Las líderes silenciadas: el debate parlamentario sobre el sufragio femenino

During the years of the Second Republic, Spanish women experienced an incipient emancipation, sanctioned by the Constitution of 1931, which recognised women’s suffrage (Art. 36), approved on 1st October. Two of the three female representatives of the First Legislature of the Republic participated in the debate: Clara Campoamor (Radical Republican Party) and Victoria Kent (Radical Socialist Republican Party). Their interventions, for and against women’s suffrage, form the basis of this work. I have constructed my analysis around Fuentes Rodriguez’ theoretical framework of pragmatic linguistics and the organisation of her model in levels. I have also taken into consideration the theory of argumentation and its grammar, as well as studies on (im)politeness and social image. Finally, though the coordinates of the parliamentary discourse of the corpus object of my article are not comparable to those of the modern political discourse, I have also taken into consideration the most recent studies of Fuentes Rodríguez and her research group on political discourse and female parliamentary discourse.