Then and Now

 I am reading a book about Franco's postwar Spain, Entre Visillos, by Carmen Martín Gaite.  The plot revolves around several families whose daughters face a future in which marriage and domestic subservience were seen as the only acceptable choices. Of course, there are always rebels and many of them came from the families of the rightist winners of Spain's civil war. Franco's dictatorship did last a very long time, but fascist rigidity and suppression of opposing ideas could not ultimately prevail given the liberal gains in much of the rest of  Europe, along with the encouragement supplied by courageous feminist writers like Martín Gaite and Carmen Laforet.  It seems worth bearing in mind now that such repressive, regressive regimes always do nurture the seeds of their own destruction.