Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Lucía Sánchez Saornil – Spanish anarchist poet and co-founder of Mujeres Libres, erased from history for being queer and radical

It begins, as these stories often do, with a photograph that shouldn’t exist. Madrid, 1936. The edges fray like burnt lace. A young woman, slight and sharp-eyed, stands with her fists in her pockets. The stance is casual. Defiant. A hint of a smile flickers on her lips, somewhere between ironic and unbothered. The backdrop is chaos — war is crackling across Spain like a dry forest set alight — but Lucía Sánchez Saornil is composed. Almost amused. You wouldn’t guess she’s just co-founded Mujeres Libres, the revolutionary feminist collective that the male anarchists called a “distraction.” Or that she’s a lesbian in a country poised to outlaw everything about her. Or that, a few years from this frame, she’ll vanish.

Not literally. She’ll live into the '70s. But politically, culturally — she’s erased. Not the way dust settles on memory, but the way memory is scrubbed like a threat. One part anarchist, one part poet, one part queer, she was inconvenient for every story Spain wanted to tell about itself. And so, they didn’t.

But let’s back up.

Born in Madrid in 1895, Lucía grew up fatherless in a working-class home — the kind of place where books are scarce, but quiet hunger teaches you to listen closely to the world. She wrote poems before she could afford paper, scribbling verses on newsprint and butcher wrap. Her mother worked as a seamstress. Lucía became a telephone operator, which in early 20th-century Spain was a curious mix of low-wage labor and strategic eavesdropping. She learned voices, cadences, code. She learned when to listen and when to interrupt.

At night, she turned into Lucía Sánchez Saornil, poet of Spain’s modernist vanguardia, publishing under a masculine pseudonym. “Luciano de San-Saor.” Because a woman writing about forbidden desire and abstract rebellion was scandalous. A man doing it? That was just literature.

And what a poet she was. Her early work pulses with eroticism, defiance, loneliness — that urgent, magnetic solitude known only to people who live half-in-shadow. “I was the silence between walls,” she once wrote, “and the flame no one saw.” Even now, her verses feel like smoke from a fire you didn’t know you were standing in.

But poetry wasn’t enough. Or rather, Spain wouldn’t let it be enough.

As the country splintered in the 1930s — monarchy crumbling, church tightening its grip, fascism on the march — Lucía moved from metaphor to manifesto. She joined the CNT, Spain’s powerful anarcho-syndicalist labor union, and started editing their publications. But here’s the punchline: even among radicals, she found herself boxed out. The revolution was supposedly for everyone. But when Lucía raised questions about women’s rights — about the fact that even in workers' collectives women were stuck cooking, cleaning, nursing men’s wounds and egos — the men told her: now’s not the time.

Lucía didn’t wait.

In 1936, with fellow anarchists Mercedes Comaposada and Amparo Poch y Gascón, she co-founded Mujeres Libres — “Free Women.” Not just a magazine, not just a movement. A full-on counter-insurgency inside the insurgency. Their goal was simple and enormous: to liberate women from ignorance, servitude, and fear. They taught literacy classes. Opened childcare centers so women could join the fight. Published radical texts about female sexuality, autonomy, abortion, labor.

Feminist activism in the middle of a civil war — bold doesn’t even cover it. It was incendiary.

But it wasn’t just the fascists who sneered. Their own comrades belittled them. “Why divide the revolution?” they asked. Lucía, never one for pleasantries, snapped back: “There is no revolution without women.”

They had nearly 30,000 members at their peak. Thirty thousand women — mechanics, educators, nurses, guerrillas — trying to remake the world in the middle of a world unmaking itself. And still, you won’t find them in most high school history books. You might not even find them in feminist ones.

But Lucía’s erasure didn’t stop at her politics. There was also her love.

She met America Barroso — yes, America — in the 1930s. The details are scarce, the way queer love stories often are when they’re not meant to survive. But the letters, when they surface, crackle with tenderness. There’s no mistaking it: Lucía was in love. Visibly. Openly. In a fascist country that would soon criminalize homosexuality under Franco’s regime.

After the Republicans lost, Lucía and America fled. Exile became their new war.

In France, then back in Spain under false names. Hiding in Valencia. Then in Barcelona. Lucía wrote some of her most aching work in those years — prose poems about invisibility, coded essays on exile, surrealist radio plays that no one aired. She gave up public life. Gave up on being remembered, maybe. The fire went underground. But it never went out.

She died in 1970, three years before Franco’s death. No obituary. No tribute. Just silence. The kind that follows women who refused to shut up.

And then — slowly, like seeds cracking under snow — she began to return.

First in footnotes. Then in feminist anthologies. Then in full-throated tributes from queer Spanish poets reclaiming her legacy. Today, she’s whispered in the same breath as Emma Goldman and Simone de Beauvoir, though she’d probably side-eye both for being too bourgeois.

Still, it’s not just about Mujeres Libres or her anarchist writings or her underdog poetry. It’s about something harder to pin down: the way Lucía lived inside contradiction without flinching. Radical, and lyrical. Public, and hidden. Fighting for a future she’d never see, in a language most refused to hear.

So when people talk about “forgotten figures of women’s history” or “trailblazing queer icons,” they’re often talking about someone like Lucía without even knowing it. She’s what gets left out when the story gets too tidy. Too male. Too straight.

But now, maybe, she’s exactly what we need.

Not just to remember, but to reckon — with the quiet violence of historical erasure, and with the kind of love and rage it takes to write yourself back into the world.

History didn’t forget Lucía Sánchez Saornil. It tried to. There’s a difference. And she — stubborn, brilliant, burning — wouldn’t let it.