Matilde de la Torre

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In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is de la Torre and the second or maternal family name is Gutiérrez.
Matilde de la Torre
Matilde de la Torre in 1918
Born(1884-03-14)14 March 1884
Cabezón de la Sal, Cantabria, Spain
Died19 March 1946(1946-03-19) (aged 62)
Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico
OccupationsJournalist, writer, educator and socialist politician
Political partySpanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE)

Matilde de la Torre Gutiérrez (14 March 1884 – 19 March 1946) was a Spanish journalist, writer, educator and socialist politician. She was elected as a Deputy in the Cortes Republicanas with the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) in 1933 and 1936. After the defeat of the Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), she was exiled from Spain and lived in France and Mexico until her death.

Family

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De la Torre was born on 14 March 1884 in Cabezón de la Sal, Cantabria, Spain, into a wealthy and liberal family.[1][2] Her parents were Eduardo de la Torre, a notary in Cabezón de la Sal,[3] and Ana Gutiérrez Cueto. She was orphaned at a young age,[4] and cared for her disabled brother, Carlos de la Torre, in adulthood.[5]

De la Torre married her cousin Sixto Gutiérrez in Arequipa, Peru, aged 29. The marriage lasted for 15 days.[4][6] Another cousin was the artist María Blanchard.[6] Her grandfather Castor Gutiérrez had founded the newspaper The Mountain Bee in 1856.[4][7]

Career

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In 1917, de la Torre published her first work Jardín de damas curiosas (Garden of curious ladies),[8] an epistolary novel on feminism, presented as a series of letters from an aunt, tía Pulquería, to her niece and nephew.[9][10] The title was homonymous to a painting by her cousin María Blanchard.[3] In the 1920s, she wrote a series of socio-political essays which defended the political system of the restoration and analysed the work of philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset.[6] The two most notable essays were titled Don Quijote, Rey de España (Don Quixote, King of Spain, 1928) and El Ágora (The Agora, 1929).[7] As a journalist, she wrote for La Región and El Socialista.[2]

In 1920s, de la Torre founded the libertarian education institution Torre Academy in Cabezón de la Sal, which followed the precepts of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and the principal of free teaching of integral education.[11] In the 1924, she founded and directed the peasant choir Orfeón de Voces Cántabras[12] (which performed at a folk festival in 1932 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, England)[1][2] and the Cabezón de la Sal Dance Group.[5]

In 1931, de la Torre published El banquete de Saturno: novela social (The Symposium of Saturn), a satirical work recounting a failed Marxist-socialist dictatorship which strongly resembled Soviet Russia.[3][13] In 1932, she gave a speech on feminism and pacifism at the First Spanish Eugenic Conferences organized by the Spanish League of Social Reform.[1] Also in 1932, she contributed the prologue to Enrique D. Madrazo's Pedagogía y eugenesia, cultivo de la especie humana (Pedagogy and eugenics, cultivation of the human species).[12]

De la Torre joined the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) in 1931, closing her school to pursue a career in politics.[12] She was involved in the foundation of Peasant Houses, linked to the Cantabrian agricultural and livestock world.[14] She also joined the communist and feminist organisation Association of Women against War and Fascism.[4][15]

Matilde de la Torre

At the 1933 Spanish general election, de la Torre was elected as Deputy in the Cortes Republicanas (Spanish parliament) representing the Oviedo constituency in Asturias.[14][16][17] She was one of five women elected to seats at this election,[6][18] with the qualification for female members of parliament being a teaching degree.[19] While in parliament, de la Torre supported trade unions[20] and advocated for better treatment for strikers and revolutionaries who were imprisoned after failure of the Revolution of 1934.[5] She called for birth control, abortion and divorce to be available to women.[20] She sat on the Navy Commission.[1]

De la Torre was re-elected to the Cortes Republicanas at the 1936 Spanish general election,[16][21] narrowly winning with 170,663 votes.[22] In Francisco Largo Caballero's government, de la Torre was appointed general director of Commerce and Tariff Policy.[1][6] She held this role until May 1937.[3] She was also a member of the Pension, Navy, and National Defence Commissions.[1]

