Bittersweet Infamy - #117 - My Perfect Socialist Daughter Must Die

Episode Date: February 23, 2025

Taylor tells Josie about the toxic, possessive, and deadly mother-daughter relationship between 1930s Spanish political activists Aurora and Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira. Plus: unearthing the legend of the green children of Woolpit, the green-skinned changelings who’ve mystified the world since the 12th century CE.

You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy! Just use Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates, so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more

applications than non-sponsored jobs. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed, and listeners of this show will get a $100 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash podkatzca. Just go to indeed.com slash podkatzca right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring? Indeed is all you need. Welcome to Bitter Sweet and Food. I'm Taylor Basso.

And I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on in infamy. The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter. And the sweet. We are wrapping up February in Style here, sweethearts, with episode 117. Are you all ready for those March winds and April showers?

Yeah. That's what we're heading into baby, March winds. That's what this year needs, wind storms. Yeah. How you doing, Jo? The winds have changed, baby. The winds have changed. Oh God, oh God.

I'm good, I'm very good. I just had a weekend with the fam with Mitchell's family. Yeah, nice. Tell us about that. It was Mitchell's mom's birthday. Happy birthday. Don't listen to this podcast. Too much swearing. She keeps asking me, how do I listen to it? I'm like, oh, the internet. Tell her to listen to this. Dude, give her the... She has to listen at least once to know she doesn't like it. Maybe she'll like it.

That's true. That's true. I gotta find like a really less on the cursing, you know, like find... That's gonna be hard. I know, right? I feel like you listened to one of these that you think was pretty clean and then there's just a big ass eating joke in the middle of it or the beginning of it, like right now. Actually more commonly right at the beginning, just like that.

Get it out of the way. Exactly. Gotta have your dessert before dinner, am I right? Life is a, you never know where it'll lead you. No, usually to the booty. You got a trip on the calendar coming up here. I've got a trip on the calendar coming up here. I'm going to Morelos, Mexico on Tuesday. It's Sunday now. In two

days I'm going to Mexico. I'm going to be spending some time with Rui, who's my partner, as well as Nigel Wong, who's a friend of the show, friend of the podcast. We've got all kinds of plans. We're going to be doing Las Estacas, which is like a little lazy river. We're going to be going to Little Pueblos. We're going to see a Lucha Libre match. Good. I'm glad you're doing that. We've got all kinds of plans. I'm very, very excited to, I mean, kind of a change of scenery. As my late Spanish granny, Dolores Gonzalez, was fond of putting it.

Es muy importante el cambio de aire. It's very important to have a change of scenery. Change the air, yeah. Change the air. I like that. I like that. Yeah, it's true. Changes the way time moves a little bit. It's nice. Yeah. And it reminds you that like things aren't so nauseatingly always the same. You can go

down to Mexico and you know, have a nice time with your friends too. That's going to be so fun. I'm excited for the pictures. I'll share some pictures on the Instagram. Bittersweet infamy for those who don't follow and we highly encourage you to join us. I'll share some pictures on the Instagram, bittersweetinfamy for those who don't follow and we highly encourage you to join us. I love spending time with my friends and one way that I spend time with my friends is there's a little film club that I do with them every month. Oh what? Yeah. Oh my gosh. I know because I take part in it as well. That was that was acting. Wow. What a thespian Like is she forgetful or a thespian? That's how that's how I get you that's how

Baby, you got to be careful out there. You gotta stay fresh That old woman who came to your door raddling her cup, she might throw off her cloak and be Josie Mitchell. You just don't know. Wig, cloak, all of it, gone. You can join us in the Bittersweet Film Club by becoming a monthly subscriber over at our Ko-fi account. That's K-O-FI.com slash bittersweetinfamy. Every month we cover a film on the bittersweet film club,

which is like an hour to two hour long podcast where me, Josie, special guest, Mitchell Collins, just kinda- Perpetual special guest. Exactly, he's just as special as he was the day that he got there. We kinda shoot the shit about movies and not just any movies,

but they're movies that you get to pick because when you're a film club member, you get to choose what we watch. What did we watch this past week just recently? What did we watch? We watched Superstar, the Karen Carpenter story. Ooh, tell me a little bit about that. It is a biopic, you could say, of Karen Carpenter, the singer from The Carpenter. She was a 70s songstress. Just like me, they long to be.

