The municipal government of Oviedo intends to eliminate the tribute and the memory of illustrious, committed and courageous women, erasing them at a stroke from its highly masculinized street scene.
To Concepción Arenal, writer, expert in Law and pioneer of Social Work in Spain; Gloria Fuertes, prolific writer of narrative, poetry and theater, belonging to the literary Generación del 50; to María Xosefa Canellada, the most important Asturian philologist of the 20th century, member of the Royal Spanish Academy and the Asturian Language Academy; to Flora Tristán, writer and thinker, tireless defender of the feminist struggle and the workers’ struggle; Amparo Pedregal, professor of Ancient History at the University of Oviedo, one of the great national references of feminism theory from a historical perspective; Aurora de Albornoz, Asturian writer, essayist, literary critic and poet, a very important memorialist of the Spanish exile; to Matilde García del Real, pedagogue and writer, promoter in 1901 of the first school for adult women; Lola Mateos, professor of Modern History at the University of Oviedo, an active participant in the movements in favor of the establishment of democracy; Sara Suárez Solís, Asturian novelist, columnist and teacher, tireless fighter for equality; to the Teachers of the Republic, women who left their skin and even their lives, to eradicate illiteracy in Spain, so that education was public and democratic; and at 13 Rosas, young people tortured and shot by the dictatorship in August 39, after the Civil War, blamed for some murders they did not commit. “May my name not be erased in history,” one of them, the Asturian Julia Coneso, wrote to her mother.
Let us not allow these and other women to be erased from the streets and from history. Because that is, plain and simple, violence.
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