THE Spanish aristocrat turned militant communist Constancia de la Mora was not only a fascinating heroic historical figure but someone whose life and experience provides valuable lessons for us today.

Born in 1906 into a wealthy family, she grew up in pre-republican Spain under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Her grandfather had been a five-term prime minister. She enjoyed all the privileges of her class. But the world she experienced was also one of ossified class structures, deeply conservative and misogynist, under the oppressive hegemony of a fundamentalist Catholic Church.

As a young adult, she came to reject this and became an avid Republican and early feminist. She was the first woman in Republican Spain to obtain a divorce simply on the basis of her own volition and remarry, this time a communist. From then on, she would devote all her energies to supporting and defending the Republic in which she placed all her hopes.