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Spain SOCIAL VALUES AND ATTITUDES
After the restoration of democracy, the changes in
everyday
Spanish life were as radical as the political
transformation.
These changes were even more striking when contrasted with
the
values and social practices that had prevailed in Spanish
society
during the Franco years, especially during the 1940s and
the
early 1950s. In essence, Spanish social values and
attitudes were
modernized at the same pace, and to the same degree, as
the
country's class structure, economic institutions, and
political
framework.
To say that Spanish social values under Franco were
conservative would be a great understatement. Both public
laws
and church regulations enforced a set of social strictures
aimed
at preserving the traditional role of the family, distant
and
formal relations between the sexes, and controls over
expression
in the press, film, and the mass media, as well as over
many
other important social institutions. By the 1960s,
however,
social values were changing faster than the law,
inevitably
creating tension between legal codes and reality. Even the
church
had begun to move away from its more conservative
positions by
the latter part of the decade. The government responded
haltingly
to these changes with some new cabinet appointments and
with
somewhat softer restrictions on the media. Yet underneath
these
superficial changes, Spanish society was experiencing
wrenching
changes as its people came increasingly into contact with
the
outside world. To some extent, these changes were due to
the
rural exodus that had uprooted hundreds of thousands of
Spaniards
and had brought them into new urban social settings. In
the 1960s
and the early 1970s, however, two other contacts were also
important: the flow of European tourists to "sunny Spain"
and the
migration of Spain's workers to jobs in France,
Switzerland, and
West Germany.
One of the most powerful influences on Spanish social
values
has been the country's famous "industry without
smokestacks"--
tourism. In the years before the Civil War, tourists
numbered
only about one quarter of a million, and it took more than
a
decade after World War II for them to discover Spain's
climate
and low prices. When they finally did, the trickle of
tourists
became a flood (see
table 6, Appendix). The leading
countries
sending tourists to Spain were France, Portugal, Britain,
and
West Germany. Of course tourists brought much more than
British
pounds or German deutsche marks; they also brought the
democratic
political and social values of northern Europe.
The other population flow that affected Spanish
cultural
values involved Spanish workers who returned from having
worked
in the more industrialized and more liberal countries of
Western
Europe. The exact number of returning migrants fluctuated
greatly
from year to year, depending on economic conditions in
Spain and
in the rest of Europe. The peak period was 1965 to 1969,
when
more than 550,000 returned; but nearly 750,000 returned
during
the decade of the 1970s. The return flow ebbed somewhat
during
the 1980s, when only about 20,000 came back per year. The
principal problems encountered by these returning
Spaniards were
both economic (finding another job) and cultural (what the
Spanish refer to as "social reinsertion," or becoming
accustomed
again to the Spanish ways of doing things). Many of the
returnees
came back with a small sum of money that they invested in
a small
business or shop, from which they hoped to advance up the
economic ladder. Above all, they brought back with them
the
cultural habits and tastes of France, West Germany, and
Switzerland, contributing thereby to the cultural
transformation
of post-Franco Spain.
Outsiders who still thought of Spain as socially
restrained
and conservative were surprised to note the public changes
in
sexual attitudes in the country since the late 1970s. Once
state
censorship was relaxed on magazines and films in 1976 and
in
1978, the market for pornography flourished. In a country
where
Playboy was outlawed until 1976, ten years later
this and
other foreign "adult" magazines were already considered
tame and
were outsold by domestic magazines. Throughout Spain's
large
cities, uncensored sex films were readily available in
government-licensed theaters, and prostitutes and brothels
freely
advertised their services in even the most serious press.
Despite
these attention-getting changes in public attitudes,
however,
Spanish government policy for some years remained quite
distant
from social practice in two important areas related to
private
sexual behavior, contraception and abortion.
During the Franco years, the ban on the sale of
contraceptives was complete, at least in theory, even
though the
introduction of the pill had brought artificial
contraception to
at least half a million Spanish women by 1975. The ban on
the
sale of contraceptives was lifted in 1978, but no steps
were
taken to ensure that they were used safely or effectively.
Schools offered no sex education courses, and family
planning
centers existed only where local authorities were willing
to pay
for them. The consequence of a loosening of sexual
restraints,
combined with a high level of ignorance about the
technology that
could be substituted in their place, was a rise in the
number of
unwanted pregnancies, which led to the second policy
problem--abortion.
Illegal abortions were fairly commonplace in Spain even
under
the dictatorship. A 1974 government report estimated that
there
were about 300,000 such abortions each year. Subsequently,
the
number rose to about 350,000 annually, which gave Spain
one of
the highest ratios of abortions to live births among
advanced
industrial countries. Abortion continued to be illegal in
Spain
until 1985, three years after the Spanish Socialist
Workers'
Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol--PSOE) came to
power on
an electoral platform that promised a change. Even so, the
law
legalized abortions only in certain cases: pregnancy
resulting
from rape, which must be reported to the authorities prior
to the
abortion; reasonable probability of a malformed fetus,
attested
to by two doctors; or to save the mother's life, again in
the
opinion of two physicians. In the 1980s, this was as far
as
public opinion would permit the state to go; surveys
showed that
a clear majority of the electorate remained opposed to
abortion
on demand.
