CIS - Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas

by the Excma. Ms. María Teresa Fernández de la Vega

Your Majesty, Mr. Minister of the Presidency, Relations with the Cortes and Democratic Memory, Mr. President of the CIS, Authorities, Ladies and Gentlemen, friends, dear Inés.

I have to start by saying that it is an immense honor for me to be here today, giving the laudatio of Ms. Inés Alberdi Alonso, professor and 2019 National Sociology Prize Winner. A well-deserved award for the one who has been a pioneer and teacher in Gender Sociology in Spain.

This act is a vindication of the value of Sociology, but it is, above all, a recognition of a person who has made an invaluable contribution to sociology throughout his brilliant career and throughout his life has contributed decisively to promoting equality between men and women. His legacy, which continues to grow, is HUGE.

The Complutense University has been a constant in his life. There he graduated in Political and Economic Sciences, there he completed his Doctorate in Political Science and Sociology, which he obtained in 1978, and there he held a Chair in the Department of Applied Sociology since 1991, after a brief stay at the University of Zaragoza.

Her academic career also took her outside of Spain. She was a Visiting Professor at George Washington University for two periods (1978-1980 and 1988-1989).

Throughout his research career he has published countless works. Her most recent article is dedicated to the History of Feminism and was published in the Revista de Occident in 2020. It can be said, with all fairness, that she, Inés Alberdi, is now also part of the History of Feminism in our country.

His works on the family, on equality within marriage, and on the situation of widows stand out. She was the first to analyze in depth the transformation of families in Spain and its consequences on women of all ages. He studied changes in family and domestic roles, the situation of young couples, the impact of paid work on family life.

She understood and knew how to see the consequences that the massive incorporation of women into the labor market, on the family and on society, was going to have. Their work, in this line of research, is essential.

The topics that Inés Alberdi has analyzed in her scientific work are exciting. He has studied and dissected the concept of romantic love. She has analyzed marriage models, the power of women in public institutions.

She has also been one of the few who has taken care to highlight the influence of feminism in Spain's transition to democracy. I have always said that, without that story, which has not been fully told, the democratic transformation of our country is not understood.

Although the dictatorship had made any hint of feminism disappear, at the beginning of the seventies, women had begun to meet, to speak, to organize, to seek alliances and allies to try to remove the discrimination that weighed like a burden on women. Many of them did not profess feminist ideology, but they understood from the awareness of the injustice that oppressed us that they had to fight for women's freedom. Inés Alberdi was part of these university groups and, later, of the Women's Liberation Movement, which aimed to achieve the legal changes necessary to recognize women's rights.

1975 was a crucial year for that movement, where Inés Alberdi was there. Crucial for Spanish women. The United Nations declared it International Women's Year and Spanish Women managed to organize platforms, hold meetings and make our voices heard before a regime whose leader, the dictator Franco, was dying. And we managed to achieve, thanks to the pressure that had been exerted, to the public denunciation, national and international, of the legal situation of women to achieve the approval in May of that year 1975, of a reform of the Civil Code that changed the legal status of married women, the rights and duties of spouses and which was the prelude to a reform of Family Law.

After Franco died (November 1975) and the transition to democracy began, that experience, which was joined by more and more women, of the most diverse tendencies and thoughts, was the beginning of a broad demand that made an important advance possible. in the modification of Family Law.

All of us, inside or outside the parties that were beginning to play in Spanish politics, knew that we had to do it, that there was no option, that we could not miss the train of democratic transformation. The conviction that, despite being only a small minority, a few thousand women could and should keep the fight for women's rights strong and alive, within a democratic tide driven by millions of citizens.

That women's rights could not be lost among so many strong priorities that that budding democracy had. And that we had to find allies and ways to put them on the political agenda.

The feminist cause was not, by the way, very widely shared in Spain, especially because its ideas had either not been able to cross the suffocating, ancient and reactionary atmosphere of Franco's dictatorship, or they had been presented as extremist or even ridiculous.

The feminist slogan of the seventies (“the personal is political”), with all the deep implications that this demand had for Spanish women, then deprived of almost all civil rights, not to mention sexual, reproductive or family rights, seemed designed for women from another planet. But no, it wasn't like that. There were Spanish women who were willing to fight for it. Inés Alberdi was one of those women who fought for the recognition of women's rights.

In 1976, History and politics were subject to an unusual acceleration in Spain. In the transition process that had just begun, a Political Amnesty law had been approved in the desire shared by all to demonstrate the commitment to move forward without return. But curiously, even when political life was developing at a feverish pace, some cases stubbornly resisted change.

Thus, while political prisoners began to enjoy the freedom decreed by the Amnesty, approved in August 1976, women were tried for adultery. The Courts condemned and put women in jail for adultery, for using contraceptives.

Not only were they not allowed to divorce, but women who dared to rebuild their lives after a failed marriage were sent to prison.

And in this breeding ground, judicial processes took place that triggered spectacular protest mobilizations throughout the country. Thousands of women took to the streets.

They were gestures of solidarity with the victims, of course, but they also sought to publicly denounce situations that were anachronistic.

