Same names for another institution

from the Residencia de Señoritas to the Teresa de Jesus College (1939-1945)

Abstract

A few months after the end of the Spanish War, what would be one of the Women´s Colleges of the Spanish Regime was launched most relevant of the capital and the whole of the country during the Franco period, the Teresa of Jesus College. However, this center, like its counterpart, the Colegio Mayor Jiménez de Cisneros, also attached to the Central University of Madrid they did not arise from nowhere, but were erecte don the premises of the former Residence of Ladies and Students, respectively. But, in addition to reusing infrastructures that had not suffered the ravages of the conflicto, Franco placed at the head of the Teresa of Jesus a group of women, such as Matilde Marquina, Eulalia Lapestra and Lucía Calvillo, that were not alien to the previous institution, in order to make use of the previous organizational and symbolic devices. With this center, of catholic carácter and linked to the Women´s Section of the Spanish Falange, it was a question of recovering, although more in form tan in content, the old collegiate institution to connect with the long awaited imperial University. In that aparent, and contradictory, return to the past, of evident ruptures and certain glimpses of continuity, the Teresa of Jesus traced a path of her own and differentiated both from the point of view of the history of the institution and the trajectories of women who resided in it during its first years of life.