An awkward style at times but many interesting vignettes about the females who cared in 1930s

People cared. It was a decade when people believed in the possibility of their own powers.

Josephine Herbst quoted in Tomorrow Perhaps the Future
In her introduction, Sarah Watling explains that “This is a book about individuals—outsiders—and how they understood their role in the history of humanity.” Tomorrow Perhaps the Future is a personal book more than a history or set of biographical portraits. It is Watling’s struggle to understand a “cluster of people,” women who understood what was at stake in the Spanish Civil War, and who were driven to become involved in the battle against fascism. And, it is about Watling considering the responsibility of activism, in the past and its implications for the future.

The women she writes about include the familiar and the famous, and women most of us have never heard of. Some were writers or photographers whose stories and photographs appeared in newspapers and magazines in the United States. One was a black nurse from Harlem. They were all outsiders, women who could speak the truth because of their unique perspective.

Through these women’s eyes we see the heroism of the Republican army, how people carried on in the midst of endless barrage and destruction. You understand the risks these women took to be at the front, embedded with the army or refugees, their personal losses.

And you understand the importance of this war, and the consequences of nations’ uninvolvement. For the Spanish Civil War was a trial run against the march of fascism across Europe, and soon after it’s end, Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.

Spain had democratically elected a Republican government, a coalition of left-wing groups. The right wing Nationalists, supported by the church and the military, tried to take over, and when they failed, they went to war with the Republicans. The Nationalists were supported by fascist Italy and Germany while the Soviet Union supported the Republicans. The country was divided, geographically and politically.

The war was pure chaos, with shifting fronts. It was a war that did not spare civilians; Picasso’s Guernica immortalized the destruction of a small village, filled with women and children as the men were all fighting in the war. The Nationalists asked the German and Italian fascists to bomb it.

As these women lost loved ones, I sorrowed with them. As they witnessed the hundred of thousands of refugees trudging to the closed borders, starving and without shelter or food or water, I was appalled. Concentration camps were created to house the refugees, with no protection, food, clean water, sanitation or medical help.

“I wanted to know what it meant to take a side and how it had been done, and I wanted to know what writing had to do with it.”

from Tomorrow Perhaps the Future by Sarah Watling
I learned so much about this war and these women. I was particularly intrigued by Salaria Kea who was a nurse, and Gerda Taro, who with her partner Robert Capa was a photographer, and who lost her life in the war.

Thanks to A. A. Knopf for a free book. ( )