Maria Angeles, 83, and her daughter Laura Martinez, 43, may have been born in the same country, they grew up in two opposing worlds. In their small village of La Rioja, in Franco’s Spain in the 1950s and 1960s, Maria Angeles’ parents decided for her about her future: she will have to devote her life to them, and stay with them when they are old.
“My two older sisters were born to get married and have children. Only my younger sister, considered smarter, had the right to study to become a teacher. And my two brothers inherited the family business, a sawmill. I was not allowed to finish my schooling. I worked in the sawmill without being paid and I took care of household chores ”, remembers Maria Angeles, who prefers to keep her name silent, so as not to offend her family. After the conquest of democracy and the explosion of freedoms in the 1980s and 1990s, in Madrid, Laura, she knows no cultural brake on her personal ambitions. Having become a physiotherapist, she set up her own practice on her own.
While inequalities between women and men have been reduced in Western Europe since the 1990s, in no euro area country has the development been as rapid or intense as in Spain, according to the 2022 report. from the World Inequality Lab. In 1990, women represented 24.7% of labor income. In 2020, this share reached 39.6%. Or 15 points more. This is more than the average for Western Europe (38%), but also the United Kingdom (38.3%), Italy (36.1%) or Germany (36 %). So many countries which, in 1990, started from much higher.
The strength to rebel
“My family expected me to sacrifice my life for them”, assures Maria Angeles, sitting in her daughter’s house, in the suburbs of Madrid, before adding, with sparkling eyes, that“It was out of the question”. At 30, she found the strength to rebel, and enrolled in a course with the Red Cross, which enabled her to be hired as an infirmary assistant in the hospital of Logroño. She stays with her parents, because “Settling down alone would have been frowned upon”. Especially since she does not have her meager salary, which she must pay to her mother.
A stay in Madrid, visiting an aunt, allows her to meet the man who will become her husband and to realize her dream: to leave the family straitjacket and the weight of traditions, which weighs even more heavily in the rural world. Hired at the Doce de Octubre hospital in Madrid, she became pregnant at the age of 40 and resumed her work as soon as her child was born. “I always wanted to be independent, but it wasn’t easy. So, I did everything to make it better for my daughter ”, she sums up.
You have 70.97% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.