What do they portray? Gender models in children's drawings from the Spanish Civil War

During the Spanish Second Republic -both at peace and at war- there were many transformations for women and gender relations. Specialized historiography has analysed these changes, stressing the need to attend to the double dynamics of changes-advances and limits-continuities. The objective of this text is to observe the gender models projected in the drawings made by the boys and girls evacuated to the children's colonies of the Republican rear guard during the Spanish Civil War, as the main form of expression and understanding of these minors. Special attention is paid to female models from a qualitative approach. For this, a sample has been selected for its interpretive analysis from three repositories: the Biblioteca Nacional de Espana, the University of California-San Diego and Columbia University. This analysis is structured with the classification of the drawings into three main categories: games, war and everyday life. The main conclusion is that the message that these children's drawings transmit to us is one of limits-continuities, with differentiation of spheres, roles and stereotypes depending on the masculine or feminine gender of the figures represented in them.