Suceso Portales

She was born into an anarchist family in Zahínos, Province of Badajoz; her siblings Juan and Luis would also be active within the anarchist movement. She worked as a dressmaker and from 1934 was active in the anarcho-syndicalist movement. She was also active in Libertarian Youth and the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo.^[1]

In 1936, she joined Mujeres Libres, a libertarian women's organization, and participated in the collective movement and its periodical.^[2] Characterized as a "reactionary", she served as the organization's national vice-secretary.^[3] When the war broke out, she moved to Guadalajara, where she served as a propagandist and advisor to peasants. Portales viewed the war as "a moment of double rupture: the eradication of 'class privilege' and the supremacy of 'male civilization'."^[1]

On August 20, 1937, she participated in the First Congress of Confederate Anarchist Women and in the organization of the Sant Gervasi Farm-School. In October of that year she also participated in the National Conference of Mujeres Libres in Barcelona. She wrote for the organization's newspaper, including an article titled "We Need a Morality for Both Sexes," in which she articulated the ideals of Mujeres Libres. In one of her editorials, she wrote:

"(...) Two things are beginning to collapse in the world for being iniquitous: the privilege of the class that founded the civilization of parasitism, from which the monster of war was born, and the privilege of the male sex, which turned half of humanity into autonomous beings and the other half into enslaved beings, creating a type of unisexual civilization: male civilization, the civilization of force, which has produced moral failure throughout the centuries. (...)"

At the end of the war in 1939, Portales found herself at the port of Alicante, from where she managed to flee with 183 others to Great Britain aboard the Galatea, believing at the time that the confrontation in Spain would resume within months. She settled for a time in the home of the Peggy Spencer family in London, where she participated in various libertarian publications and maintained contact with resistance members inside Spain.^[1] In London she took part in demonstrations organized against the Francoist regime, including protests against the visits of ministers Fernando María Castiella in 1960 and Manuel Fraga Iribarne in 1963.

In November 1964, she began editing the journal Mujeres Libres from London.^[4] In 1962, she had already reconnected with former libertarian comrades in exile in France, and together they relaunched the newspaper Mujeres Libres as the voice of the Federation of the Spanish Libertarian Movement in exile, under the name Mujeres Libres en el Exilio. In 1972, she settled in Montady, near Béziers, where Sara Berenguer also lived, and oversaw the publication of the journal until 1976.