Not copyright infringed, so we just move on. In love. With someone who resembles you. Todd Haynes is the director, and he made this film as a student in college and it is completely done with Barbies. It's very cool. And we chat all about it and this is at the behest of our subscriber and long time supporter

Soph. Soph! Good pick Soph. Good pick Soph. And we have already had that conversation. We haven't, I'm still, I need to edit that episode Which is tricky because as you just heard him going on vacation But it'll be out by the end of February and if you would rather Join now a little bit earlier. We'd appreciate that and you can listen to our last month's episode about battlefield earth

Lots of fun. Lots of fun. Yeah. Yeah film club is a good time. We love movies I honestly I like I've come to really enjoy it. I had originally just thought of it as like extra content for our coffee subscribers. I've really come to enjoy its function in my life as a film club. Yeah. Like I've come to enjoy the fact that I am now like sitting down and watching a movie and not just a movie,

but most often a movie that someone else chose. And then having like an in-depth conversation about its artistic merits with my friends whose opinions on films I respect. Mikhoel and Taylor usually butt heads a lot and that's fun. We go at it. You guys do. It's good. It's a big dick measuring contest over at the film club, coffee.com slash bittersweet.

Josie usually just sits in the back and yawns because we taped them quite late. But it's not just dick measuring because there's like... No, I mean what I say. We all just have opinions. We have opinions and so to see, it truly is, I like to think that all three of us can bring our opinions whether or not they agree with one another. And we hash it out and we just chat about films. I think usually we end up liking them more at the end of the conversation because

we enjoyed the conversation. And that happens to me all the time with like books I read or poem. This especially happens with poetry. Interesting. I read a poem. I'm like, ah, and then I talk about it with people and then it's like, oh, shit. He did eat those plums from that icebox. Yeah.

Yeah. That's fucked. Someone should do something. There a seg in there to your infamous plums in the icebox? There's a seg if those plums are still green. Why is that? Because, Taylor, for my infamous, my short little itty bitty story today, I'm going to tell you the story of the green children of Woolpit. You ever heard of this tale?

No, but why are they green? Very good question! To be fair, I remember when I read that book, One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads, I was very scornful of people for asking questions like, Why are they blue? And yet here I find myself wondering, why are they green? I know, I just have an imagination. Get over it, come on. Yes, come on, this is 2025.

Well, actually this story takes place in 12th century England. When she said green children of Woolpit or whatever the hell, I was like, that sounds old. I bet this was happening in the fucking countryside. This sounds old. There are peasants involved in this. There are a lot of peasants.

Yeah. This story is interesting for many a reason, but the way that we still have the story is that this is 12th century. It was chronicled by two different historians of the time. And the story as it gets passed down all the way to today has, of course, many different iterations as stories do. But the main gist is these two children were found by peasants. It was harvest season in Woolpit, England, which is near Norfolk.

And they were towards the like far end of a pasture where very common, there was a wolf pit. Hence Woolpit. Hence Woolpit, that's where the name comes from. And if you had to hit that link on Wikipedia like I did, a wolf pit is an ancient way. Good question, actually. I just saw a pit. Yeah, the wolf pit, of course. Classic. Classic wolf pit, yeah.

Society's the wolf pit, dude. It's essentially a trap for animals and in particular predators. In this area, wolves were a predator that were of concern for the sheep. So it's just like a stone box in the ground. It goes a few feet deep. The idea is that you cover it with brambles so that you can't see it. A wolf or predator of some kind walks over it, falls in and can't get out of the stone pit and the stone because the, you know, he can't dig his way through and all of that. So and they're still around as archaeological sites in this part of the world and that kind of thing. But I guess this was a really well known wolf pit. I don't know.

But the town was named after Wolf Pit. Probably everyone had a wolf pit to what's it called? Two car garage and a wolf pit in every home. Exactly. Yeah. And so these two young kids and like not toddlers, but not teens. Firmly children. These are children. Firmly children. Yes. They were found by these villagers, by these peasants and it's late summer harvest season, and these kids were alarming from the get-go because their skin was tinged green.

All of their skin had this pale green powder that was very alarming. Eerie, yeah. Eerie, yes. Two, they, appearance-wise, they seemed to be dressed in clothing that was not typical of that area. It was kind of something that was not recognizable. Time traveler clothes.

Yes, the fabric was off, the style, no. And then when they approached these fearful kind of wide-eyed kids, the language that they spoke was unrecognizable to the peasants. With me. Yeah, dog. Yeah. Okay. Much to consider.