Perhaps the most significant change in Spanish social
values,
however, involved the role of women in society, which, in
turn,
was related to the nature of the family. Spanish society,
for
centuries, had embraced a code of moral values that
established
stringent standards of sexual conduct for women (but not
for
men); restricted the opportunities for professional
careers for
women, but honored their role as wives and (most
important)
mothers; and prohibited divorce, contraception, and
abortion, but
permitted prostitution. After the return of democracy, the
change
in the status of women was dramatic. One significant
indicator
was the changing place of women in the work force. In the
traditional Spanish world, women rarely entered the job
market.
By the late 1970s, however, 22 percent of the country's
adult
women, still somewhat fewer than in Italy and in Ireland,
had
entered the work force. By 1984 this figure had increased
to 33
percent, a level not significantly different from Italy or
the
Netherlands. Women still made up less than one-third of
the total
labor force, however, and in some important sectors, such
as
banking, the figure was closer to one-tenth. A 1977
opinion poll
revealed that when asked whether a woman's place was in
the home
only 22 percent of young people in Spain agreed, compared
with 26
percent in Britain, 30 percent in Italy, and 37 percent in
France. The principal barrier to women in the work place,
however, was not public opinion, but rather such factors
as a
high unemployment rate and a lack of part-time jobs. In
education, women were rapidly achieving parity with men,
at least
statistically. In 1983, approximately 46 percent of
Spain's
university enrollment was female, the thirty-first highest
percentage in the world, and comparable to most other
European
countries.
During Franco's years, Spanish law discriminated
strongly
against married women. Without her husband's approval,
referred
to as the permiso marital, a wife was prohibited
from
almost all economic activities, including employment,
ownership
of property, or even travel away from home. The law also
provided
for less stringent definitions of such crimes as adultery
and
desertion for husbands than it did for wives. Significant
reforms
of this system were begun shortly before Franco's death,
and they
have continued at a rapid pace since then. The permiso
marital was abolished in 1975; laws against adultery
were
cancelled in 1978; and divorce was legalized in 1981.
During the
same year, the parts of the civil code that dealt with
family
finances were also reformed.
During the Franco years, marriages had to be canonical
(that
is, performed under Roman Catholic law and regulations) if
even
one of the partners was Catholic, which meant effectively
that
all marriages in Spain had to be sanctioned by the church.
Since
the church prohibited divorce, a marriage could be
dissolved only
through the arduous procedure of annulment, which was
available
only after a lengthy series of administrative steps and
was thus
accessible only to the relatively wealthy. These
restrictions
were probably one of the major reasons for a 1975 survey
result
showing that 71 percent of Spaniards favored legalizing
divorce;
however, because the government remained in the hands of
conservatives until 1982, progress toward a divorce law
was slow
and full of conflict. In the summer of 1981, the Congress
of
Deputies (lower chamber of the Cortes, or Spanish
Parliament)
finally approved a divorce law with the votes of about
thirty
Union of the Democratic Center (Union de Centro
Democratico--UCD)
deputies who defied the instructions of party
conservatives. As a
consequence, Spain had a divorce law that permitted the
termination of a marriage in as little as two years
following the
legal separation of the partners. Still, it would be an
exaggeration to say that the new divorce law opened a
floodgate
for the termination of marriages. Between the time the law
went
into effect at the beginning of September 1981, and the
end of
1984, only slightly more than 69,000 couples had availed
themselves of the option of ending their marriages, and
the
number declined in both 1983 and 1984. There were already
more
divorced people than this in Spain in 1981 before the law
took
effect.
Despite these important gains, observers expected that
the
gaining of equal rights for women would be a lengthy
struggle,
waged on many different fronts. It was not until deciding
a 1987
case, for example, that Spain's Supreme Court held that a
rape
victim need not prove that she had fought to defend
herself in
order to verify the truth of her allegation. Until that
important
court case, it was generally accepted that a female rape
victim,
unlike the victims of other crimes, had to show that she
had put
up "heroic resistance" in order to prove that she had not
enticed
the rapist or otherwise encouraged him to attack her.
Another important sign of cultural change involved the
size
and the composition of the family. To begin with, the
marriage
rate (the number of marriages in proportion to the adult
population) has declined steadily since the mid-1970s.
After
holding steady at 7 per 1,000 or more for over 100 years,
the
marriage rate declined to about 5 per 1,000 in 1982, a
level
observed in West Germany and in Italy only a few years
earlier.
Fewer people were marrying in Spain, and the family
structure was
changing dramatically as well. In 1970, of the 8.8 million
households recorded in the census, 59 percent consisted of
small
nuclear families of two to five persons, 15 percent were
somewhat
larger nuclear families that included other relatives as
well as
guests, and 10.6 percent were households of unrelated
individuals
who had no nuclear family. Large families of more than
three
children were only 9 percent of the total. In a 1975
municipal
survey that dealt only with families, the following
results were
registered: couples without children constituted 16
percent of
all families; and two-children families made up 34 percent
of the
total. Although the number of family units increased more
than 20
percent between 1970 and 1981, the average size of the
family
decreased by about 10 percent, from 3.8 persons to 3.5.
The
typical extended family of traditional societies (three
generations of related persons living in the same
household)
hardly appeared at all in the census data. Clearly, that
characteristic of Spanish cultural values was a thing of
the
past.
Data as of December 1988
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