SPAIN: Votes for Women

Stubbornly, insistently President Alcala Zamora of newly Republican Spain has pressed Pope Pius XI to withdraw Spain’s die-hard Royalist Primate. Pedro Cardinal Segura y Saenz, Archbishop of Toledo (TIME, June 29). In Vatican City last week this long, silent diplomatic struggle ended with a decorous item in Osservatore Romano, Papal daily:

“His Most Reverend Eminence, Cardinal Segura, has remitted into the hands of the Holy Father free renunciation of the Archbishop’s See at Toledo. His Holiness has accepted it, expressing appreciation for the noble gesture the Cardinal has made with true generosity and supernatural spirit.”

Expelled from Spain by the military last summer, Cardinal Segura watched from a French monastery near the Spanish frontier last week while Madrid legislators passed a bill strongly opposed by His Eminence. This law, which the Spanish National Assembly passed 160 to 121, granted suffrage at last to Spanish females aged 23 or more.

Never before has a Latin nation put ballots into the hands of its women, France and Italy being no exceptions to this Latin rule. In Spain there are some 5,000,000 male voters. Last week’s law added 5,000,000 females.

Debate in the National Assembly just before the bill passed was exciting. “Do not forget,” shrilled Suffragette Senorita Clara Campoamor, “that you are all the sons of women! We are all equal by nature! The Spanish woman awaits her redemption by the Republic!”

Spain’s Minister of Prisons, British-blooded Senorita Victoria Kent, leading Spanish feminist, opposed the law: “Spanish women are not prepared for the ballot yet!”

Somewhat stealthily, as the vote neared, several Deputies stole out. Not one of these craven abstainers was bald. Bald deputies, Madrid noticed, voted almost without exception for votes-for-women. Very young Deputies, dandies with sleek black sideburns, vainly voted in the negative.