When Kinship Became Political: Maternal Moral Citizenship in Postwar Greece and Francoist Spain

The Hellenic Studies Program presents Dr. Magda Fytili, Ramón y Cajal Postdoctoral Researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid and an Associate Professor at the Hellenic Open University, on "When Kinship Became Political: Maternal Moral Citizenship in Postwar Greece and Francoist Spain"

Abstract: This paper asks how the post-civil war state turned kinship itself into a political liability, and how women turned that same liability into a source of public authority. In postwar Greece, repression did not stop at the militant: emergency legislation criminalised communist affiliation and tied ordinary citizenship rights to the political loyalty of one’s kin, so that mothers, wives, sisters, and children were detained not for their own acts but for their family ties. My central case is the Panhellenic Union of Families of Political Prisoners and Exiles (PEOPEF), founded in 1948 and, drawing on the surviving archive at ASKI in Athens, the first organisation of its kind to receive systematic scholarly treatment. Mostly elderly, poor, often illiterate women built a repertoire of mass deputations in mourning, petitions, and material aid, halting transfers to Makronisos and carrying their case to the Red Cross and the United Nations, until the state banned PEOPEF in 1952. I trace the thread into the more bureaucratic ASOPEF of the 1960s to develop the concept of maternal moral citizenship: kin-based moral authority through which excluded women rendered suffering publicly legible and actionable. Criminalised kinship, I argue, produced collective agency not automatically but where it met enabling cultural repertoires and practical infrastructures. Francoist Spain, structurally similar but far more tightly closed, serves as the comparative case, relocating the genealogy of maternal humanitarian politics from the Latin American paradigm to the postwar Mediterranean.

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Bio: Magda Fytili is a historian of memory, repression, and resistance in twentieth-century Southern Europe. She holds a co-tutelle PhD from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Autonomous University of Madrid, and is currently a Ramón y Cajal Postdoctoral Researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid and an Associate Professor at the Hellenic Open University. As principal investigator she led the HFRI-funded PORE project, on the state’s recognition and exclusion of the Greek Resistance from 1944 to 2006, and the AGAUR-funded TRANSMEAS project, on the circulation of memory between Argentina and Spain; she has also worked within the ERC project Soundscapes of Trauma (MUTE) and the Horizon 2020 projects REPAST and SO-CLOSE, among others. Her research addresses forced displacement, women’s resistance and the gendered dimensions of post-civil war repression, transitional and post-transitional justice, and the transnational politics of memory. She is one of the authors of "The Second Life of the National Resistance: Politics of Recognition and Exclusion, 1944–2006" (Themelio, 2023) and has published in "Contemporary European History", the "Journal of Modern Greek Studies", "Gender & History", and "European History Quarterly", and her current work extends to maternal activism and criminalised kinship in postwar Greece and Francoist Spain, the subject of this talk.

The activities of the Hellenic Studies Program are generously funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Center for Hellenic Studies at Yale University; and co-sponsored by the Yale MacMillan Center's European Studies Council and the Council of Latin American & Iberian Studies.