As always, you bring me much to consider. You haven't let me down yet. And hopefully I never will. That's the goal. I hope not. So they are young enough and fearful enough that they don't attack or anything. They're just like huddled and scared, right? And so the villagers take them in and they're trying to communicate with them, but they

can't get anything across. And so they take the two children to Sir Richard de Kalne, who is a landowning knight in the region. Let's bring them to someone, a wealthy white man. He'll know what to do. He's smart. Exactly. And it's also, you know, it's medieval England. Like, what do we do? But take it to a night. Yeah, exactly. They're paid to deal with this. They put on your armor, bud. We're out of our pay grade. So Richard De Kalme offers the children a place to stay. He initially gives them a big plate of food, you know, a big hunk of bread, some stew, and they won't fucking touch it.

They're like cowering, green, gibbering, and won't touch any food. Days go by and they still haven't touched food. And like they're trying to feed them, show them like you eat the bread, I eat the bread, I eat the bread, you eat the bread, you know, like eat the bread. Eat the bread, eat the fucking bread. Eat the bread.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it isn't until the kids are a little bit more comfortable and they're walking around the grounds that they are in the garden and they see that there are broad beans growing in the garden. And they notice them, take stock and immediately go to them and devour them.

Take bean stock, you might say. Bean stock, yeah, per chance, my dog. Yes, exactly. The villagers are realizing it. OK, well, they will eat. So let's like slowly introduce other foods along with the beans. Maybe we can cook the beans. Maybe just a little. Yeah.

Let's put those beans in that bread. Maybe you eat that bread. Maybe you eat that bread. Exactly. So slowly, but surely, as they eat more varied food, more food and then more varied food, they lose the green pallor of their skin. That's good. We love to hear it.

And as time goes on, the young boy becomes sick, sick enough that he dies. Oh. Medieval England. Life's a bitch, man. How did we get here? We shouldn't, no one should be. No, yeah. We should all be dead of plague and not washing our hands. Yeah, no, it's true.

It's true. It's amazing that we're still, we're still here. Still kicking as a species. The young girl though, she does stay alive. She is baptized shortly after her brother passes and she eventually learns English. She can communicate in English. Well, that's helpful. She should be able to tell us exactly where she came from.

Problem solved. She tells the asking public that her and her brother are from a village, a place called St. Martin. And in St. Martin, the sky never gets fully dark, nor does it ever get fully light. It's always twilight. Arctic Circle? Potentially. She also says that in St. Martin,

everything is green, a green shade. Okay, so green Arctic Circle. Green Arctic Circle, yeah, we'll go with that. Greenland, problem solved. There we go. I did it, folks, we're done with that story, bring me another one, we still got time. Yeah, so when asked how her and her brother got to Woolpit,

she says that they were in St. Martin and they heard this very calamitous noise, like this big kind of ringing of bells and they were entranced. And so they followed the sound. They were out shepherding their father's flock and they heard this big sound and they followed it. His flock of greep, green sheep? Yes. Sick? Yeah flock of greep, green sheep. Yes. The greep, yeah. You greeple.

Wake up, greeple. And she says that they followed the sound to a cave, and they entered the cave as their sheep had entered too, and they were so entranced by the sound. And all of a sudden they walked out what they thought was the entrance that they came in, but they were in Woolpit. And that's when the villagers found them. So mysterious all the way through, not very clear on how that could actually be. She did say as well, and you know, it's because it's the historical record and medieval records as well, at one

point she says that Satan Martin was a river away from where we are now. She remembers this big roaring river that they had to cross. So there's like, okay, well maybe it's this, maybe it's that. There's just enough there, as with the best of these kind of mysteries, there's just enough there for you to spot patterns that resemble the real world and something that you could actually find. Yeah.

But just enough vagueness and contradiction there to confound those efforts. Exactly. So she lives and she gets more or less assimilated into life in this small town and this village. She takes on the name Agnes and she marries an Englishman who is connected to Henry the second and she lives. Yeah, I mean, he's connected in that like

he is connected to the court. That's fine, I'll take, listen, any name to drop in a time where otherwise you were just a green child in a wolf pit, that sounds great. Yeah, no, that's true. That's true. Yeah. Keep it in perspective. That's good. She was noted as not being a very formal lady. Let's leave her alone. She's been through a lot. Right? I know. Exactly. We found her in a pit. Rather loose and wanton in her conduct is how one of the historians noted it. Throw that pussy in a circle, Wolf Girl.

