Women: fictions and realities is an exhibition that seeks to make visible a historical and still present interference in women's lives: the conflictive, uncomfortable and complex relationship between normative models of femininity, disseminated by audiovisual culture with greater popular incidence, and their own realities, built under the pressure of sexism and traditional heteropatriarchal culture, but not for this reason free from authority, dissent and dissent.

The exhibition proposes an itinerary through some of the most emblematic moments, from the post-war period to the present, in which the discomfort of women is more evident in the face of official stories, used as propaganda elements to spread a reductionist model of femininity and thus restrict women's freedom. It revolves around three stories that intersect throughout the journey: women's work, their invisibility and the stereotypes created around their work activities; the staging of women's social and political participation, their mobilizations and the emergence of feminism in Catalonia, and finally, audiovisual narratives related to a purported regularization of female models and behaviors with regard to the body, sexuality and love.

Veiled realities and invisible images of women's work

The contribution of women to the workplace is one of the most poorly documented realities. Women's work and especially domestic and care work have been omitted from cultural accounts and until the 1990s the first sociological studies dealing with this topic do not appear. Sometimes it appears indirectly in advertising, but always associated with household consumer products and the voice of experts who insist on presenting them as elements to minimize day-to-day work. Be that as it may, it insists on the exclusive responsibility of women in relation to this occupation and tries not to make it look like a job properly.

After the Second World War, the official accounts related to care work resort to the female model of the “angel of the home” who, over time, evolves into the figure of the superwoman: a woman recognized for her professional activity, but equally linked to home care and care. The conflict of women's time appears in the public debate, together with the double and triple women's days.

From Francoist 'wolves' to the new imaginaries

The social and political participation of women in the early years of Francoism has become invisible and is also poorly documented, despite the fact that many lived in exile, prison and were also sentenced to death or shot. The laws continued to prosecute any female dissent related to the narrow margins of conduct established. Francoist morality sought to impose a control over the female body and sexuality. Hand in hand with film production, she tried to interfere in the female experience through a national star-system of actresses and singers. From Hollywood came idealized images of women that allowed us to imagine other possible lives.
Advertising associated female images with an objective, fetishistic and exhibitionist use. For free, women's bodies were subjected to various manipulations with the aim of encouraging desire and consumerism.

Creation of physical and symbolic spaces

From the 1960s onwards, women's participation emerges again and becomes more visible, especially in the neighbourhood struggles of the new neighbourhoods of cities. His activism, which had previously manifested itself at specific times, reappears within the framework of the unions and the anti-Franco associative movements.

Many of these struggles were led by women from the most recent migrations. The participation of women in general mobilizations against the regime became more and more present, at the same time that new female protagonists appeared that broke the pre-established schemes about traditional femininity.

And, together with the individual protagonists, what began to transform patriarchal structures was the emergence of the feminist movement, which, throughout the 1970s, incorporated into the struggle for democracy a specific agenda with the aim of visualizing and giving value to the needs of everyday life and, especially, work in the domestic environment, for the most part. developed by women. With the motto “What is personal is political”, feminism burst onto the public stage demanding another way of doing politics and demanding public solutions to problems previously considered private.