You have to go back to 1857when at only 14 years old, Isabel Vila went to work while she spent her free time caring for the sick for mutual aid of the Catalan municipality of Llagostera. To this Girona municipality, center of the cork-stopping industry of Cataloniahad moved with the family as a result of the economic crisis that hit the region. That’s how that girl – coming from another town in Girona, Calongewhere the Vilas had made their way by extracting cork from the holm oak forests that populated the mountains of the Gavarres area – was imbued with the working-class environments, which to make up for the lack of social security had created mutual aid and other similar organizations.
Immersed in that environment, Isabel Vila took hours to learn to read and write. “She had very clear ideas, she was rebellious and willing to go against the grain to become a teacher one day.” This is how they narrate Núria Bassa and Toni Strubell the first steps of this activist, whose biography has been condensed in the book Isabel Vila, the first Catalan trade unionist. A work illustrated by the renowned and popular cartoonist Pilarín Bayéswhich reviews the journey of someone who, over the course of those decades, became a reference among the social and worker movements of the country.
Isabel Five Hours
During the 19th century and the first third of the 20th, several women led the workers’ struggles in Catalonia. Thanks to them, rights were achieved that allowed greater recognition of women in the different productive sectors and other areas of public life. Among the best known, it is worth mentioning the secretary of the Spanish Federation of Workers, Teresa Claramunt (1862-1931); the internationalist Francesca Saperas (1851-1933); the cenetista Llibertat Ródenas (1892-1970), as well as the anarcho-syndicalist and minister of the Second Spanish Republic Federica Montseny (1905-1994).
In this generation we also find Isabel Vila, who, despite not having transcended official historiography, was key in defending the interests of workers and republican values. In fact, among its first actions, the impulse of a manifesto against the villasthe system of military recruitment of young people with which the new government of the Republican six-year term (1868-1874) intended to swell the militias that fought in the wars that were taking place Morocco, the Philippines and other overseas territories.
Vila’s ancestry among the popular strata was key to 800 women from Llagostera signed that document. “We can fully understand its role,” explain Núria Bassa and Toni Strubell, who describe the support that the initiative provoked as exceptional, even more so when the population barely exceeded 3,000 inhabitants.
Later, the book focuses on the campaigns that Vila led to demand the right of children – especially girls – to receive education, and the proposed reducing the working day to five hours for those under 13 years of age who worked in factories of the region. A lawsuit for which it became known as Isabel Five Hours.
Also in those years he starred in republican uprising of the Foc de la Bisbal. With other nurses and a group of 3,000 men led by the deputy Pere Caimóin 1869 he undertook a march from Llagostera to Cassà de la Selva to defend the Federal Democratic Republic.
From the International to the classrooms
Although the insurrection of La Bisbal d’Empordà failed, this did not prevent Isabel Vila from remaining committed to the popular sectors. In 1871 he joined the cork union that had been formed in Sant Feliu de Guíxolsto then enter the center of Llagostera driven by the International Workers Association (AIT), of which she was secretary. “Precisely this position of responsibility makes her considered the first Catalan trade unionist,” point out Bassa and Strubell.
Unfortunately, the coup d’état by General Pavia in 1874 She cut short her militant activity, since upon learning of the arrest warrant against her, He went into exile to the Occitan city of Carcassonne, in France.where the Muntada family, friends of his mother, gave him a job as an accountant in the cork factory they ran. In total, your stay in the area of Llenguadoc It lasted six years, during which Vila studied teaching with the aim of recovering the old idea of being a teacher, when the situation in Spain permitted it, something that did not occur until 1880.
Taking advantage of the fact that the repression of dissent had eased, Isabel Vila crossed the border to settle in Barcelona, where founded a school located on Consell de Cent streetafter a year, and as a result of the prestige he had acquired, accept the offer to take charge of the school of the Center Republica de Sabadella cooperative school that had been founded by people of republican ideology, Freemasons, trade unionists and working families. As Bassa and Strubell point out, her contribution in the pedagogical field marked an entire era, since, “in addition to breaking the maxim that no woman could direct a school, she contributed to students taking subjects that until then were only reserved for to the boys.”
As director of the school, she endured attacks from the Church and municipal authorities, as well as the resignation of three teachers who practiced spiritualism. But neither those obstacles, nor the economic crisis that devastated the Catalan city of La Vallès region In 1883, she was diverted from her “holy cause,” as she defined teaching work. Only death, caused by a vascular accident on December 23, 1896, interrupted a trajectory that historiography barely dignified during the 20th century.
Only in 1990 did the sociolinguist and former ERC senator Francesc Ferrer i Gironès wrote two books that gloss over Isabel Vila, from which later emerged the musical IsaVel (2013), from Antoni Mas and Enric Planellaand the monologue Isabel Cinc Hores (2019), which Toni Strubell recites with actress Carme Sansa.
To these contributions have been added the inauguration of streets and squares that bear his name and, this year, the 25th edition of the Isabel Vila Memorial Walkin memory of the march of the revolt known as the Foc de la Bisbal; the book The Federalby Sebastià Alzamora, and Isabel Vilathe first Catalan trade unionistwhere under the drawings of Pilarín Bayés, Núria Bassa and Toni Strubell outline the profile of a restless, committed and key woman in the fight for civil and social rights in Catalonia.
#Isabel #Vila #irreverent #unionist #changed #Catalan #school
