Spanish society after the democratic transition

After the restoration of democracy in the late 1970s, the changes in everyday Spanish life were as radical as the political transformation. They are famously known as La Movida (The Movement). These changes were even more striking when contrasted with the values and social practices that had prevailed in Spanish society during the Francoist regime, especially during the 1940s and the 1950s. In essence, Spanish social values and attitudes were modernized at the same pace, and to the same degree, as the country's class structure, economic institutions, and political framework. Under the rule of Francisco Franco, dominant Spanish social values were strongly conservative. Both public laws and church regulations enforced a set of social structures aimed at preserving the traditional role of the family, distant and formal relations between the sexes, and controls over expression in the press, film, and the mass media, as well as over many other important social institutions. By the 1960s, however, social values were changing faster than the law, inevitably creating tension between legal codes and reality. Even the Catholic church had begun to move away from its more conservative positions by the latter part of the decade. The government responded haltingly to these changes with some new cabinet appointments and with somewhat softer restrictions on the media. Yet underneath these superficial changes, Spanish society was experiencing wrenching changes as its people came increasingly into contact with the outside world. To some extent, these changes were due to the rural exodus that had uprooted hundreds of thousands of Spaniards and had brought them into new urban social settings. In the 1960s and the 1970s, however, two other contacts were also important: the flow of European tourists to "sunny Spain" and the migration of Spain's workers to jobs in France, Switzerland, and West Germany. During the Francisco Franco years, the ban on the sale of contraceptives was complete and rigid at least in theory, even though the introduction of the combined oral contraceptive pill had brought contraception to at least half a million Spanish women by 1975.