Assessment Card from the Institute for the Protection of Women

This document is a psychological classification file produced in an Observation and Classification House (COC) of the Seville branch of the Institute for the Protection of Women in 1953. Documents such as this were created when a young woman was admitted to the Institution and formed part of a standardized procedure that was used from the creation of the Institution in 1941 until its formal disappearance in the 1980s.

The Institute for the Protection of Women was a key part the Francoist repressive apparatus, created to control and correct those women and adolescent girls who deviated from the model of femininity imposed by the regime. Under the rhetoric of moral protection, it operated for decades as a system of surveillance, confinement, and discipline. This was particularly intense in the 1940s and 1950s, though it continued well into the democratic period.

The Houses of Observation and Classification occupied a strategic position within this network. They were not centres of long-term confinement, but rather transitional spaces in which the future of the inmates was decided. The reports produced in these centres determined the institutional trajectory of the young women, which could lead to confinement in reformatories, transfer to semi-internment centers or maternity homes, or a return to the family environment under supervision. 

The psychological record served as a technical instrument to legitimize these decisions. One of its central sections is the assessment of psychic functions, with scores in areas such as attention, memory, judgment, or reasoning. These evaluations were based on psychometric tests inspired by models such as the Terman scale, which was widely used at the time. The final result sought not so much to measure intellectual abilities objectively as to fit the young woman into a category intelligible to the institution. Diagnoses such as “imbecile,” “oligophrenic,” or “subnormal,” frequent in these files, reinforced the notion of moral incapacity and the need for prolonged tutelage.

Alongside these tests appears the so-called “moral clock,” a tool that combined intellectual, affective, and behavioral traits with explicitly moral categories such as obedience, sensuality, selfishness, or piety. Its function was to situate the inmate’s character within a scale of “normality” defined by the values of National Catholicism, in which submission and chastity occupied a central place.

These records make it possible to understand how the Institute transformed social problems—poverty, family conflicts, motherhood outside marriage, or conduct deemed inappropriate—into alleged psychological or moral deficiencies. Beneath a technical veneer, a system was constructed that justified the confinement and re-education of thousands of women over decades. Through these records, the Institute devised pathways of confinement and surveillance that decisively shaped the lives of thousands of young women in Francoist and post-Francoist Spain. Their preservation today makes it possible to grasp the everyday and bureaucratic dimension of this form of repression.

CGL