And from there, the coordinated action began that would lead us to obtain important results. Groups of Women Jurists, of Separated Women, of University Women; groups of women from neighborhood associations, then very active in Spain, and others linked to political parties and unions or simply feminist groups, we began to work together and despite the ideological or strategic differences, which of course existed, we united in platforms of feminist organizations. And it is clear that feminism was plural and that there were differences among its members, but we were able to work together.

I tell you all this because Inés Alberdi actively participated in all these movements, strategies and actions, who already in 1978 wondered in a book edited by Bruguera, if the end of the family had come. In 1980 she was appointed advisor to the Minister of Justice for the preparation of the Reform of the Civil Code regarding family and Divorce. In 1981 he began publishing studies on the sociological aspects of divorce.

Professor Alberdi, in addition to being a multifaceted personality, has been a pioneer in many areas. It is striking that already in 1986 she wrote two scientific articles on the repercussions of new technologies on the situation of women and on the promotion of equality at work. And she was also one of the first to study new masculinities, analyzing the role of men in fatherhood.

It should also be emphasized that she has dedicated a large part of her work to studying one of the main scourges that gender inequality leaves us with: violence against women. A scourge that unfortunately we have not yet been able to put an end to.

The figures illustrate the magnitude of his work: 21 books, 41 chapters in collective books and more than fifty articles.

The research projects he has carried out are also very numerous, national and international. She has worked, among others, on projects financed by: the Ministry of Education, the Sociological Research Center, the Women's Institute, the European Union, Public Banking, the Official Credit Institute, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Ministry of Social Affairs, the Center for Children and Family Studies, the DIOTIMA Foundation, the Fourth Program of Equality between Men and Women of the European Union, the LaCaixa Foundation, the Complutense University of Madrid or the Higher Council for Scientific Research.

One might think that someone who has written so much, in such an innovative way and with so much impact, has dedicated his life to the University, to study. And, although this is true, in the case of Inés Alberdi it has not been incompatible with her feminist activism. She has oriented her life towards promoting social changes that promoted equality between women and men in our country. I have already made reference to her activism in the 70s. In the 80s she collaborated with the Women's Institute and the Equality Commission of the European Community. She has been a deputy in the Madrid Assembly, where she worked especially in the Women's and Social and Family Affairs Commissions. In 2008, and until 2010, she was Executive Director of UNIFEM, the United Nations Women's Development Fund, the precursor of what is today UN Women. During these years she was responsible for highlighting the importance of gender equality and empowerment for the development of the world, and, in particular, the African continent. As President of the Women for Africa Foundation, which is dedicated precisely to promoting the development of Africa through its women, I could not agree more.

And her international experience is not limited to UNIFEM, she has also worked as an expert in the European Union on various issues related to gender equality. In addition, she was senior advisor on women and development issues at the Inter-American Development Bank in 1989, where she created the “Women in Development” Program.

This solid and constant activism has not been to the detriment of an excellent research career. I have already highlighted it, but – although her contributions to gender sociology are well known – I think I can give some more detail about the importance of her work on transcendental issues for understanding the social transformation of our country. Inés Alberdi has studied – like no one else – the process of modernization of the family in Spain and the influence that feminism exerted on that process. The Spanish family began to transform at the end of the 60s, although the changes were not reflected in the democratic legal system until the beginning of the 80s. She has analyzed these social and legal changes, highlighting the influence of the Church in the marriage regulations until our Constitution established the nondenominational nature of the State, which allowed the evolution of institutions linked to the family, such as marriage or filiation. She has examined the relationships of authority and equality between spouses or the authority of parents in the face of the growing recognition of the rights of children. He has also worked on sexist violence, on its concept, its etiology and its characteristics, considering it as a consequence of inequality and a phenomenon that is not only individual, but also social. Today more than ever we see that what she maintained – that sexist violence was ideological, rooted in the patriarchal code – is absolutely true. His works in all these areas are an unavoidable reference.

Inés Alberdi has elevated gender sociology, feminist sociology, to a higher level. In his words: “The starting point for knowing society is to ask questions about it… Well, the questions that the sociology of gender relations asks are some of the most important and interesting that we can think of. The sociology of gender deals with some of the most important, most significant and most interesting aspects of our society: the relationships between men and women. And, he continues, “few variables are as explanatory in terms of placing an individual within the social structure as the sex to which he or she belongs.”

In her most recent article, on the history of feminism, which I referred to at the beginning of my intervention, Inés Alberdi maintains that feminism has led to an authentic revolution in the 20th century. A profound revolution that has produced “a historical change of enormous scope” and that “has been original because it has occurred without violence.”

In that same article she highlights that there are challenges, many pending challenges, and that as long as they exist, feminism will continue to be necessary.

Dear Inés, it is clear that feminism is more necessary than ever. I hope the time comes when it isn't. Today, we still must face the gigantic challenge posed by sexist violence, which persists throughout the world. And there are others: the political and economic empowerment of women and equality in working conditions. And to face all this, we need minds and voices as lucid as yours.

I conclude, celebrating once again the decision to award the 2019 National Sociology Prize to Professor Alberdi, who has known how to instigate the feminist revolution through thought, science and research like no one else, from sociology. Thank you so much

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