Mi hija, Hildegart—say those words in Spain and everyone will know whose daughter Hildegart you mean. Bestselling books, self-replicating features in the Sunday press and a 1977 movie that surfaces from time to time on TV replenish the public’s awareness of a 1930s tabloid tragedy (Mad mom slays teen genius daughter!) sometimes interpreted as a bloody curtain-raiser to the Spanish Civil War.

Beyond the Pyrenean divide, it was the basis for a book translated as ‘Aurora’s Motive’ by Austrian novelist Erich Hackl, who fictionalised his account with interpolated dialogue, but otherwise refrained from taking liberties with his sources. Now, Professor Alison Sinclair has written Sex and Society in Early 20th Century Spain: Hildegart Rodriguez and the World League for Sexual Reform. When Spaniards take note of the new light she sheds on a story they may think they already know, and when that story becomes better known outside Spain (as it certainly deserves to be), Hildegart’s tragedy may well come to occupy a niche of bizarre but instructive prominence in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.

As can be surmised from its unwieldy title and outrageous price tag, this is an academic’s book, as far from being grist for the Waterstone’s mill as it is possible to get. But its only real drawback is that Sinclair has mustered fascinating new information for the exegesis of a narrative not very familiar to English readers. Obviously, the background details get filled in as she displays the results of her researches, but the narrative never quite gets unrolled and laid out on the ground from beginning to end before it gets explicated, so that the full force of its dramatic—Sophoclean is not too strong a word—impact can be experienced by those new to the story that shook up a country already on pretty shaky ground at the time it occurred in 1933.   

Aurora Rodriguez was a singular, as well as a single mother; radically militant in her feminism (that’s correct, in Spain, born in 1890) who was also influenced by anarchism, different workers’ rights movements and the crackpot communal utopianism of Charles Fourier. One fine day she decided to get pregnant with the sole aim of raising and educating the world’s first truly free woman, hot-wiring evolution to produce a prototype Nietzschean superbeing that would lead humanity into a New Era.

I had always taken Aurora as being beyond sympathetic comprehension, assuming that only monstrously warped egoaltry could account for her act of deliberate and defiant filicide. But following Professor Sinclair’s discoveries at the Spanish equivalent of the British Library’s Colindale facility, it becomes easier to see her as a woman of hypertrophied intelligence and hair-trigger sensibility, intoxicated by the big-ticket ideas swatted around in public print by the progressive intelligentsia of her age. Among these was the beta version of feminism to which she pledged her life’s purpose, and it can’t be emphasised enough that this partiular iteration was very much a subset of the eugenics movement sweeping through Europe at the time. 

Eugenics these days has a bad rap that it did not possess until Hitler came along, though its sinister side is implicit in the stated goal of ‘improving the breed’ through methods that start with, but unfortunately did not end with, sexual and reproductive autonomy for the individual woman. A handful of thinking minds, notably GK Chesterton’s, spotted the implications straight away and were not taken in. But Woodrow Wilson, Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, and Emile Zola were among the believers. Meanwhile, Spain was transiting a period of intellectual frenzy in the run-up to the establishment of the Second Republic, one in which foreign-grown ideas were being imported in wholesale lots. Along with Socialism, Leninism, Freudianism and Fascism, Eugenics made a big splash, as it was directly relevant to Spain-specific issues such as prostitution and venereal disease. Among those endorsing the notion was Gregorio Marañon, who rivalled with Ortega y Gasset as the high-profile liberal intellectual of the period.

Again, it might be well to stress that the short and obvious leap from the prevention of unwanted children to the elimination of undesirable ones had not yet been made. So at the Copenhagen Eugenics Conference of 1928, the first of ten ‘planks’ in its platform called for ‘political, economic and sexual equality of men and women’. but that was subordinate to the greater good of bettering the human species. A reading of Margaret Sanger shows how readily that larger goal was associated with a woman’s right to be ‘the absolute mistress of her own body’ on the assumption that given a choice, most ‘dysgenic’ females would happily decline the burden of care-intensive offspring.