I like it. Good women rarely make history. You know, I think it's, yeah, yeah. Get that green pussy out, let's go. Chuck that grissy around. So good. So this story obviously is carried through a millennia because that was the 1100s.

And- Fuck. I know. And now here we are talking on a screen about it. through a millennia, because that was the 1100s. And- Fuck. I know. And now here we are talking on a screen about it. Yes, yes. Yeah. Very strange. As you are like in a green pallor of the electronic lights

mounted to your wall that you control Bluetooth wise. Excuse me. They literally go between the exact bittersweet infamy colors, which is this sort of like greeny blue, and then into that kind of pinky purple. It's nice. It's nice. It's inspiring. I do like it. So there's a few ideas of where maybe this story came from, because there are also a lot of fairy tales. There's a lot of kind of medieval legends that come out of this time. So there's some historical thinking

that it could just be that. It could be a legend, right? It could be a representation of a very historical situation that's happening that wasn't necessarily like a battle that happened or a king that took over this da da da, but rather more a amorphous societal change. Exactly, and plus we must note too,

that like because of our historical abstraction, anyone in the chain from Agnes to the person that discovered her, to the historian who wrote the case, to anyone could have fudged anything. It could be a contemporary hoax, or it could be a hoax that was propagated later by someone pretending, you know, like there's all kinds of ways that this could be fucky.

Yeah. And one of like the fairy tale interpretations of it is at this time, there was a huge clash between indigenous Britons, the people who lived there, that we maybe formally know now as like the Scots or the Irish, right? The indigenous folks who lived in the British Isles clashing with the Anglo-Saxons, with the Romans who came through.

So this could be a representation of that, that the green children were representative of the indigenous Britons. Right. That the boy dies because he would rather give up his life than be a Briton. So in this logic, the green children babbling nonsense are just Irish. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty much.

Got it. Or Scottish. Oh, we caught a leprechaun, I got you. I got you. But that's important to say leprechaun because this is a time too where like spirits and Leprechauns and fairies, the fairy people, like that's like, those are alive and well, those traditions, those pagan thoughts of spirituality and mysticism and so on.

Exactly. So there's like this theory too within that that beans at this time represented the food of the dead. So they were like maybe transported from another realm of existence. Where they still had beans. Where they still have beans, right, yeah. Green beans, it makes sense when you think about it. Feed them more green shit, see what happens. Yeah. Let's do it, let's do it.

You guys know lettuce, Did you have lettuce? Yeah, as they were reintroducing some different foods to them. Hmm, what else we got here? No wonder they didn't have, the bread didn't work. No shit, it's not green. Have you tried a green smoothie? It's really good.

Yeah. Put some cucumber slices on your eyes. It's great for your skin. So there's that idea. There's also a like more historically, in a modern sense, interpretation of the story in which at this time there were a lot of Flemish immigrants to the British Isles, to this area. And so in their influx, which we see throughout human history? When new people come to a different land,

they're usually pushed against, right? There's a lot of persecution that happens. So at this time, the Flemish were persecuted. And so the idea might be that these children with their strange language, which might have been Flemish, were in a village that was burned. Their parents were killed in some ways. They had a traumatic experience and they ended up roaming through the woods, eating what they could. And the green pallor was more maybe anemia that was expressing itself.

Some kind of jaundice or something. And then the thing is too, is that like, don't forget how much of Agnes, for example, account of what her life looked like pre-pit might have actually been implanted there by the various adults who would have been rigorously, are you from a place where everyone is green? Like sure. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And memory, memory is a wild thing, you know? So this theory is pretty sound, right? Like it kind of, it hits like historical marks in terms of the immigration of Flemish folks, the persecution.

It removes the supernatural element, which is inconvenient for the story if you're trying to take it 100% at its word, unless you believe in that sort of thing. Yeah. And it seems to kind of jive with maybe a more modern understanding of like a traumatic response to an experience that you might be like... That you might turn green and start gibbering, especially if you're a child. Yeah. But the one thing that doesn't quite line up with that is that when the villagers brought the children when they first encountered them to this nobleman,

to Richard Conley, he would have been educated enough to have understood Flemish or understand that it was another language and not just some gibberish. If the only hole in the theory is one rich white guy being wrong. I'm okay with that. Also, I think in this too, like, I mean, we know the silent twins, they created a language. If these two kids were out there long enough. Back in episode 13, Flowers in Hell, we covered the story of the silent twins, really recommend it. One of my favorite early stories that I did. Yeah. And these two girls through kind of like traumatic bonding create their own language in order to talk. And I could imagine that these two kids might be able to do something similar or just like

tweak Flemish enough so that it's not recognizable to the rich white man. Yeah, exactly. Dialectical Flemish. That makes sense. But of course, it's neither story is fully confirmed because it's happened a millennia ago, but it's certainly in either iteration of the story, it is talking about the confluence of two cultures coming together, right? Whether it's the Flemish immigrants or whether it's the Indigenous Flemigrants, yes, the

