ez dut ahorik.

Xabi Otero
1980

Euskal Herria Journal

The Feminist League of Baiona was formed in the early 1940s in the Basque Country in France. The league's first magazine Aana was created in 1944.

Katalina Elizegi was the first female playwright to write in the Basque language. In 1916 Katalina was awarded by the Town Hall of Donostia for her first work in Euskera, Garbiñe.

A Basque institution, the Andere or déaconess was a woman who looked after the work of a parish in early Christianism.

Some women wore black dresses at their wedding.

During the "Great Hunt" in France groups like the Basques faced bouts of persecutions and mass executions that showed all the signs of the witch hunts, except that these were readily identifyable people. Basque women were said to practise "strange rituals" and to speak a "strange language." They were victims of interrogation, torture, imprisonment, and cruel murder. Many were forced to leave their homes or expelled. In 1609, the witch hunting French official Pierre Lancre tried to execute all 30,000 Basque-speaking inhabitants of Lapurdi. A popular revolt stopped him from doing it. The exact number of people burned or killed in Lapurdi (1576), in Zuberoa (1599), and in Miarritze (1605) as a result of the "witch hunt" is not known, but Lancre alone is credited with having tortured and burned around 700 Basque women, and some men.

Women were already working the iron in the 15th-century.

Near 100 female Basque political prisoners are scattered throughout jails in Spain and France.

Only a handful of women are currently writing works in the Basque language (Euskera). Itxaro Borda, Arantxa Iturbe, Mariasun Landa, Amaia Lasa, and Laura Mintegi are some of them.

Maria de Maeztu from Araba in the Basque Country in Spain was a defender of the right of women and men to education during the Spanish Republic in the 1930s.

The Spanish Inquisition was implanted throughout the Basque territories in Spain after the military occupation of Navarre by Castile. Both women and men were victims of the Inquisition.

Many women participated in the labor strikes during the Francoist dictatorship.

In 1825, 45 percent of the active women population in Bilbo were married women or widows; and 15 percent in 1935.

Anne Marie Vergez from Donibane-Lohitzune is the only fisherwoman in the Basque Country. She has her own boat, the Nahikari, and has been in the fishing industry since 1988.

Alamanda (1130 post 1200) probably a Basque-speaking Gascon, is one of the twenty known female court poets or troubadours. Although court poets wrote about love (in lenga d'oc, from which it took the name of Occitania), the women poets prefered a more straight-foward speech of conversation than their male counterparts. They did not idealized the relationships they wrote about, nor they worshiped men or seem to want to be adored themselves.

Nuns in the Monastery of Saint Engracia, founded in the 13th-century in Navarre, every year had only one meal (bread and water) a day for a period of six months. And they were bled four times a year. These nuns belonged to the predominantly Gascon, aristocratic class of Iruña (Pamplone), who did not use Basque language but Occitan. This does not imply that the leaders of that society were unable to speak Basque. But Basque was not regarded as appropriate for administrative or literary purposes, for which Occitan was available. However, the popular classes did use the Basque language or Euskera.

Carmen Iza from Eibar (Gipuzkoa) was the first female hiker in the Basque Country to finish scaling 100 mountains in 1927. She joined an elite of male professional hikers in the Basque Country that included Andres Espinosa and Antxon Bandres.

Women's participation suffered a substantive change in the transition from the baserri (farm) life-style to the cooperative organization. Women traditionally cooperated as co-managers sharing the work with the men. With the division of labor deriving from an structured cooperative, women's role in the decision-making process and work participation diminished drastically.

In 1825 the average age of matrimony in Bilbo (Bizkaia) was 27.6 for women and 27 for men; in 1887 was 24.8 percent for women but remained 27 for men.

In 1995 a group of women challenged the organizers of a massive all-men parade in Irun (Gipuzkoa), Saint Marcial military parade, by participating dressed as soldiers. In the past women were allowed in the parade only as cantineras (canteen holders). The parade has thousands of uniformed men to fire their rifles on the order of a General. This parade, as well as the Hondarribia military parade also in Gipuzkoa, commemorates local victory over a third attempt in 1522 by the Navarrese monarchs to re-conquer Navarre from Castile. Gipuzkoa fought on the side of Castile.

A parade in Hondarribia (Gipuzkoa) celebrating the Day of Santiago has a young woman carrying a box on her head. The box contains documents and books of the local association (kofradia) of fishermen. She heads a street parade of mainly men including mayors and other local politicians.

The feminist movement in the southern Basque provinces in Spain emerged in 1988.

Eulalia Abaitua (1853-1943) from Bilbo was a pioneer in photography. She studied photography while residing in Liverpool with her husband. Eulalia began to work as a photographer in 1873 when she returned to Bilbo. She photographed mainly women in her daily activities.

In 1998 several female members of the grassroots group Solidar@as con Itoiz damaged construction equipment used for building a road which is part of a government project to build a dam and reservoir in the Itoiz valley (Navarre). A court had suspended the dam project for Itoiz but works continued in full swing. Solidar@as con Itoiz oppose the construction of the Itoiz dam and reservoir. Itoiz has three Nature Reserves and important archeological remains.

Divorce and contraception was legalized in Spain in 1983.

Nationalist women in Bizkaia formed their first association in 1922. The Association of the Patriotic Women (EAB, Emakume Abertzale Batza) borrowed inspiration from the role of Irish women and the women's organization Cumann namBan in the Easter Rebellion of 1916. The EAB women functioned as transmission belts for the nationalist ideology inside the domestic sphere. EAB was dissolved during Spain's dictatorship of Primo de Rivera but quickly reorganized in 1931. By 1936 EAB had 28,000 active militants. An EAB document of 1922 expressed "Now the [male] patriots are not alone in their struggle; their wives, mothers, daughters and sisters walk by their side and with them suffer and with them rejoice."

Nathalie Tauziat from Baiona is the first Basque woman to win Wimblendon's women semi-finals in 1998.

The current work of women writing in the Basque language (Euskera) is considered pedagogical while men's is considered literature.

In 1995 a group of women in Ibarra forced a rape suspect, Francisco Ibañez, identified by one of the victims, to leave his work and march through the streets of the town in front of a banner denouncing the aggression. The march ended at the local court house where Sanchez admitted to being the aggressor. Victims had reported the attacks to the police which did nothing.

Abortion was partially legalized in Spain in 1985. The 1985 law was more restrictive than the one proposed by the right in France in 1975. It denied the right to abortion to working women who cannot afford the procedure in private clinics.

Sources: Roger Collins, The Basques (Basil Blackwell, 1986); Jean-Louis Davant, Ebauche d'une histoire du peuple Basque (Euskadi en guerre, Ekin, 1982); Ricardo Cierbide y Emiliana Ramos, Monjas Occitanas (Eusko Ikaskuntza, 1997); Egin archives; Iñaki Gil de San Vicente, Evolución y enmarque de la liberación sexual en el proceso de liberación nacional y social de Euska Herria (Ezpala Abertzaleko Aldizkaria, No. 7, 1998); Sybille Harksen, La Femme au moyen-áge (Leipzig, 1974); Marianne Heiberg, The Making of the Basque Nation (Cambridge University Press, 1987); Linda White, More women than you think! (Basque Studies Program newsletter, October 1996); Joseba Zulaika, Basque Violence Metaphor and Sacrament (University of Nevada Press, 1988)

Graphic: ehj