Aurora’s method of improving the race was to put a classified ad in the paper. It appears to have been a priest who answered, only too happy to comply with Aurora’s stipulation that he disappear forever once the ‘carnal affront’ was over and done with. Amazingly, the results satisfied all her requirements as to gender and intellectual capacity. Daughter Hildegart was a true prodigy—advanced maths, fluency in six languages by age eight, a law degree at 16 —and politically precocious, joining the Socialist Party in her early teens, and becoming a splendidly articulate journalist, pamphleteer, and campaigner for changes in the social fabric more radical than the reformers of her day and age were prepared to undertake.

The books and articles signed Hildegart (no surname affixed or required for an icon of the ascendant left) that began appearing when their author had just turned 14 are staggering in their quantity and intellectual density, including the 400-page, chapter-and-verse analysis ¿Se equivocó Marx? (Did Marx Get It Wrong?),  some 20 articles appearing over a twelve-month period in the journal Sexualidad, such as ‘Limiting Offspring: A Duty of the Conscientious Proletariat’,  or ‘El Problema eugenico: punto de vista de una mujer moderna’ (The Eugenics Issue as Seen by a Modern Woman) or countless opinion pieces in the left-wing Madrid press. But what a price was exacted! ‘I insisted on 14 hours of intellectual work that was selected for her by me; law, anatomy, humanities and sexology (I always discussed this matter with Hildegart),  in addition to physical activities such as walking and taking care of animals,’ Aurora would one day proclaim to her baffled psychiatrists. 

A product of her times as well as of her mother, Hildegart viewed the Catholic Church’s teaching on the family as particularly inimical to the cause of radical feminist empowerment, the latter becoming the primary focus of her inexhaustible energy after she broke with the then-ruling Socialists in 1932. ‘Religion has brutally curtailed women’s right as thinking individuals to choose whether to become a mother or to employ birth control techniques,’ she wrote. The harm caused by Catholicism could only be undone by secular, progressive education, which Hildegart saw as an instrument rather than an end; no surprise considering that at the time she wrote, 44 percent of Spanish women were illiterate.

For her, education was proscriptive and therapeutic, rather than descriptive and didactic, and even a man deserved ‘an education explicit enough to make him understand there are limits to his rights regarding the woman to which he is partnered, and that would make him aware of the respective liberties they are under an obligation to guarantee to each other’. It is interesting to contrast that statement, which would serve as a boilerplate vindication for modern-day feminists, with the scant regard for homosexuals manifested by Hildegart. This was not on account of their orientation per se, but because shirking their reproductive duty to the race. Homosexuals were a drag on the dynamic that was supposed to be leading to species-wide perfection. She was absolutely certain Christ was gay, along with most of the leaders of the Second Republic, including two of its presidents, Azaña and Alcalá Zamora, and for good measure, the ‘Spanish Lenin’, Largo Caballero, as well. To her mind, the lot of them were closeted queers and ineffectual as reformers because they had too much to lose if exposed. (It was a view also expressed sotto voce by the radicals vying with them for power in the Second Republic, and may be categorically accurate). 

However, allowing women to express their sexual identity and have children at discretion were second-order concerns to Hildegart. What she really wanted was to deprive the exploiting classes of its steady supply of exploitees.

‘If the patriots want men to defend the state, if the bourgeoisie wants to have women at its disposal to fill its brothels, then let them be the ones who stock the armies and brothels with their own children.’

To further the cause of contraception as a weapon in the class struggle, Hildegart churned out medically impeccable how-not-to manuals for men and women, (she was working on an MD to top her law degree). But when addressing the issue of why people might want to get into bed together in the first place, the best she could suggest was that people must be made to understand that ‘love is a qualitative and quantitative mixture of instinct, or sexual attraction, and friendship, taking the latter term in its most precise sense of mutual understanding and harmony’.

If that sounds like the thoughts of someone who has never been out on a heavy date, well, that’s about the size of it. Manic in her possessiveness, Aurora never let her creation out of sight, and the domineering mother’s loathing of fleshly friction was passed on to the daughter who didn’t mind being known around town as ‘The Red Virgin’. The radical intellectual, militant feminist and safe-sex advocate proudly announced to her followers that she was saving herself for her one true love, should one appear. And even then she’d give the matter some thought.

