Twenty-five years ago the battle of the women of Palmar became big and reached everyone. She left that district of València that grows next to La Albufera and that behaves like a town and made headlines. They rebelled against the rule that established that only male descendants of fishermen could be members of the Fishermen’s Guild and fish there, an feat that even today surprises them that it is still remembered.
“We threw ourselves into the bull, and at that time there was no equality law or anything at all,” recalls Carmen Serrano Soler, president of the Tyrius del Palmar women’s association and promoter of a book that is now being published and that in value the work of all those women. In 1999 they won in court, but it was not until 2008 that the situation normalized. “Many things were fixed, because now the doors are open, men and women can go fishing, participate in the raffle and be members. The relationships have been remade and so has the social network, because women, in addition to weaving fishing nets, have that mission,” reflects Serrano.
“El Palmar was an idyllic place, but there was something to fix and that was to fight for women’s equality in the fishing inheritance. We knew that it was an inequality that our ancestors had suffered, and it had to be corrected,” Serrano said last year. Thursday at the 8-M event that the Consell Valencià de Cultura has been celebrating since 2021 to recognize as an institution women who have distinguished themselves, in various subjects, in the fight for gender equality.
In a time of recognition of that battle in a feminist key, now comes the book that the women of Palmar have prepared to remember and value those women, grandmothers, aunts, mothers… whom they now honor in its pages. The book Les Dones Pescadores del Palmar, within the project ‘El Palmar. Herència viva’ was presented on March 1, with the assistance of the regional secretary of Equality and Diversity, Asunción Quinzá, in an event held in the same Brotherhood that previously all of them could not participate in.
“We wanted it to be something more formal, but you need to know the people to tell you those stories, so we sat down with them, pulling the thread…” says Carmen Serrano, who has been talking, little by little, with those women, or their relatives, who appeared as ‘widows of’ on the fishing lottery lists, for example, to weave a story of which they now only show glimpses, but which aspires to more. “We wanted to highlight what they have done and get the new generations interested in talking, asking and learning,” she adds.
Its story, which also has its own website, tells how initially the fishermen’s families lived in Valencia, first in the fishermen’s neighborhood, then in the Russafa neighborhood and finally, on the island of Palmar. “The women who had come from Russafa had played a fundamental role,” insists Serrano. They weave the nets, take care of the family, sell the fish in the market and, when they move to Palmar, they promote businesses and small businesses. They take care of the invisible work.
Numerous photographs from the time reflect the faces of those women to whom they now do justice, images that they explain must have been taken by visitors to the Palmar because “few people in the Palmar could afford a camera.” Heirs of humble and hard-working people, women like Amparo Aleixandre, Milagro Marco, Esperanza Soler, María Soler and Elena Marco also talk about the importance of all of them in a video that reminds us that they also made El Palmar possible.