Life in exile

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After the defeat of the Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), de la Torre went into exile, along with Ramón Lamoneda and other politicians.[23] She firstly went into exile in Marseille, France, where she published Seas in the Shadows (1940) about the war in Asturias. She also wrote in Julián Zugazagoitia's magazine Norte, from July 1939, which was an organ of expression for exiled negrinists.[1][4]

In the spring of 1940, De la Torre embarked for Mexico on the ship Cuba from Bordeaux, France, to continue her exile from Spain.[1][14] In Mexico, she supported Juan Negrín in his work as president of the Council of Ministers in exile[6] and befriended Emmy Kaemmerer, who was staying at the Hotel Lux.[24]

Death and legacy

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Photograph of de la Torre, published after her death in 1946

De la Torre suffered a period of poor health from 1944.[7] She died while still in exile, on 19 March 1946 in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, aged 62.[16][25] She was buried at the Spanish Pantheon [es] in Mexico City.[25]

In March 1984, a speech in memory of d[14]e la Torre was given in Santillana del Mar, Spain.[26] A portrait of her was painted by Eduardo Estrada in 2003.[27]

De la Torre was one of the 36 militants expelled from the PSOE through a note published in El Socialista on 23 April 1946.[7] After a proposal by the Federation of the Canary Islands,[1] the expelled members, including de la Torre, were posthumously readmitted into the PSOE at the 37th Federal Congress held on 24 October 2009 in Madrid, Spain.[28][29]