The qualifications issue was no obstacle to Hildegart becoming secretary of the Spanish offshoot of the World League for Sexual Reform, founded by Havelock Ellis, with whom she began exchanging letters. The author of Studies in the Psychology of Sex was half a century older than his correspondent, but perhaps for that very reason became her ‘significant other’, the one soul in which she would confide her true feelings and nature. What a pair they made, the elderly Englishman with a lifetime history of impotence, and the teenage Spanish virgin. The most authoritative and committed campaigners for sexual freedom and gender equality in their respective homelands, and neither one with so much as an orgasm to show for it.

Ellis’s letters have vanished, but the adolescent girl imprisoned within the fairground automata created by Aurora stands revealed in 20 lengthy, utterly absorbing, and often heartbreaking missives which had been languishing among Ellis’ papers in the British Museum until Sinclair sought them out and transcribed them. Nobody in Spain, so far as I can make out, has a clue as to the revelation they are, and Sinclair is perfectly accurate when she says, ‘The letters are an extraordinary testimony to Hildegart’s life, with all its fears, ambitions and ingenuousness, mixed with premature maturity. It is here that we find a whole new voice for her and a window onto the private life lying beneath her busy and complex public life’.

It sounds like a spoof when in one of her letters to Havelock Ellis—all but one are in English—Hildegart remarks that she has just finished translating into Spanish several hundred pages of a 16th-century treatise by of the Sevillian neo-Platonist Fox-Morcillo, De naturae philosophie seu de Platonis et Aristotelis consensione, and in another comments that :

’I have two of the playthings of childhood, that doll, and a very great Teddy Bear. It is so great I could not hold it in my arms when I could play with it and we both rolled in the carpet or in the grass when I was out from home, and I kissed his hairy face and he grunted—he can grunt, too. Now he is enjoying a comfortable jubilation.’

In 1933, after the league’s Spanish branch invited HG Wells to lecture in Madrid, the novelist was evidently quite impressed by the earnestness and sense of commitment he saw in Hildegart, who had been deputised to show him around town. Spain was hopeless, he assured her, and invited her to come to London and carry on with the valuable work she was doing in a country where it might actually bring results.

Now, even though Wells was a notorious sexual predator, it is by no means clear that he was setting Hildegart up as a dish to be served at his own table. The adolescent we see in the photographs looks older than her years; heavy set and coarse-featured, with a permanent cast of grim earnestness that must have made her even less attractive than the chromosomal input of the absent father had intended her to be. In one letter, she complains about the difficulty she is having in keeping her weight under 80kg.

But Hildegart was determined to leave for London. People later said she had been telling them she was fed up with being her mother’s ‘doll of living flesh’, with being prophet and prodigy, increasingly persuaded that the causes to which she had given her life were all futile, all the battles lost before they were fought. People’s view of the relationship between Hildegart and her mother, once hailed as a prodigious accomplishment of the human intellect, was starting to draw more critical attention. Socialist politician Julian Besteiro described her as being ‘so attached to her mother, you couldn’t help thinking of a baby kangaroo enveloped in its mother’s invisible pocket with the still-intact umbilical cord serving as hypertrophic one-way communication link’.

There was even some talk of Hildegart showing an unwonted interest in a leader of an obscure Libertarian party. Not so, Aurora insisted to her daughter’s erstwhile mentor and unreliable posthumous biographer, Eduardo de Guzman, The girl was simply exhausted, but more dedicated than ever to her life’s mission. In Aurora’s version, the girl could not live with a sense of failure and begged to be put out of her misery. What is not in doubt is that after two days and nights of non-stop arguments, threats and recriminations, Hildegart just managed to drag herself up to bed and fell into a deep sleep. Aurora sat up through the night at her bedside and in the early morning of June 9, 1933 shot her unconscious daughter four times. Then she went to turn herself in and spend the rest of her life in madhouses.

Hildegart was 18 years old. A week after the murder, Ellis wrote to his Australian associate, Norman Haire, saying his informants in Madrid had told him that one of the four gunshots that killed the girl had been to the genitals. If true, this fact appears to have been glossed over in the transcript of Aurora’s trial, where she testified that after shooting her daughter once in the head and twice through the heart, she ‘could not remember’ where the fourth shot had impacted. ‘Some say Hildegart’s life with her mother was martyrdom’, commented Ellis.