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Black-and-white photo of three nurses and a group of soldiers in front of a military truck. Three soldiers are sitting in the truck, and two are crouching in front of the open door. One of the nurses is resting her hand on a soldier's back.

The International Participation of Women in the Spanish Civil War: Searching for Traces in British Archives

Modern wars have global impacts. The war in Ukraine in particular has produced a large international solidarity movement. As a result, numerous international volunteers have travelled to Ukraine to take part in the war—including women. This fact has attracted a great deal of attention in international reporting since the beginning of the war. It still seems unusual to see women in the armed forces and in active warfare, especially when they are voluntarily participating in a war that does not directly affect them. This reveals gender stereotypes associated with war that go back many centuries: active men who protect their homeland, wives, and families vs passive women who dutifully care for their homes, children, and the wounded. As a result, women are denied political maturity, which has fatal consequences for their political role and rights of participation in times of war and peace alike.1

Women in active service are breaking away from traditional gender norms and demanding political participation, and the effects of this on social and political development processes have not yet been studied. However, a look at history offers an ideal opportunity to do just that, as the international participation of women in warfare is not a new phenomenon. One of the first significant global solidarity movements was in response to the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), which began when nationalist, conservative, and fascist forces launched a coup against the legitimately elected Popular Front government. While Mussolini and Hitler supported the coup leaders and Stalin took the side of the Spanish Republic, aid committees and solidarity organizations around the world also got involved. In addition, tens of thousands of people from all over the globe felt compelled to actively participate in the war in various ways. Among them were more than 1,200 women from over 50 countries—an unprecedented number that also attracted attention in the international press. These women broke with the gender norms of their regions of origin, and this was reflected not only in the press but also in reports by volunteers.

Spaniards themselves were involved in various ways in the preservation and expansion of women’s rights, but at the same time there were also reactionary forces that wanted to maintain traditional gender divisions.2 The Spanish Civil War became a battleground for a wide variety of political and ideological positions and extremes, not only in Spain itself but also internationally, and this in turn was reflected in the negotiation of gender dynamics. The Spanish Civil War is therefore an ideal case study for examining the tension between voluntary military service and gender, and for exploring the overarching question of what role the category of ‘gender’ played in the international participation of women in the Spanish Civil War.3 This can be achieved through biographical case studies, which do not merely reconstruct the lives of various women, but rather place them in the larger context of political developments. The case studies can show how women opened up spaces for themselves, what expectations were placed on their actions, and how they adapted to these expectations, or even broke with them.

Searching for Traces

During my two-month fellowship at the GHIL, I set out to trace the British women and their stories. Newspaper reports, correspondence, diaries, interviews, and photos, mainly found in the Marx Memorial Library and the Imperial War Museum, make it possible to reconstruct their experiences and how their efforts were assessed by contemporaries. Beyond the women’s own accounts, institutional documents and the accounts of their comrades who reported on the women and the events of the war are also relevant. Using all these sources, it is possible to understand the differences between how volunteers described themselves and how they were perceived by institutions and the broader public in their countries of origin.

Volunteers travelled to Spain from all over the world to play a wide variety of roles on both sides of the conflict. In my archival research to date, I have examined reports by volunteers from countries such as the United States, Switzerland, Argentina, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. They stood up for their convictions, which were as diverse as the participants themselves: some cited religious or humanitarian reasons, while others were motivated by the desire for adventure, the fight against fascism or communism, commitment to democracy and human rights, the pursuit of social revolution, or even party affiliation. At least 2,400 people from Great Britain made their way to Spain.4 The vast majority supported the Republican government and were men. However, there were also numerous women among the volunteers. Most of the women were engaged in traditional female roles, such as nursing, and were involved in the Spanish Medical Aid Committee. But there were also some who broke with expectations of how women should behave, such as Felicia Browne, who served in combat units. Tragically, she not only went down in history as the only female fighter among the British volunteers, but also as the first of more than 500 British combatants to be killed in action.5

A collage of photographs showing various archival documents and a workplace in a library.
Working on documents. Photos by Christin Hansen.

Winifred Bates: Committed to the Party

There was a high percentage of communists among the international volunteers. Angela Jackson estimates that around 50 per cent of British volunteers were communists.6 They were not a homogeneous group; in fact, during the Spanish Civil War the divisions between the various communist groups became more pronounced. One example is Winifred Bates (1898–1996) and her husband Ralph, who were members of the Communist Party and saw their involvement in the Spanish Civil War not only as an anti-fascist fight, but also as laying the foundation for the expansion of communism in Spain. They travelled to Spain together a few weeks after the coup. Ralph helped set up the International Brigades, while Winifred initially worked as a journalist and later joined the Spanish Medical Aid Committee in July 1937. She was involved in hospital and personnel administration and also reported to the party on her activities and her comrades’ political suitability. Various reports from Winifred’s time in Spain have been preserved, as well as interviews, correspondence, and her memoirs, which I reviewed and evaluated during my time in London. Winifred is one example from the ranks of British women with communist sympathies who stood up for their convictions in the Spanish Civil War.

I can now compare this new archive material on British volunteers with the documents I have already examined on volunteers from other countries who went to Spain. This will allow conclusions to be drawn about the international dimension of women’s voluntary participation and enable an in-depth analysis of the extent to which women from different countries of origin asserted themselves against gender norms in their home countries, as well as the practices that made this possible.


Feature image: The ardent Republican sympathizer and photographer, Winifred Bates (centre), pictured with a group of British nurses on the Teruel Front. Imperial War Museum (HU 34622).

  1. See e.g. Barton C. Hacker and Margaret Vining (eds.), A Companion to Women’s Military History (Leiden, 2012); Karen Hagemann, Stefan Dudink, and Sonya O. Rose (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 (New York, 2020); Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds.), Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford, 2002); Ute Frevert, Die kasernierte Nation: Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland (Munich, 2001). []
  2. See e.g. Mary Nash, Defying Male Civilization: Women in the Spanish Civil War (Denver, 1995); Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion (Cambridge, 2015); Martha Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (Oakland, CA, 2005); Julían Casanova, De la calle al frente: El anarcosindicalismo en España (1931–1939) (Barcelona, 2010); Antonio Elorza and Marta Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas: La Internacional Comunista y España, 1919–1939 (Barcelona, 1999). []
  3. Jorge Marco has already pointed out that there is an urgent need to examine gender constructions in connection with the deployment of women in the Spanish Civil War. See Jorge Marco, ‘Mujeres combatientes en la guerra de España (1936–1939): Debilidades conceptuales y metodológicas de un nuevo paradigma’, Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar, 13/26 (2024), 243–67. []
  4. Richard Baxell, Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle Against Fascism (London, 2012), 6; Angela Jackson, British Women and the Spanish Civil War (London, 2002), 7. []
  5. Tom Buchanan, The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain: War, Loss and Memory (Brighton, 2013), 64. []
  6. Jackson, British Women and the Spanish Civil War, 7. []

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Christin Hansen (November 24, 2025). The International Participation of Women in the Spanish Civil War: Searching for Traces in British Archives. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved December 7, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15718


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