Liberated only to wear lace mantillas

In the first third of the 20th century, the centralism of the Spanish right was challenged by regionalism, the Catholic Church by the spread of secularism and anticlericalism and industrialists and landowners by the growing strength of trade unionism. The establishment of the Second Republic on April 14 1931 saw a new political elite of liberal intellectuals and moderate Socialists introduce a broad range of social, political and economic reforms. In the context of economic depression, this was perceived as an aggressive assault on traditional interests by the old order, which mobilised accordingly. Nevertheless, in the five and a quarter years before the right-wing backlash culminated in the military coup of July 18 1936, cultural and educational reform transformed the lives of many Spaniards, particularly women.

Before 1931, the Spanish legal system had been astonishingly retrograde - women were not permitted to sign contracts, to administer businesses or estates or to marry without risk of losing their jobs. The Republican constitution of December 1931 gave them the same legal rights as men, permitting them to vote and to stand for parliament, and legalised divorce. Ironically, as Shirley Mangini's highly readable account reminds us, the emancipation of women was regarded as dangerous by some female leftists. Ten years earlier, the Socialist Margarite Nelken wrote: "If women were to intervene in our political life, they would be inclined very sensitively towards the reactionary spirit, since women here I are meek disciples of their confessors".

Why Nelken was right is graphically explained in Mary Vincent's vivid account of the class dimension of female religiosity in her wide-ranging study of Catholic society and politics in Spain. As she shows, girl's convent schools run for the rich operated on the principle that "to win the soul of a woman is to win the whole family.To train a woman is to train a man".

Pressure for the female vote came from a tiny elite of educated women and some progressive male politicians, most notably Socialists. Accordingly, it was excoriated as "godless" by a majority of Catholic women influenced by their priests. However, the right was far more successful than the left in mobilising newly emancipated female voters. Nevertheless, between 1931 and 1936, women of both the left and the right were mobilised politically and socially as never before. To understand the articulation of that process on the right, Vincent's study is required reading. In book titles, it is usually the case that what the large print giveth, the small print taketh away. Here there is no need for any recourse to the Trades Descriptions Act. This is the best kind of local study, casting its light far beyond the confines of the area studied, illuminating the national picture and enriching it with detail from Salamanca (and elsewhere).

Sharply and elegantly written, with frequent shafts of wit and irony, Vincent's work provides not only hard sociological evidence on religiosity but, more importantly, an empathetic depiction of how the uncompromising secularism of the Second Republic played into the hands of those who would destroy it. The abolition of religious education and the removal of financial support for the upkeep of buildings and for stipends for the diocesan clergy turned a Catholic electorate that was not initially anti-Republican into a potential electoral asset for the anti-Republican right. Vincent's sensitive accounts of the combination of the sacred and the profane in liturgical practices, processions, feast days, miracles, apparitions of the virgin, help explain the popular sentiment that the secularising Republican politicians were inadvertently challenging.

The process whereby a mass right-wing party, the Ceda, emerged is relatively well known but the local sinews of the process are analysed with great originality. There can be no higher praise than to say that her work on the politics of Spanish Catholicism is on a par with that of David Blackbourn on German Catholicism.

The outbreak of the Spanish civil war and the need to mobilise society for total war gave women in both zones a dramatically new participation in the functions of government and society. In the Republican zone, they played a crucial role in industrial production and assumed important positions in the political, and even military establishment. Behind the lines, women ran public services in transport, welfare and health. That, together with the assumption of the role of principal bread-winner, had a dramatic effect on traditional gender relations. In the reactionary atmosphere of the rebel Nationalist zone, there was no such emancipation of women.

Health and welfare were organised by the Falangist Secci"n Femenina but Franco's emergent regime followed previous Catholic practice in stressing women's role as homemakers and mothers for Falangist warriors. Moreover, once the war ended with Franco's victory on April 1 1939, the feminist revolution of the Second Republic was reversed with extreme savagery. Republican women were punished for their brief escape from gender stereotypes by humiliations both public (head-shaving, forced castor oil doses) and private (imprisonment, torture, rape).

The remarkable story of the partial emancipation and subsequent repression of women in 1930s Spain has not yet found its historian. That is hardly surprising given the scale of the research agenda. Mangini has not undertaken a project that would require a large team. But her book, deeply moving and alive with an unfailing empathy with her subjects, is no less welcome for that.

Essentially, she brings to this story the methodologies of the literary critic and the oral historian rather than those of the social or political historian. She provides an excellent account of the role of women in war production, as nurses, soldiers, as farm and factory workers in appalling conditions of toxicity, running buses and trams in towns, as teachers in literacy campaigns at the front - as well as continuing to provide food and do laundry for men. She makes good use of interview material to illustrate the repression of the imprisoned and tortured working-class women who were unable to escape into exile.

Mangini describes her work as having a pioneering element. Certainly her discovery and choice of apposite texts constitutes a significant contribution to a subject that is in its infancy. In particular, she is to be commended for her accounts of the political careers of two important Socialist deputies, Matilde de la Torre Guterrez (from Oviedo) and Mar!a Leiarraga (from Granada) although it is to be regretted that she did not use their remarkable speeches in the Cortes. Both played a crucial role during the savage social struggles of 1934 - Leiarraga in the nationwide strike of landless labourers and de la Torre in drawing attention to the repression after the Asturian miners' uprising.

The book is at its weakest when Mangini steps beyond the immediate bounds of her subject with attempts at pungent generalisation. Ecclesiastical, economic or military historians of the Golden Age could hardly agree with her statement that Spain after 1492 was "controlled by an all-powerful monolith composed of the monarchy, church and military officials, landowners and other sections of the aristocracy". On the other hand, her analysis of interviews with rightwing women to show how they internalised misogyny is powerful and memorable. Despite its flaws, the book abounds in illuminating insight.

Paul Preston is professor of international history, London School of Economics. His Concise History of the Spanish Civil War has just been published by Fontana.