Green Flemish immigrants. The Green Flemigrants. Yes. The green flemish. The green flemigrance. Yeah. Or the representative story of the indigenous Britons kind of butting heads with the Anglo-Saxons. Mm hmm. With the Romans. But of course, being a story, it gets threads, get pulled and stories come and go and da da da. And it changes, changes with the teller truly and the listener.

So of course now in 2025, a millennia later, we're like, oh, they're green? Well, what if they're from outer space? I won't lie, I considered the interpretation. You know, it just, you're of your time, baby. I'm of my time. You are of your time. We are born into a time.

Kamala Harris, fucking coconut tree over here huh? Teacher. Yeah. So the story still lives on. There's a wonderful like the town of Woolpit is still in existence and it's still very much a story there. There's a wonderful little like wr rod iron sign that is on display in this little hamlet. And people recognize the green children of Woolpit. Yep, that's

where we're from. That's, that's the story. That's where it comes from. But yeah, dude, that is the story of the green children of Woolpit. Do you have any theories additional to the ones? No, I liked the Flemish one, honestly. I thought that covered a lot. If not Flemish, then something similar. I think that based on their strange clothes and their impenetrable babble,

we're talking culturally different children speaking a different language. That seems fair. The green shit, again, oh look, as we fed them and brought them back to health, they stopped being so green. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I don't know. I would just assume children of a different culture who were in some way displaced by

circumstance, who ended up in this sort of wolf pit and then who then maybe had these kind of very what seemed like quite extreme ideas of living in this place of perpetual twilight where we can only eat green things and we're all green, those feel like they maybe got mixed in by trauma, by interrogation, by misremembering or by maybe like misinterpretation of key memories. I don't know. Or just a good story.

Maybe Agnes was like, eh. Wanna go chill in this pit? And then when they got caught, she was like, ah, fuck you. Quick rub this bean based on me. Who knows? Who knows? And you know what? We're still talking about our millennia later. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast?

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And listeners of this show will get a $100 sponsored job credit to get your job's more visibility at Indeed.com slash podkatzca. Just go to Indeed.com slash podkatzca right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Hey, sweethearts, Taylor here. Visit our Ko-fi account at ko-fi.com slash bittersweetinfamy. That's K-O-Hyphen-F-fi.com slash bittersweetinfamy. That's K-O-hyphen-F-I dot-com slash bittersweetinfamy Become a monthly subscriber to join the bittersweet film club

Not only do you get to hear me, Josie, and Mitchell analyze infamous films, but you get to tell us which movies to watch This month at the command of our subscribers, Dylan and Satchel, we've suited up for a space This month at the command of our subscribers Dylan and Satchel We've suited up for a space Odyssey in the form of the 2000 L Ron Hubbard adaptation Battlefield earth starring John Travolta, Forrest Whitaker, a sea of beautiful interchangeable long-haired white men and a single featureless woman I'll blow up your girlfriend with a collar and he's like no She's the only one who I fuck No one else. We know nothing else about her.

If she dies, I'll have to settle for one of the many beautiful long-haired men that I surround with, twinks that I surround myself with all the fucking time. Who look just like me. Who look exactly like me, but I'm noticeably like a degree hotter than them because I'm the main one. Join the film club now with your monthly pledge over at KO-FI.com slash Bitter Sweet Infamy and we'll see you at the movies. Taylor, you got a story for me?

Yes, I do. I did bring a story today as I indicated. Imagine if we got to this point and you're like... Brutal. Nightmare. Don't have one. Sorry. Oh, fuck. We're just gonna shoot the shit for an hour. Well, I do want to shoot the shit on something that you said during our last segment that sort of, I guess, resonates as a nice seg into our main infamous story of the day.

