The First National Congress of the Spanish Falange’s Women’s Section, held in Salamanca on 6 January 1937, marked the transition of a women’s organization founded for limited assistance into a more influential political institution. Its public leadership placed Pilar Primo de Rivera at the top and Marichu de la Mora in a prominent national post, but Clara Stauffer’s carefully staged retreat from office did not mean a retreat from power: she continued to shape the organization’s propaganda and became an important link between the Francoist government and the Third Reich.

Background and Political Setting

The Women’s Section had been founded in June 1934, before the Civil War, with comparatively modest, mainly charitable purposes. Its members visited imprisoned Falange supporters and accompanied their families, in keeping with Pilar Primo de Rivera’s principle that women’s role was to serve. The war changed the organization’s importance. By the time of the Salamanca congress, delegations had come from every province in the Francoist zone, and the expanded political circumstances justified a national gathering.

The congress took place while Madrid remained outside Francoist control. That absence had an institutional consequence: the Madrid leadership, headed by Pilar, was the sole provincial delegation not present. The meeting was therefore national in scope but bounded by the front lines, a wartime distinction reflected even in the publication of the Women’s Section’s official book the following year: it appeared without an imprint because Madrid was still in Republican hands.

Leadership and the Public Arrangement

Pilar Primo de Rivera remained the organization’s first, last, and only National Chief. She was the daughter of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, who had ruled Spain as a military dictator from 1923 to 1930, and the sister of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Falange’s founder. Executed in Alicante prison in November 1936, José Antonio had been elevated by the movement to the status of a martyr of the Crusade. His family’s political standing lent the congress’s leadership a dynastic dimension.

At the congress, Marichu de la Mora appeared to be its great winner after Pilar: she held the post of National Delegate, while Stauffer placed herself in the lower-sounding position of Central Assistant for Press and Propaganda. De la Mora was also said to have been José Antonio’s only known fiancée, although the account notes that this claim rested on her own testimony and lacked corroborating evidence. The public arrangement gave de la Mora prominence, but it did not transfer the organization’s propaganda machinery to her.

Clara Stauffer’s Influence Behind the Title

Stauffer, known affectionately as Clarita, was thirty-three in 1937. Born in Madrid in 1904 to a German father and a Madrileña mother, she had been educated in Germany and still held German nationality. Her foreign status did not obstruct her prominence in Spanish women’s sport, where she excelled in swimming and skiing, or her political advancement within the ultranationalist Falange. It instead helped make her useful in relations between Burgos and Nazi Germany.

Her formal demotion at the congress functioned, in effect, as a political display: she appeared to yield the National Delegate’s place to de la Mora while preserving practical control of communications. Stauffer wrote the unsigned texts and edited the signed contributions in the Women’s Section’s official book, first published in 1938 and frequently reissued in the early 1940s. Beginning in January 1937, she also contributed to the Salamanca newspaper El Adelanto as a spokesperson for Falangist women. The congress thus revealed the gap between visible rank and the work through which influence was actually exercised.

From Congress Leadership to German Connections

Stauffer’s responsibilities extended beyond Spanish propaganda. She travelled frequently to Germany, where she used the name Klara, and acted as guide and interpreter for Falange and Francoist-government representatives through the end of the Civil War and afterward. Mercedes Sanz Bachiller, founder of Auxilio Social, and her close collaborator Carmen de Icaza travelled under Stauffer’s guidance, usually to Hamburg, to study Nazi Party welfare programs. The Winterhilfe, or Winter Relief, provided a model for their own organization.

Stauffer also took part in less public and sometimes secret missions. Francoist military representatives negotiated German military assistance and, in return, offered wolfram and other raw materials; Stauffer participated in this sphere of contacts as well. Her position at the congress therefore belongs to a larger pattern: a leader who could appear to step aside in the domestic hierarchy while carrying political, propaganda, and diplomatic influence across national borders.

Significance

The congress makes visible both the gendered limits and the political reach of the Women’s Section. Its founding principle assigned women a subordinate role of service, and its leadership continued to organize authority through a hierarchy headed by Pilar. Yet wartime expansion gave the organization a national platform, while Stauffer’s authorship, editorial control, and diplomatic work show how women could exercise consequential power within that structure.

Its central reversal is the difference between office and influence. De la Mora received the prominent title; Stauffer took the lower-ranking post, but the texts, public voice, and German connections remained substantially in her hands. The congress was not merely a ceremonial debut for the Women’s Section. It was a public arrangement of authority that also concealed how that authority operated.