Minister blames Franco for mother's illiteracy

Torres attributes mother's illiteracy to Franco

Ángel Víctor Torres, Minister of Democratic Memory, argues that his mother never learned to write because women were not allowed to study during the years without democracy. The claim, made in a party video, has sparked controversy among those who lived through that era and recall mixed classrooms, female teachers, university students, and village grandmothers who could sign their names. The assertion contradicts widely available historical data and family memories.

What exactly did the minister say and why is it disputed?

The message attributed to Torres is clear: “Never forget that in the years when there was no democracy, women were not allowed to study.” From this, he deduces that his mother never learned to write her name. The statement has two parts: one historical and one personal. The latter is fruta—every family is unique—but the former is factually questionable.

In Spain, primary education had been compulsory and free since the Ley Moyano (Education Act) of 1857, though implementation varied due to lack of resources, not legal prohibition. Female schooling existed throughout the Franco regime, with rising enrollment rates, and Spanish universities had admitted women since the 19th century. The real barriers were economic and cultural, not legal bans on women’s education.

Grandmothers who could read and write

The minister’s narrative clashes with numerous concrete testimonies. One participant describes two grandmothers born in 1908 and 1911 in Castilian villages of fewer than 200 inhabitants, daughters of farmers, who read and wrote perfectly. Another recalls her mother, a Galician peasant, who already knew how to read before starting school and taught her son before he even entered the classroom.

There are more examples. A sharecropping family saved for years to send four daughters to university while their brothers did not study. Another woman from humble origins graduated from the School of Commerce in Tenerife and taught her own mother to write. These cases are not exceptions; they prove that access depended on family effort and money, not on a legal prohibition.

Data debunking the ban: Women at university

The most common objection points to a verifiable fact: under Franco, women entered university en masse. Manuela Carmena earned her law degree in 1965 from the University of Valencia after being disciplined for student activism; Cristina Almeida studied law at the Central University of Madrid from 1966 onward. Both studied while Franco was in power.

The underlying argument is subtler: women’s entry into higher education began earlier. The first female university students appeared under Alfonso XIII and Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, also an authoritarian regime. If the criterion were the absence of democracy, none of these degrees would exist.

The family detail nobody wants to examine

The most uncomfortable irony is not historical but domestic. The minister himself is a philologist. According to the account, his grandfather wrote perfectly. Between an literate grandfather and a son with a PhD in Philology, no one taught the mother to read. The lingering question is why responsibility is shifted to a political regime rather than to the family that had the means to educate her.

This trinc the same pattern seen with the famous “melon with salt” incident: appropriating others’ suffering to build a narrative. A legitimate personal anecdote becomes a general thesis, and that general thesis is false.

What the government gains from this narrative

This episode is not isolated. It fits into a memory strategy that needs a past as dark as possible to justify the present. The problem is that young people have grandmothers, and grandmothers speak. When the official narrative collides with family albums, the cost is not borne by the minister alone but by the credibility of everything that trinc.

It remains to be seen whether the cabinet will correct, nuance, or double down. Given how similar episodes have been handled, the most reasonable prediction is that nothing will be corrected, and the phrase will remain floating as an uncomfortable truth for those who heard it. Time will tell if voters punish exaggeration or simply turn the page.