In 1984, a biography of da la Torre's life, Matilde de la Torre y su época by C. Calderón Gutiérrez was published.[14] In 2022, a biography of de la Torre's life, Matilde de la Torre: Sex, Socialism and Suffrage in Republican Spain by Deborah Madden was published for the Modern Humanities Research Association's Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures series.[30]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i "Torre Gutiérrez Cueto, Matilde de la". Fundación Pablo Iglesias (in Spanish). Retrieved 12 December 2025.
  2. ^ a b c Montagut, Eduardo (16 May 2018). "Matilde de la Torre Gutiérrez". Tribuna Feminista (in Spanish). Retrieved 13 December 2025.
  3. ^ a b c d Hernández, Hortensia. "Matilde de la Torre diputada y socialista". Heroínas (in Spanish). Retrieved 12 December 2025.
  4. ^ a b c d e "Real Academia de la Historia". Historia Hispánica (in Spanish). Retrieved 12 December 2025.
  5. ^ a b c Toca, Maria (8 December 2022). "Matilde de la Torre (parte segunda)". La pajarera magazine (in Spanish). Retrieved 12 December 2025.
  6. ^ a b c d e f Chica, Miguel Ángel (8 October 2016). "Matilde de la Torre, el compromiso de una mujer pionera". ElDiario.es (in Spanish). Retrieved 12 December 2025.
  7. ^ a b c d "Torre, Matilde de la". Biblioteca Nacional de España (in Spanish). Retrieved 12 December 2025.
  8. ^ "Matilde de la Torre de Gutiérrez". 15 June 1918. La Montaña año III (24). Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica. Retrieved 13 December 2025.
  9. ^ Madden, Deborah (2022). "Jardín de damas curiosas: Language, Law and Feminisms". Matilde de la Torre: Sex, Socialism and Suffrage in Republican Spain. Vol. 56. Modern Humanities Research Association. doi:10.2307/j.ctv33b9pcx.5. ISBN 978-1-83954-085-1.
  10. ^ Chang, Julia H. (2 April 2024). "Jardín de damas curiosas: by Matilde de la Torre, edited by Luis Pascual Cordero Sánchez, Valladolid, Editorial Páramo, 2022, 292 pp., €19 (paperback), ISBN13 978-8412600001". Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. 25 (2): 331–332. doi:10.1080/14636204.2024.2347721. ISSN 1463-6204.
  11. ^ "El legado musical de Matilde de la Torre". Colección CMB. 21 October 2023. Retrieved 13 December 2025.
  12. ^ a b c Sánchez, Luis Pascual Cordero (3 July 2025). "Más allá de la política y la literatura: Matilde de la Torre y la educación en los años 30". Bulletin of Spanish Studies (in Spanish). 102 (6): 1257–1278. doi:10.1080/14753820.2025.2546760. ISSN 1475-3820.
  13. ^ Madden, Deborah (2022). "El banquete de Saturno: Novela social: Sex, Socialism and Soviet Russia". Matilde de la Torre: Sex, Socialism and Suffrage in Republican Spain. Vol. 56. Modern Humanities Research Association. doi:10.2307/j.ctv33b9pcx.7. ISBN 978-1-83954-085-1.
  14. ^ a b c d e "Matilde de la Torre Gutiérrez, una socialista fundamental". Eduardo Montagut (in European Spanish). 12 May 2019. Retrieved 13 December 2025.
  15. ^ Rodrigo, Antonina (2003). Mujer y exilio, 1939 (in Spanish). Flor del Viento Ediciones. p. 323. ISBN 978-84-89644-88-5.
  16. ^ a b c Mangini, Shirley; González, Shirley Mangini (1 January 1995). Memories of Resistance: Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil War. Yale University Press. p. 35. ISBN 978-0-300-05816-1.
  17. ^ Preston, Paul (8 May 2003). Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. UPNE. p. 322. ISBN 978-1-55553-560-5.
  18. ^ Tombs, Terry Norma (1983). Women, Politics and Social Change in Spain. University of California, San Diego, Department of Anthropology. p. 260.
  19. ^ Castellanos, Mercedes Roig (1989). La mujer en la historia: a través de la prensa : Francia, Italia, España S. XVIII-XX (in Spanish). Ministerio de Asuntos Sociales. p. 266. ISBN 978-84-7799-026-0.
  20. ^ a b Pérez, Janet; Ihrie, Maureen (2002). The Feminist Encyclopedia of Spanish Literature: N-Z. Greenwood Press. p. 673. ISBN 978-0-313-32445-1.
  21. ^ Madden, Deborah (1 March 2023). "Matilde de la Torre: A feminist socialist in Republican Spain". International Journal of Iberian Studies. 36 (1): 83–92. doi:10.1386/ijis_00092_7. ISSN 1364-971X.
  22. ^ Madden, Deborah (2022). "Mares en la sombra: Gender, Collectivity and Trauma". Matilde de la Torre: Sex, Socialism and Suffrage in Republican Spain. Vol. 56. Modern Humanities Research Association. doi:10.2307/j.ctv33b9pcx.8. ISBN 978-1-83954-085-1.
  23. ^ Bergmann, Emilie L.; Herr, Richard (2 September 2007). Mirrors and Echoes: Women’s Writing in Twentieth-Century Spain. University of California Press. p. 81. ISBN 978-0-520-25267-7.
  24. ^ Casey, Maurice J. (29 August 2024). Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals. Footnote Press. p. 322. ISBN 978-1-80444-100-8.
  25. ^ a b Gijon, Victor (3 April 1984). "La vida de Matilde de la Torre, evocada en el centenario del nacimiento de la escritora". El País (in Spanish). ISSN 1134-6582. Retrieved 12 December 2025.
  26. ^ Rodríguez, Eulalio Ferrer (1999). Páginas del exilio (in Spanish). Aguilar. p. 219. ISBN 978-968-19-0576-7.
  27. ^ Iglesias, Fundación Pablo; Madrid, Universidad Complutense de; Nacional (Spain), Biblioteca (2003). El voto de las mujeres, 1877-1978: exposición, Biblioteca Nacional (Sala Siglo XX), 4 de noviembre-7 de diciembre de 2003 (in Spanish). Editorial Complutense. p. 180. ISBN 978-84-7491-739-0.
  28. ^ Viñas, Angel (8 July 2008). "Negrín y 35 viejos militantes socialistas". El País (in Spanish). ISSN 1134-6582. Retrieved 12 December 2025.
  29. ^ Fernández, Xuan (29 August 2025). "La 'necesaria' restitución de las diputadas pioneras en el Congreso". La Nueva España (in Spanish). Retrieved 13 December 2025.
  30. ^ "Enter Matilde de la Torre". Modern Humanities Research Association. 27 June 2021. Retrieved 13 December 2025.
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