Pick up the seg, baby. Follow the trail, pick up the sag, let's go. Time to do that wolf pit. You and Kamala Harris both indicated that we sort of exist in the context of the time and the place that surround us, yes? Yeah, we don't get to choose into what era we are born. We don't get to choose into what era we are born and the place in which we are born

really influence a lot of our personalities and our values and our outlooks on the world. And I would say that that is extremely true of the subjects of today's story who were very plugged in to their context, let's say their time and their place context. And I say subjects because Josie, there really is nothing like the bond

between a mother and a daughter, is there? No, there is not. Let me do a little bit of unpacking a year reaction there. You and Alice are two strong-willed women. I wouldn't say like disagreeable women, but I would say that like Josie, for example, for all her mellowness isn't someone that I would call like a shrinking violet on issues that are important to her.

Like you're not a walkover. Thank you. I appreciate that. No problem. I mean it. I mean it as a compliment and of your mom as well. I would say your mom is more of a strong-willed woman in the typical context. She shoots from the hip, she's a lady of power, she was a lawyer, you know, she's smart.

How was it growing up, the two of you, mother and daughter? It was, yeah. Choose your words carefully, you're being recorded. Yeah, yeah, I know. How old were you when your dad passed away? I was four. So really young, but for the most part, she would have been a single mom. Yeah.

And what was that experience like? I think I got to see her be that strong-willed woman. And like, I got to see how people reacted to that too. How in some ways that I didn't think were very fair or right. And I think for me that was really nice because she was doing things that were good for us, but also things that were good for her. Like I remember in her 40s, it was like late 40s, so I was like 10 or something like that. She started rowing. She took up rowing. JAY Oh, cool.

STACEY Yeah, and like an all-women's rowing club. And I remember that being really important to her and kind of important to me to see her do that, like take time for herself. But, and also take time for herself to become stronger, like physically stronger. And surrounded by other women. That's cool. I think that was something that I learned too, is that when she didn't have a romantic partner, she had extremely strong friendships and kind of spread out too.

Like she had swim club folks, she had her rowing club, she had like people from her past and people that she was meeting all the time and like she had a lot of friends in her life and they played important roles in her every day. Her ecosystem. Would you say that you were conscious of her raising you in like, I guess with what you would call like feminist ideals? Because I know you to be a very pro woman woman. Yeah, yeah, she was pretty vocal about that. So, thinking about the conversation we just had,

I'm going to tell you a story about two women, a mother and a daughter, two strong-willed women, feminist women, a single mother and her daughter, but it's maybe through a slightly, scratch that, through a significantly darker lens. Okay, okay, okay. I'm gonna tell you a story that is set in Spain. Espana.

Espana, fi. From the mid 1910s into the early 1930s. Specifically, the later end of that timeline is when my late grandparents would have been young. My grandma, uh, Dolores Fernandez was born in 1921. My grandpa, Antonio Gonzalez was born in 1922, both late grade RIP. I think of them often. I love them very dearly and I thought of them, especially when I was researching this story, because like I say, very much a time and place story, a story that is embroiled in a time of very changing politics in Spain.

End of World War I into like the start of World War II. That's correct. In which Spain is neutral, although I believe loosely allied with Hitler. So it's not, we're not covered in glory here, but also 1939, which is known as like the World War II time for the most of the world I would bargain is also very specifically the Franco takeover slash Spanish civil war time for Spain.

Yeah, yeah. It's pretty intense. It takes place between a monarchy and a dictatorship, this story, as we're experimenting with all of these different types of new thinking to include communism, to include anarchy, to include socialism, feminism, right? All of these new ideas, the idea that like maybe the church shouldn't be controlling contraception. That's like a big one. Mm-hmm. Maybe not.

Maybe not. So I didn't know any of this history prior to this. And so in doing my research, I stumbled on that fun phenomenon that Josie will recognize, which is that in order for any of this story to make sense, I need to understand and quickly present at least three decades of very fine Spanish history that I'm learning for the absolute first time. My apologies for any errors. No, no, no, it's good. This is good.

