Federica Montseny was born in Madrid in 1905 between words and letters: her parents, anarchists, were the editors of La Revista Blanca, a publication in which they defended their political ideology. And she, gifted with an extraordinary gift for oratory and storytelling, published her first novel at the age of 15, and she dedicated her life to defending what her parents believed in.
In 1931 she joined the CNT. In 1936, in the middle of the Civil War, she was part of the Government of the Republic, which appointed her Minister of Health. With or without war, it was an extraordinary fact: until then no woman had been a minister in Spain. There were four more in all of Europe. She did not accept the position without hesitation, given the pressure and responsibility: Federica stopped writing romantic novels in which she addressed women with the desire to guide them through complicated questions and circumstances, and she took action.
In the short half-year he had, he dedicated himself to remedying the conditions of children and women, especially those who were in the worst situation: orphans, pregnant women, prostitutes... and he also proposed solutions to improve the lives of people with disabilities, abandoned to their fate or to charity in most cases. The first draft of the Abortion Law is due to her,
She left the Ministry only when the war front closed in; Shortly afterward she escaped out of Spain to save her life. The governments that followed annulled all the measures that Federica had adopted. She began to be persecuted and claimed by the Nazis and the Spanish authorities. France, where she had taken refuge, never handed her over.
She lived in that country until 1977 when she was able to return to Spain. She continued with her political work and dissemination of her thoughts until her death in 1994. Nothing about her, in fact, ever stopped her language nor did she stop her journalistic work, which she published under the pseudonym by Fanny Germain. Like her parents, she managed several newspapers. She firmly opposed the Moncloa Pacts, and the way in which part of recent history was forgotten during the Transition. In her final years she was able to see how the ideas that she had proposed as a minister were valued and appreciated, when no one even dreamed of changes like those she considered simple common sense.
