Gender-based violence is not something new, although some sectors try to dilute it as a pseudo-invention of women today in order to gain more rights. Since time immemorial women have been considered second-class citizens (or not even that), which has allowed abuse, harassment, rape and any other aberration by their partners, without them having to answer for it, because it was understood that they were private matters, which only concerned the marriage and in which no one could interfere. What was wrong with an abusive husband? Well, he had to put up with it for the rest of his life, if he didn’t take it out himself.
But there have always been women who have rebelled against this injustice. A minority, but they existed. This is the case of Francisca de Pedraza, a poor woman who obtained the first conviction for documented sexist violence. She obtained a divorce from her abuser, on whom they imposed a restraining order and the return of the marriage dowry. It took place in Alcalá de Henares, the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes, on May 24, 1624. It has been 400 years now.
It was Ignacio Ruiz Rodríguez, Professor of Legal History at the King Juan Carlos University in Madrid, who discovered Francisca de Pedraza in 1995, while doing his doctoral thesis. He was diving among thousands of links from the University of Alcalá de Henares (formerly the Complutense University, a title he sold to the University of Madrid due to financial problems) in search of legal acts carried out in the 17th century by the same university, founded by cardinal Cisneros in 1499 and through whose classrooms passed the most important figures of the Spanish Golden Age.
“Among the thousands of papers, I found a file that said ‘marriage’, which caught my attention. The university then had jurisdiction over teachers, students (students) and officers, and I was surprised that they were dealing with a matter of this nature in 1624. It was a tome of about 500 pages that told the story of Francisca de Pedraza, a poor orphan raised by the nuns of Alcalá de Henares, and her struggle for ten years against the ordinary and ecclesiastical courts to put an end to the brutal abuse she suffered from her husband, Jerónimo de Jaras”, explains the Doctor of Law.
Pedraza knew from the beginning of his life with Jaras what hell is. Beatings followed each other for any reason, including rapes. She even had an abortion after being kicked by her husband in the middle of the street. But Francisca was not satisfied and with her disfigured body she went to court up to three times: once to the ordinary court, which filed it away and claimed that it was a private matter, and twice to the ecclesiastical court, where witnesses appeared who endorsed his complaint. The answer in both cases was for her to hold on and for him not to hit so hard.
But in life you have to be lucky, and Pedraza had it. “It seems that the planets were conjured”, points out Ignacio Ruiz. In 1624, the young woman went to the Pope’s nuncio, Innocent Maximus, who had come to Madrid to accompany the future wife of Felipe IV, who surprisingly asked the University of Alcalá to take charge of the matter.
And that’s when the rector Álvaro de Ayala appears, an expert in civil law and clergyman who turned the matter around. This rector, son of a lawyer, listened to the victim, also to the aggressor, analyzed the evidence and listened to the witnesses (the town mayor even testified in his favor). On May 24, 1624, the verdict was made public: divorce, order to distance the victim and return of the dowry. The abuser’s appeal was rejected.