This is how we all learn. So before I introduce you to our, let's just call them our- Alice and Josie, is that it? I'm very like emotionally invested now. I have Back in my childhood home like okay, please project yourself, but it's 1930s Spain also, right? So VHS is out. Okay We need to move some of the furniture around to make this work, but we still can

Let me take you before we meet our Spanish Alice and Jos Josie, Alicia and Josefina, let's say. Let me take you on a little road to the second Spanish Republic. Okay, let's go. All right. 1898, Spanish-American War. Propagated by Hearst. Boom. Yeah, right. All you need to know for today's story is that this was a dick measuring contest between empires using a handful of island nations and specifically Guam, Yeah, right. All you need to know for today's story is that this was a dick measuring contest between empires using a handful of island nations and specifically Guam, Puerto Rico,

the Philippines, and Cuba as bargaining chips. Spain came out on the losing end after many years of declining empire, and Spanish people were very shocked and disillusioned. This prompted basically a social and artistic and political upheaval in every realm of Spanish society. We are eager to try new ideologies and methods of governance, and the grasp of established institutions like the monarchy and the church and so forth are getting slippery. Ooh, slippery handhelds. Love it. Riii! That's the noise of them slipping right out.

Yeah. Prior to 1931, Spain is overseen by a constitutional monarchy. Specifically King Alfonso XIII, one of the Habsburgs, is the ceremonial figurehead over top of a parliamentary government overseen by Marquis Manuel Garcia Prieto. As overseen as like prime minister or overseen as just like head of parliament? He was the president of the Council of Ministers. So a president. Okay. In 1923, Garcia Prieto gets overthrown in a coup by a dictator named Primo de Rivera, who basically says,

Spain's politicians have been mismanaging everything for years. Give me 90 days to shake this shit up, lo prometo, done. Little 90 day fiance, but with a dictator. Yeah, wow, okay, 90 days around the world, let's go. Exactly, 90 days after the ring, whatever, there's so many, my mom watches them all, she loves them. Good. People in general are very behind this

and King Alfonso gives Primo his seal of approval, although I don't know if that's an honest endorsement or just him trying to cling to his own waning power as the tides turn against him. Yeah, exactly. We don't really need a dictator and a king, do we? That kind of combo doesn't make sense, yeah. No, yeah.

Primo shockingly does not cede power after 90 days, even though he said he would, because Josie, sometimes people just kind of lie. It's terrible stuff I've seen it. I've seen it Politicians even sometimes politicians even dictators they lie sometimes Nonetheless primo is popular until he isn't he loses the support of the people gradually over a period of years as well as the monarchy The army economy goes into the shitter because again, this is 1930. Uh huh.

Rivera resigns in disgrace, moves to Paris, dies within a month and a half of fever and diabetes, a swift series of accumulating elves for our boy Primo there, R.I.P. cousin, death by snowball effect. Wow. But I am surprised he resigned of his own accord to begin with. The writing was on the wall. Once you lose the army, that's a tough one. The army, when you make sure the army, I'm like, oh, out. Yeah. Don't let the army against you. From there, Alfonso the King basically loses credibility for having sided with a dictator

and pseudo abdicates. He ends up like formally getting ushered out in the 40s, but he basically goes into like exile from here. This ushers in a provisional democratic coalition government that is essentially a tangle of people with different interests, attempting to cobble together a constitution and some vision of a future for Spain slash power struggle.

Sounds very modern. Very modern. A lot of, this is a time of a lot of people talking about philosophy and big rooms underneath the flags. Yeah. It really, really is. This is called the Second Spanish Republic and that is the backdrop that informs our understanding of today's story, which is extremely plugged into the turbulent politics and shifting

ideologies and even political violence of its time. This is an era, I I should say where targeted assassinations of political activists by other political activists were common, especially among far-left socialist, communist, and anarchist social circles. Yeah. Violence was also common when rural peasants would rise up against overbearing authority figures.

A lot of like police on peasant kind of crime. Yeah. We don't go around calling people peasants much anymore, but it was derriger at the time. No, no, that's the thing. Yeah, yeah. There is the idea in the air that to be passionately engaged in any particular cause implies that you would kill

or die for it. And those are very literal ideas, literal possibilities. Yeah. And that feels like the last important drop of context as I introduce you to Aurora Rodriguez Carballera. Or Aurora Rodriguez Carballera. Okay. If you wanna say time. Aurora.

Aurora, pretty name. Some of her behavior, as you will see, not as pretty. So I should say that a lot of the why in this story, like why things unfold the way they do, and even how they unfold amongst Aurora and her daughter Hildegard, our subjects for today, are sort of based on the constructed accounts of others, on semi-fictionalized accounts, on vibes.

Aurora herself has her account, but she may be unreliable due to self-interest and or mental illness, which we can get in there. Ooh, okay, okay. So a lot of what I say about, like particularly I think the relationship between mother and daughter can be taken with a bit of a grain of salt and knowledge

that this like your green children's story is something that has undoubtedly acquired a little snowball of mythology as it's traveled through the years. Yeah, and that makes sense too. And also, you know, mother-daughter stories. It depended on speaker. Yeah, she said she said, certainly. Prior to this, I watched two fictional movies about this. Oh. One was from 1977.

