“It is better to die standing up than to live on your knees.” — Dolores Ibárruri (July 1936) This iconic phrase is often attributed to men such Emiliano Zapata and Che Guevara; however, the Spanish anti-fascist activist Dolores Ibárruri spoke these words in the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Also known as ‘La Pasionaria’ (The Passionate), Ibárruri became one of the most famous orators for the opposition to Francisco Franco’s fascist army in the Civil War. Her journey to activism began young as she was compelled to quit school at the age of 15 and begin working due to her family’s poverty. She had spent the previous two years of her life preparing for a teacher’s college. Ibárruri was born on December 9th, 1895, in a town near Bilbao, Spain called Gallarta as one of 11 siblings in a mining family. Her family moved to Somorrostro in Biscay, Basque Country Spain, where she worked as seamstress, waitress, and cook. In the town of Arboleda where she worked as a waitress she met Julián Ruiz Gabiña who was a union activist and the founder of the Youth Socialist movement in the town. Ruiz and Ibárruri had a child and married two years after. Their participation in a general strike led to Ruiz’s imprisonment from which Ibárruri began to spend her time reading Karl Marx and founding the library of the Socialist Workers’ Center. Ibárruri gained fame in her first article publication in 1918 in El Minero Vizcaíno, signed under her famous alias La Pasionaria. Two years later she joined the Communist Party of the Basque Country. After ten years of grassroots militancy she was appointed to the Central Committee of the Communist party. She moved to Madrid to edit the Socialist newspaper El Mundo Obrador and was arrested and incarcerated for the first time in 1931 where she organized a hunger strike to obtain freedom for political detainees. She published two articles from jail and was named to the Central Committee of the party in Seville, Andalucia shortly after release. In 1933, she founded Mujeres Antifascistas, a women's organization opposed to Fascism and war. She was “discovered” by a Russian astronomer Grigory Neujmin who invited her to the International Communist Party Committee in Moscow in which they spoke about the threat of fascism and the possible onset of a world war. In 1934, she attended the First Worldwide Meeting of Women against War and Fascism in Paris. Toward the end of 1934, Ibárruri and two others spearheaded a risky rescue mission to the mining region of Asturias to bring more than a hundred starving children to Madrid. The parents of these children had been jailed following the failed October Revolution suppressed by General Franco at the behest of the Republican government. She succeeded but was jailed and sent her children to live in the Soviet Union anticipating the onset of the Civil War. In 1936 she ran for election in Asturias for the Communist party and won a seat in the parliament. During the outbreak of the Civil War she gave many famous speeches on the radio, with her most famous one being “Fascism will not pass.” After the fascists won the war, Ibárruri fled to Russia where she lived and worked from 1939 to 1977 when she returned to Spain after the dictator Francisco Franco’s death. She was voted and won again a place in parliament in Asturias in the Communist party which she had seated 41 years prior. She assisted feminist and political rallies into her old age until she passed away at the age of 93 on November 12th, 1989 in Madrid. Today there are monuments and memorials in her name across the world. Ibárruri’s commitment to the rights of workers and the equality of people outlives her. She was a true leader of freedom and will be remembered as such.

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