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Weak sex? Never. If a female colleague was penalized for smoking in the factory - the men were allowed to do so - the cigar makers of the

Tabacalera de Lavapiés

responded by lighting a cigarette, all at once. "That combative spirit was very significant even in the gesture," reflects the interviewee.

If Mayor

Alberto Bosch

imposed a tax higher than his earnings in 1892, the greengrocers would mutiny for two days against the governor's infantry and cavalry, who, incidentally, would

end up wounded

.

With their handkerchiefs as a flag, barricades of banastas in the Madrid markets, and leaving only the pharmacies open on their way from La Cebada to Valverde.

"All of them had

that character of claiming what was theirs

and of taking their fight and their speech to the public space to make society participate," continues the author.

Metro ticket office in the 1940s METRO DE MADRID

If the chronicles and folkloric verses of the early twentieth century called them frivolous, busy only to fish for students in the

Bombilla

or to beg San Antonio for a boyfriend, the couturiers in the workshops of the 30s were associated to limit the working day to eight hours and a fixed price per garment. And the writer again undertakes: "They took to the streets when society did not listen to them.

They were often ridiculed,

with condescension and paternalism. It is seen in the press of the time: the bad reputation of the greengrocers is today an expression contemptuous. But they had the ability to unite to make their voices heard in a not easy time, less to express themselves or associate themselves. And it is something that should be vindicated or, at least, not forgotten ".

The illustrator is

Victoria Gallardo

(Madrid, 1990), journalist and signatory of

Fuimos indómitas.

The disappeared jobs of the women of Madrid

(Ediciones La bookstore).

A rigorous and careful book that is a warp of findings, after two years of research in newspaper archives, between historical documents and few previous titles, about the

working women who built the capital from 1850 to the present day

, with oak spines and the creaking of their knees.

Washers of the Manzanares River (Madrid), c.

1915.BALDOMER GILI ROIG / JAIME MORERA ART MUSEUM

They were the washerwomen, water carriers, greengrocers, chestnut makers, dressmakers, cigar makers, telephone operators and Metro ticket office. "They

opened a path that continues to this day

, where it is easy to extrapolate their motivations and concerns to those of the present," explains Gallardo. Because these women were our great-grandmothers, grandmothers and mothers, pioneers in subsistence and in the will of icebreakers, who are the substratum where we granddaughters flourish.

For this reason, the author has also included, after an almost "obfuscated" search, the testimonies and the family memory of the descendants and of those who still exercise some of these trades, such as

Angelines Cardenal

,

daughter and granddaughter of chestnut trees

, with six decades of embers and coal, installed in the

Bilbao roundabout

. "It seemed tricky to try to talk about these women or put words in their mouths, without them being the ones to tell their story."

And because times are different, but not so much burdens, with women's work still precarious or undervalued, Gallardo crowns the book with an

interview with a chambermaid

, a

kelly

: "They represent today the same as their predecessors, the same what they fought for. " If the cigarette companies did not give up until they abolished the piecework hours and received a sickness allowance - the press said: "the cigarette companies need a riot from time to time, they live off the smoke and the smoke goes to their heads" -, workers like

Ángela Muñoz has been

demanding, since 2014, that the retirement of those who stretch sheets for three euros be advanced, in Madrid hotels for 900 euros per night. "And their companions do not make beds," the author concludes.

Antonia Fernández, at her stand on Paseo del Prado CEDIDA

Not "hip moving more than a ballerina ,

" as the washerwomen of the Manzanares, nor needed "agility puppeteers" of -metáforas telephonists of the press, which

romantizaba

the

left spine

feminine.

Until 1984, they lost their position if they married

, like the box office of Metro.

Although in other contests there was no inequality: in that of dying of cold working, like the washerwomen, or in working until death, as

Amalia Maroto

tells

of her great-aunt Pepa, a brunette until she was 70 years old.

"I realized how little I knew about the anonymous lives of the women of my city.

They hardly appear in the history books

. If they do, it is obliquely, without explaining that many were heads of families, single mothers or widows, nor how they combined their jobs with the work that they expected at home, "says the journalist, a regular contributor to EL MUNDO and Metrópoli

,

about the

flash

that prompted her to search for these silenced biographies.

"To restore the narrator's generic masculine by

the plural feminine

", with a look at the historical void, without nostalgia or sweetening.

Book cover.

Gallardo's work is also an act of justice: the lives of the workers were in an uproar. It was not often that they knew how to read or write until, hopefully, they were 20 years old, but he remembers

Clara Campoamor

, with the opposition to Telefónica before obtaining the Baccalaureate, or

Luisa Carnés

, with her self-taught training in popular bookstores. Daughter of a sastra, she was also a hatmaker apprentice and a telephone operator, before she was a journalist and a writer. In fact, this author, along with

Josefina Carabias

or

Magda Donato

[Carmen Nelken's pseudonym], was an exception among her colleagues, with reports on these workers, and without picturesqueness, which are also at the base of this book.

Beneath its humble facades, hunched over sewing or with black eyes from treating nicotine, beats a collective identity.

"

Everything they achieved was always together

, the women of yesteryear had it very assumed. And they have to serve as an example today: we cannot alone, but together, yes."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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