#manlleu

Filomena Sanglas Guiu at the portal of her home. Unknown photographer, around 1920.

Filomena was born in the sharecropper’s farm (masoveria) Can Sanglas in Orís (Central Catalonia), the 19th of March, 1853. In 1880, when she married Jaume Solà Alou, she moved to the farmhouse (masia) el Llobet de Tavertet, near the monastery Sant Pere de Casserres.

Filomena and Jaume had five daughters and four sons. Even though the historical documents refer to Filomena as “without profession”, “domestic” and, even, “those appropriate for her sex”, we know that Filomena did what she had also seen from her mother: she raised her nine children, fed and took care of the health of her family, washed clothes, sewed, and took part of the work in the fields and taking care of the livestock. Her family remember Filomena as a spinner, an activity that she combined with all the other ones.

When her husband died in 1905, Filomena moved to her oldest son’s farmhouse. The last years of her life, grandmother Llobeta (l’àvia Llobeta), as Filomena was known, dedicated her time to spinning and picking medicinal herbs, which then she sold in the nearby marketplaces. She died on February 23rd, 1945, at 93 years old.

Source: Museu del Ter de Manlleu.

I’m sharing this story as one example of many of a common practise in our country, and in many other countries as well. When the documents of the time say that a lower or middle class woman was “without a job” or was a housewife (“domestic”, or what’s understood by “those appropriate for her sex”), that is more often an idealistic vision of what she should be doing, more than a description of what she actually did.

In this case, we see Filomena was a farmer (worked in the fields and with livestock) and a spinner, as well as doing the domestic labour (providing food, cooking, setting the table, washing the dishes, taking care of children, washing clothes, sewing, cleaning the house, making the bed...), and we must remember that washing clothes back then meant going to the river to manually clean them, it took way longer than throwing them in a washing-machine.

A farmhouse surrounded by blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) in Manlleu, Central Catalonia.