Lucía Sánchez Saornil
An avant-garde poet who wrote love poems to women under a male name – and co-founded the anarchist women’s movement Mujeres Libres.
Lucía Sánchez Saornil grew up in a working-class family in Madrid and taught herself to write. She worked as a telephone operator and published avant-garde poems in the Ultraist style – often under the male pseudonym Luciano de San-Saor. Under this name she could write love poems addressed to women without causing a scandal.
After the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931 she joined the anarchist trade union CNT. She soon found that many of her male comrades wanted to keep women in traditional roles. In 1936, with Mercedes Comaposada and Amparo Poch y Gascón, she founded Mujeres Libres (Free Women), an anarchist women’s organisation that grew to some 20,000 members. It ran schools, childcare and training for women.
During the Civil War she also worked for the aid organisation Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista. After Franco’s victory in 1939 she had to hide. She eventually lived in Valencia with her partner América Barroso, discreetly, under the dictatorship that persecuted both anarchists and homosexuals.
She died of cancer in Valencia in 1970, aged 74. Her gravestone bears a line from one of her poems: “But is it true that hope has died?”