Talk:Women in the Spanish Civil War

Source selection

In writing about the Spanish Civil War, there is an inherent issue of bias in the sourcing as any source in Spanish needs to be thoroughly checked to know if it is written from a Republican and Nationalist perspective, as both can exaggerate or make false claims to support a position. Even within these source perspectives, that are often additional perspectives such as Falangists versus Carlists, Stalinist Communists versus Trotskyite Communists. Where possible, after consulting with librarians at other Spaniards I know, I made the decision to try to use English language sources first as they are viewed as the least potentially biased. From this root of English sources, I then tried to fill information in using Spanish sources with awareness that things may not read as neutrally as I would like because reality of sourcing issues. --LauraHale (talk) 07:51, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Women's agency

One of the major challenges in writing this article and others in the series is that, for the most part, the perspectives of women involved were sometimes not directly put forward. Perspectives put forward about women could also be by people trying to actively deny them agency. The articles had this challenge of how do you provide women agency and do that in the context of sources that are written with inherent bias to deny them agency? There are two large examples that come to mind when more broadly writing about women during the Spanish Civil War period. The first involves militiawomen serving on the front line, and how many were prostitutes. Most of the sources talking about this issue are reporting people's accounts that women were prostitutes as this fed into both Republican and Nationalist narratives about the role of women. Few sources provide substantial detail regarding this, with women not being named or more detailed information on prostitution during the Spanish Civil War. There are sources that make clear that in many cases, this was a slander... and then in some cases repeat the slander as a fact. When this happens, to try to give women agency and resolve broader source conflict, I decided to go with "were slandered with the accusation of being prostitutes" or something to that effect. The other big example involves babies being taken from new mothers by Nationalist forces against the will of the mother. This is not described by sources as kidnapping, but the stolen babies cases make clear this was what was happening. These were not unwanted babies put up for adoption, but babies taken by the state to prevent mothers from ideologically infecting their children. To give women agency here, when this sort of thing is being described, I have tried to use the word kidnapped to describe the initial act. In many places, I have struggled with this by an over-reliance on passive voice, so any assistance in improving the articles by switching to more active voice appreciated. --LauraHale (talk) 08:02, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Text duplication and dropped words

The articles in this series got long very fast, with content being moved around from one to another, or copied and pasted inside the same article. Hence, there was some cases where there is internal text duplication on the same article. Major ooops on my part. Ipigott‬ did a fabulous job in tackling some of this but what remains is on me. I tried to reread articles before moving to the main space to further eliminate this problem, so hopefully is isn't as bad as it was in the drafting. Also, I occasionally have a tendency to drop words and make typos. Again, these are not on purpose. Tried to fix up as many of these as possible before main spacing but as the articles tend to be from the 3,000 to 10,000 word range... that isn't always as easy as I would like it. Any assistance in improving the writing of the article, the flow, and dealing with what remains would be appreciated. :) Trying my hardest but no one can be perfect. :( --LauraHale (talk) 08:07, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Amazing piece

It is amazing that despite all the talk about encyclopaedic tone, non-biased approach, narrative free from advancing own agenda, this piece still stands as the monument of total disdain and disregard to all the above rules. It is badness beyond the power of criticism. It can not be just "improved"; it has to be re-written all from scratch. Regards, --2A02:A317:2144:1A80:70F2:111C:A48E:41B8 (talk) 21:49, 5 December 2023 (UTC)