Lucía Sánchez Saornil (13 December 1895 – 2 June 1970), was a Spanish poet and anarcha-feminist activist, best known for co-founding the Mujeres Libres organisation together with Mercedes Comaposada and Amparo Poch y Gascón. Born into a working-class Madrilenian family, she taught herself from an early age and began writing poems for the burgeoning Futurist and Ultraist movements.
After the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931, she joined the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and became involved in the Spanish anarchist movement. She quickly became discouraged by the sexist attitude of men within the movement, deciding it necessary to form specific women's libertarian groups in order to organise for women's empowerment. She developed a program for such an organisation and, together with Comaposada and Poch y Gascón, established the Mujeres Libres, a nationwide organisation of anarchist feminists.
During the Spanish Civil War, she continued her work with the Mujeres Libres and also served as secretary of Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA), making frequent trips to the frontline and campaigning for international support for the Republicans. After the fall of Catalonia, she briefly fled into exile, before clandestinely returning to Francoist Spain and living out the rest of her life in hiding in Valencia.
Lucía Sánchez Saornil was born in Madrid, into a poor working-class family. She was self-taught and from a young age developed her talents as a poet, writing for journals of the Futurist movement. In 1916, she started work as a switchboard operator, at a time when women were beginning to become the sector's main work force.
Following the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931, Sánchez Saornil participated in a strike action against Telefónica, which first brought her into the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). She quickly came to consider that women's rights, theoretically achieved by the new republic, were still largely inaccessible to women, and started to advocate for women's empowerment through education. As an activist within the libertarian women's movement of Barcelona, Sánchez Saornil floated the idea of establishing a women's education organization to a number of trade unions, but she was rebuffed by each of them and decided to return to Madrid.
There she met Mercedes Comaposada, a law student at the University of Madrid. In 1933, the pair attended a meeting of the CNT. They had been invited there to act as "women teachers", but instead found themselves being silenced by their male comrades, who still viewed women negatively. Frustrated by the experience, they left the meeting early and began to discuss alternatives at the Retiro Park. At the time, Sánchez Saornil was working for a railway union and procured a list of anarcho-syndicalist women's groups. They wrote to these groups, inviting them to discuss their experiences and issues they were having, and ended up receiving responses from throughout Spain. By 1935, the ensuing exchange of letters between these groups had set the groundwork for a national network of libertarian women's organisations.
As the activity of these anarchist women's groups increased, Sánchez Saornil also began to contribute a number of articles about women's issues in the pages of the FAI's magazine Tierra y Libertad and the CNT's newspaper Solidaridad Obrera. In the latter, the CNT's general secretary Mariano R. Vázquez published two articles regarding women in the CNT. While he expressed his sympathies with women's struggles, he ended up insisting that women's liberation ought to be put aside until workers had won the class conflict. Sánchez Saornil responded with her own series of five articles titled "La cuestión femenina", which lay the groundwork for the establishment of a libertarian women's organization. She called for the creation of a women's liberation organisation ran by and for women. Her program suggested classes to raise women's literacy and education, apprenticeships in different sectors of industry, and groups for developing women's empowerment through consciousness raising.
These discussions set the groundwork for the establishment of the Mujeres Libres organisation, which Sánchez Saornil and Comaposada co-founded with the anarchist physician Amparo Poch y Gascón. This new anarchist feminist organisation set itself the goal of achieving women's liberation from their "triple enslavement" by ignorance, sexism and exploitation.
Within the organisation and as a writer for its homonymous magazine, Sánchez Saornil developed a reputation as a firebrand, a keen organiser and a powerful orator, reminding many libertarian women of the Parisian anarchist heroine Louise Michel. Sánchez Saornil wrote a number of articles for the Mujeres Libres journal, including an article on Castilian agricultural workers, intended to educate its readership in the big cities on rural life.
Following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Sánchez Saornil joined in the defense of Madrid, working as a front line journalist and propagandist for the anarchists. She began to utilise her poetry as a form of agitprop, writing a series of poems that played an important role in Republican cultural production. Her writing attracted the attention of the anarchist Emma Goldman, who corresponded frequently with Sánchez Saornil, inspiring her to coordinate an international campaign to support the Spanish revolution.
Sánchez Saornil moved to the Republican capital of Valencia, where she became an editor in the anarchist press. As the Republicans faced a worsening subsistence crisis, exacerbated by refugees from the Nationalist zone and an embargo by Britain and France, she publicised the situation and fundraised for the republican cause. She became the general secretary of Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA) and made regular supply trips to the front-line, along with other Mujeres Libres and women of the CNT. Part of the goal in the Mujeres Libres visiting the front was for them to educate the militiamen and to create a "conscientious and responsible female force". Sánchez Saornil herself said:
"This feminine force that we wish to create and that we are creating has, of course, a purpose and a political destiny much greater than sewing uniforms for militiamen or visiting the sick [...] These are immediate needs, required by the circumstances [...] Our organization has other more far-reaching goals that inform its principles and that must, at all times, guide its actions."
Sánchez Saornil and Comaposada also requested the recognition of the Mujeres Libres by the government of Francisco Largo Caballero. But the government refused, stating that as the Mujeres Libres was not a formal organisation with committees and officials, they couldn't recognise it. In response, in August 1937, the Mujeres Libres held its first national conference and reorganised itself into a national federation, based on the model of the CNT. But even after reorganising, the Mujeres Libres still lacked broader support from the anarchist movement. In December 1938, the Casal de la Dona Treballadora was evicted by police and repossessed by the Ministry of the Interior, who turned it over to the Bank of Spain. Although the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) responded to their requests for assistance, the CNT showed the Mujeres Libres little support. In a letter to the CNT's national committee, Sánchez Saornil wrote:
"It is a pity that you compañeros have always had so little time to acquaint yourselves with the valuable work of Mujeres Libres and that the consequence of this is the little interest you have shown in responding to our plea."
Sánchez Saornil also dismissed calls by the Communist-led Association of Antifascist Women to unite under their banner, as she believed the organisation was more than capable of continuing its direct action and consciousness raising without requiring standardisation within a state structure. She upheld the principle of unity in diversity, as she believed each women's organisation should maintain its own individual character, while each working towards women's emancipation. She declared: