand that all oppressive structures and organisations be periodically thrown off. Just as earthquakes and¯oods erupt under pressure, causing abrupt mutations of the natural environment, men and women experienced psychological changes affecting their collective consciousness. Revolutionary violence was analogous to, though not caused by, the disappearance of infantile features during the human crisis of puberty, ultimately leading to maturity.
To Mira, revolutionary violence was not a problem of defective bodily constitution or primarily of public order, but the result of a long collective psychological process. Neither a simple moral criterion nor a rigid physiological classi®cation could be applied. The intimate sense of social revolution was a realisation of disequilibrium and non-conformity: affective currents of collective aspirations towards justice, which could only be satisfactorily expressed with spectacular gestures. It was simply unreasonable, according to Mira, to require the dominion of the conscious mind over the unconscious' within the revolutionary masses. While Nationalists spoke in static moral terms about the dichotomy of`order and chaos' (the`cosmic order' in so-called`times of peace'), Mira, by contrast, persuaded his audience to think in dynamic terms of the habitual order and the other as a new morality.
Mira also makes a distinction in types of revolutionary behaviour between that which is`lived' during the revolution, that`lived' from the revolution, and that which lives the revolution and is part of its`all'. This scheme is problematic, since`the revolution' is never satisfactorily de®ned, although the theory does at least recognise that far from all Republicans were`moral'. It also goes some way towards limiting the deterministic effects of separating the psyche from human agency and politics. But here Mira does not entirely succeed. The determined revolutionary, he postulates, suffers a psychological restructuring, apparently because of his beliefs or due to the charisma of a political leader, and is thrown into a state of transcendence, above equanimity and judgement, where the law of`all or nothing' reigns. However, the collective response to isolation, encirclement and imminent defeat by early 1937 in Ma Âlaga must have produced a state of panic and despair which was only fuelled by stories of the violence of the advancing Nationalist forces and by hunger. 122 The compression of time and distance which Mira reasonably perceives as in¯uencing the behaviour of the revolutionary is unlikely simply to have been the result of a`revolutionary' acceleration of endogenous psychical processes, but primarily an experience of material, exogenous pressures: the struggle for survival.
The war initially had seen a rise in the incidence of reactive or endogenous 121 Resume Â of a paper presented at the Institut, curso 1937±38, Emilio Mira,`Psicologõ Âa de la conducta revolucionaria', Universidad de La Habana, 26±27 (September±December 1939), 43±59. Mira was ®rst professor of psychiatry at the Auto Ánoma University in Barcelona, and head of the Institut Psicote Ácnic of the Generalitat of Catalunya, in the 1930s. 122 The Acting British Consul in Ma Âlaga reported as early as September 1936 that there was a¯ood of refugees and wounded, and that the insurgents were generally expected to occupy the city in three or four days. PRO/FO927/14, 15/30 September 1936. psychoses, though this was most evident in the ®rst months of the con¯ict and the rise levelled off once`the constructive phase of the revolution was initiated'. 123 An increase in neuroses was also noted towards the end of the war, as food shortages in the cities became catastrophic and military occupation was imposed. 124 Indeed, the sometimes tragic effects of the female experience of`social commotion' largely derived from women being closer to the struggle for daily survival heightened by war, as female activists in Ma Âlaga made clear. 125 When a twenty-one-year-old Perchel mother, married to a humble ®sherman, threw herself and her two tiny children from the rocky hillside of the Castillo del Gibralfaro, overlooking the city's port, in early August 1936, it was because of her agonised need of milk for her baby which she could not ®nd or produce, a desperation compounded by the war. 126 Political dissidents in Franco's Spain were not interned en masse in psychiatric hospitals, as in the Soviet Union. However, both systems related political attitudes to sickness and disorder, paradoxically in such diagnoses as`schizophrenia with religious delirium' or`Marxist mania'. 127 In Franco's Spain, as in Stalin's system, religious or quasi-religious attitudes and medical science contributed to the repressive political culture. It would be quite wrong to argue that all priests and doctors disinclined to support the Spanish Republic were somehow cruel and vindictive. But during and after the Civil War, Catholicism and pathology did provide parallel repressive linguistic and ethical frameworks, the one consisting of sin, punishment and redemption, and the other of infection, disease and cure. In the Civil War struggle for the nation, these vocabularies/mentalities became dominant, jostling and inter-acting with each other and pushing material social issues into the background of political discourse.
The gendering of morality in Civil War Spain was reinforced by a psychopathological conception of crime and revolution. Morality was also the basis of an imagined`new' Catholic-totalitarian community that pre-dated the con¯ict but was restated juridically by wartime divisions. This imagined sacred community's shaping of medical culture and biology was deduced from essentialist, totalising ideas, rather than from the individual and the individual's way of being. 128 Science could not be ignored, but it also could not be permitted to relativise the absolute gendered values of what would become the`New State'. Femininity, for example, did not merely follow glandular dictates. Neither was it a way of being which could be forged by a woman in whatever way she pleased. It was the product of a given spiritual environment acting on a given organic and temperamental base, evolving through time:`Femininity simply is, just as any value simply is', and if she is feminine, woman never ages spiritually'. 129 Psychiatric discourse and practice in Spain around the time of the Civil War revealed parallels in the relationship of organic psychiatry and bio-typologies to both liberalism and neo-Thomist Catholicism. Both medical science and Catholic doctrine could be exploited in declaring the indissolubility of gendered morality. The`biological roots' of conditions such as hysteria were linked to women's revolutionary behaviour. Where liberal and Catholic views differed was in their diverse attitudes to social conditions as a theoretical category of mental medicine and psychology. Catholic military doctors leaned heavily on a gendered psychological construction of women's moral culpability originating in nineteenth-century liberalism, while ignoring the material conditions of revolutionary conduct and social class. They reclaimed conservative gender traditions for the political right and coupled them to the Francoist crusade to`re-Christianise' Spain.