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Women of courage

Cristina Massanés Casaponsa

Brave women who have carried out peace practices in a context of war

Eulàlia Martí, from Campdorà. Beatriu Puyol, from Bordils. Francesca Sestries, from Medinyà. Joana Tomàs, from Madremanya. And the list goes on up to 115 women. From October 1448 to February 1449, and with the active participation of women, 10,000 peasants organised themselves and came together to meet and articulate a new social and political space. After years of struggle, the Sentencia de Guadalupe (Arbitral Decision of Guadalupe) in 1486 abolished the Remença (a Catalan form of serfdom) and the so-called 'mals usos' or abusive practices. The history of the women of the Remença Union ties in with an episode that took place in Girona centuries later when, faced with the harshness of the Napoleonic siege, in 1808, a group of women went to General Álvarez de Castro and told him that they wanted to organise themselves into a military structure to take care of those who were fighting. This led to the creation of the Companyia de Santa Bàrbara (Santa Bàrbara Company). During the sieges of 1808 and 1809, stationed at different bastions and sections of the city walls, 200 women attended the wounded and fed the soldiers, cooked for them and brought them water, bandages and ammunition. A long red ribbon on their left arm identified them among the wounded and the battered city.

The Remença peasant women and the heroines of Santa Bàrbara were brave women who have earned a place in the city's repositories of memory. The Girona History Museum preserves the moulded raw earth model that Fidel Aguilar made for a projected memorial commemorating the Santa Bàrbara women, and the portraits of some of these women, such as Raimunda de Nouvilas Pagès. The Llibre del Sindicat Remença de 1448 (Book of the Remença Union of 1448) lists the names of the women and men who took part in the meetings, and in 2013 it was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. It is kept in the city's Municipal Archives.