Today is a day when writers and great works of literature are usually honored. However, I want to pay homage to a woman who did not write books, but she was involved so that the whole world had access to culture and reading.
I speak of Maria Moliner, a somewhat forgotten figure of the Republic who was involved in the opening of libraries and produced a well-known dictionary: the MarĂa Moliner Dictionary.
MarĂa Moliner (Zaragoza, 1900-Madrid, 1981), was a librarian, philologist and lexicographer. The daughter of a rural doctor, she graduated in History at the University of Zaragoza and a year later she entered the Facultative Body of Archivists, Librarians and Archaeologists.
Proclamation of the Republic and the Pedagogical Missions
MarĂa, married with children, lived in Valencia when the Republic was proclaimed in 1931. A month later, the government created the Board of Pedagogical Missions, in which MarĂa became involved and created the Valencian delegation.
In 1931, illiteracy in Spain exceeded 44 percent, with a majority of women, and only six percent of the population had access to books or newspapers. The Library Service was coordinated by Luis Cernuda, Juan Vicens and MarĂa Moliner and 60 percent of the budget of the Pedagogical Missions was allocated to it, which meant that between 1931 and 1936 5.522 new libraries were created.
In Valencia, MarĂa dedicates all her energies to extending the circulating libraries, which consisted of batches of one hundred books for each town or village, both for children and adults. Around the libraries she organized series of conferences, film sessions, radiotelephony auditions and selected records, basic objectives in her revolutionary plan for literacy and cultural socialization.
As is to be expected, there were not so many career librarians for so many libraries, so he decided to leave them in the hands of male and female teachers as well as mothers, since he observed that they had more concerns about culture than men and he saw in them the women perfect assistants.
As MarĂa Moliner explains about libraries:
It is about awakening and promoting the love of reading, which is why in the batches sent there are plenty of books that are fun and aesthetically pleasing, as well as those with adequate information about those ideas, those problems and those conflicts that shake the world in all the orders of thought and all the purposes of life, what constitutes that human thing that cannot and should not be foreign to any person.
El Dictionary of spanish use by MarĂa Moliner
Considered one of the best alternative dictionaries to that of the Royal Academy (RAE), it was first published in 1966-67 by the Gredos publishing house and MarĂa Moliner spent more than fifteen years working on it.
This dictionary of definitions, synonyms, expressions and set phrases, and word families, is also a true ideological and synonym dictionary.
MarĂa Moliner anticipated in some aspects such as the ordination of the Ll in the L, Y de Ch in the C (criterion that the RAE would not follow until 1994) or the inclusion of terms in common use but that the RAE had not admitted, such as the word cybernetics.
If you want more information about this dictionary, in the Instituto Cervantes website they have a very comprehensive entry on him.
MarĂa Moliner today
MarĂa Moliner is the example of injustices towards women and the barbarism of absolutism.
About its libraries, the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Franco dictatorship destroyed that great project of the libraries of the Pedagogical Missions and the literacy and socialization of culture. As Juan Vicens stated in France in 1938 when speaking of the impulse given to public reading during the Republic in Spain:
The story is simple, always the same when the town falls to the enemy: the librarian is shot, the books are burned, and all those who have participated in his organization are shot or persecuted.
On the other hand, MarĂa Moliner was the first woman candidate to occupy a chair in the Royal Academy of Language, although the fact that she was a woman, and professionally considered more as a librarian than as a philologist, despite having produced an important dictionary , made it never get to enter it.
Carmen Conde, writer and first woman admitted to the Academy in 1979, did not forget to mention it indirectly in her admission speech:
Your noble decision puts an end to an unjust and ancient literary discrimination.
This article serves to honor this lady of language and culture who did so much for the book.