Agree humbly... exploring marital advice from the Franco years

Anyone who admires the tolerance and sexual freedom enjoyed in Spain today may see this as a reaction to the extreme sexual micromanagement imposed upon Spanish women during the Franco years.

"If your husband asks you for unusual sexual practices, be obedient and don’t complain. If he suggests union, agree humbly? When the culminating moment arrives, a small whimper on your part is sufficient to indicate any pleasure that might have been experienced."

Such conjugal advice formed part of a battery of intimate instructions imposed upon millions of Spanish women for 40 years by the Feminine Section of the fascist Falange group, now explored in an exhibition about those who joined its blue-shirted ranks. The all-powerful Seccion Femenina also dictated how women should behave at work, to the point of eliminating expression altogether.

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"Conceal your physical presence at work. Let us be gracious and amiable little ants," it recommended.

Small wonder that after the organisation was abolished in 1977, two years after the dictator’s death, Spain exploded with a sexual revolution and an artistic flowering – the "Movida" – more excessive than anything experienced in Britain in the Swinging Sixties; or that today’s laws guaranteeing sexual equality and women’s rights put Spain in the international vanguard.

From 1937 to 1977, some three million women aged 17 to 35 joined an organisation that urged young girls "not to burden themselves with books ? there’s no need to be an intellectual". And although sport was encouraged – one of few positives of the mass mobilisation – enthusiasts were warned: "Don’t take sport as a pretext to wear scandalous costumes."

These pearls appear in manuals on show in the exhibition, Women in Blue, organised by the Culture Ministry’s Historic Memory Centre in Salamanca. "We wanted to tell the story of those who suffered a living death," says the curator Moncho Alpuente. "Efforts to recover our historic memory have concentrated on the 1934-39 civil war, and that’s understandable. But the post-war was long and hard, a period of fear and repression that began and ended with executions."

The indoctrination that blighted the lives of generations of young Spanish women was an exercise in hypocrisy, since those who ran the movement were mostly unmarried women who enjoyed prominent positions in public life. The head of the women’s section was Pilar Primo de Rivera, sister of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, who founded the fascist Falange, the ideological backbone of Franco’s rule. "The life of every woman ? is nothing more than the eternal desire to find someone to submit to," she wrote.

For 40 years, women were drafted into "social service", a form of military conscription that supplied free labour for hospitals, publicly run restaurants and other social institutions.