Tomorrow, December 4, the Canovas Hall of the House of Representatives will host the presentation.Clara Campoamor Before the League of Nations and the United Nations, where historian Luis Español will remember the role of the suffragette before international organizations, … Both the United Nations and its predecessor, the League of Nations.
“Clara Campoamor was the first Spaniard to speak before the League of Nations, on September 8, 1931. A few weeks later, she spoke in the Chamber of Deputies, convincing the majority to approve women’s right to vote,” confirms Espanyol, who recently published hitherto unpublished statements in the book “Clara Campoamor before the League of Nations and the United Nations,” in the book Always Waiting.
According to the writer, this “tremendous success” obscured her international face: “Not only was she part of the Spanish representation before the Social Democratic Network in 1931 and 1934, but in 1956 and 1958, she represented the International Alliance of Women at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva.” She was the first Spaniard to speak before the SDN and perhaps also the first Spaniard to speak before a United Nations committee, the successor to the SDN.
This event will be presented in the Chamber of Deputies by University of Geneva professor Cristina Rosario Martínez Torres, editor of Siempre a lawaite. Clara Campoamor and Republican Exile in Switzerland, (Renacimento, 2025) and director of the Scout Academic Project Campoamor 2025, in Switzerland.
In Geneva
The headquarters of the League of Nations were in Geneva from its founding until its dissolution. When Clara Campoamor addressed the League of Nations Assembly, in 1931 and 1934, the headquarters of the Social Democratic Network was still the Palais Wilson in Geneva. The institution moved to the Palais des Nations in Geneva itself in 1937.
The Wilson Palace went through various vicissitudes, and in 1988 it became the headquarters of the Human Rights Division, which was established in 1946. Today it is the headquarters of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“Franco clearly did not intend to appoint as his representative a distinguished republican like Clara Campoamor, who was burdened by the threat of twelve years in prison for being a Freemason.”
Franco’s Spain was accepted into the United Nations in December 1955. In the same year, Clara settled in Switzerland, in the home of the Quinci family, in whose house she died in 1972. “When Clara Campoamor returned to Switzerland, the International Feminist Alliance, based in Geneva, took advantage of the circumstances to appoint Clara Campoamor and her friend, the great Swiss feminist Antoinette Quinci, as her representatives to the United Nations,” explains Luis Español. (1956)”
“It is clear that the undefeated regime would not have appointed as its representative a prominent republican like Clara Campoamor, who was under threat of imprisonment for twelve years for being a Freemason,” says Espanyol, who finds it remarkable that “an official representative of Spain, in 1931 and 1934, before the League of Nations, spoke at the United Nations, again, on behalf of a women’s organization, four decades later.”
Against child marriage
From a newspaper article, Espanyol concludes that Clara Campoamor intervened, as a delegate of the International Feminist Alliance, with these words:
“Equal rights and equal responsibilities do not refer exclusively to physical ability, to the ability to reproduce, but they forget the psychological and psychological ability of women to prepare for a personal life and even for their role as a wife and mother, and for their development as a human being. These two monsters must be eliminated at all costs: woman and child, mother and child.
Clara Campoamor’s intervention in the Assembly in 1934 marked the end of her political career in Spain. In August 1936, she fled the massacres in the Republican zone and went to Switzerland, to the home of her Quench friends, accompanied by her mother and niece. During the flight from Spain to Italy, some Spanish far-right extremists attempted to assassinate her. Luis Espanyol published in this newspaper on March 12, 2024 part of the original article published on November 12, 1936 in the newspaper El Pensamiento Navarro, in which the frustrated killer, who used the pseudonym “Anjúbar,” was proud of his attempt, in vain, to throw Clara Campoamor into the sea. Upon landing in Genoa, she was interrogated by the Fascist police but was able to continue on to Switzerland. He remained there, with some stays in Paris, until 1938, when he went to Uruguay and Argentina. He lived in the latter country until 1955. He left his mother at Quinci’s house, and was unable to return after the death of Pilar Rodríguez, in the middle of World War II.
In 1955 he settled again in Switzerland. Since the Franco regime did not allow her to return to Spain, she died in Lausanne, surrounded by the affection of the Quinch family, in 1972. The Spanish explains that “her friend and partner over four decades of many feminist adventures, Antoinette Quinch, managed to convince the canton of Vaud, of which Lausanne is the capital, to approve women’s right to vote in 1959. It is comforting to think that the first Spanish suffragist lived for decades.” Switzerland’s main voter “There are no limits to talent or intelligence.”