It's called Mi Ije Hildegard, which means my daughter Hildegard. Spanish film. They're both Spanish films. And then the second one I watched was, I think from last year, 2024. It was called La Viergen Roja, The Red Virgin. Ooh, damn. And that title will be explained through the course of this story. And I would say that I liked the older film better.

I thought it was slightly more honest about its subject matter, even as it took the liberties that are common of a fictionalized portrayal of something where you kind of invent characters and scenarios and snip the story and da-da-da-da-da. Right. I thought it was much more honest and much less sensationalized than the 2024 one. Interesting. Aurora Rodriguez Carballera is born April 23rd, 1879 or 1882, I saw different accounts, into an upper class family in Feroz, Acornia, Galicia, Spain.

Mmm, Galicia, cool. The Aurora's father is a lawyer whom she adores and whose side she frequently takes in family conflicts. Young Aurora attends political meetings that her father participates in, which opens her up to ideas like republicanism, groups like the Freemasons, et cetera. Her father, very much one of these men standing in rooms

talking at chairs that we were kind of talking about. With flags behind them, yeah. Yes, you got it, you got it. And echoing the words of Marx or whoever was a preeminent thinker in these sort of like leftist revolutionary circles at the time. Cool. She also samples from her father's extensive library,

which helps her develop some of her key political positions like social reform based on education. All for it. Beautiful. Yeah. Let's go. Her young idols are people like Cuban independence revolutionaries, Antonio Maseo and Jose Orizal. Where someone else might be fantasizing about like

Davy Jones and the monkeys. Yeah. This lady's like Antonio Maseo, there is a thinker. There's a, you know, there's a man with the spirit. His poster is on her wall, yeah. Exactly. She would have loved the Che Guevara shirt era. She's probably very sad that she missed it.

Very thriving, very thriving, yeah. Meanwhile, Aurora apparently regards her elder sister, Josefa, as a loose woman without aspirations who seeks sexual pleasure. And this is sort of inferred in a lot of the, I can't, it's hard to say how exactly she saw her sister, right? But the story goes that in 1895, when Aurora is about 16,

her sister has a child named Pepito Arriola. And Pepito Arriola is a name in his own right. He has his own Wikipedia page entirely separate from this incident. Good for him. There you go. See, Family Tree has all kinds of branches that bear all kinds of fruit, right? But he actually has kind of something in common with this kind of intellectual family, and specifically he's a piano prodigy, like an extremely good piano player.

Oh, shit. There's a few different versions of this, but a really commonlyigy, like an extremely good piano player. Oh shit. There's a few different versions of this, but a really commonly told one, and certainly the one that's most commonly told when we're trying to figure out Aurora and her psychology and why she does the things that she ends up doing in the story is that it was sort of at Aurora's instruction at her father's behest that Pepito became this piano prodigy.

Essentially, Josefa wasn't really raising him. It was Aurora doing it, or Aurora had some big hand in the raising of this child, and specifically, like, piano prodigy'd him on purpose. Was Pepito born out of wedlock? He was born out of wedlock. We don't know who his father was. Right, okay, okay. Which, at the time, or at least in aristocratic circles is like big no-no. Uh-oh.

Yes. It sort of maybe speaks to this, this, I guess, latent disgust that Aurora was supposed to have had toward her sister as this like sexual being. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why I asked, because if she felt that she was like tawdry in some way, then. She did seem to feel that her sister was tawdry. She helped raise Pepito and Saca Boa piano prodigy, or to hear Josefa tell it, it's like, oh, I just walked in and he was, I guess like he had auto instructed himself

how to play the piano. Oh yeah. But the story goes that regardless, Josefa realizes that there's money in Pepito's talent, takes him to go on and become a piano superstar as he does go on to become to be. So she danced mom's out. She danced mom's out and Aurora's very aggrieved at this

because she felt that she had basically raised this child in this way and was not seeing any of the- Accolades or whatever, yeah. Exactly, exactly. That's kind of a damned if you do damned if you don't for Josefa, because it's like, you're not helping raising him, but when you do take over to help raise him,

I'm not getting acknowledged for helping raising him earlier. It's just like, okay. Right. Cool, cool. It sounds very family, family feud vibe. The story, can I shock you, has a bit of a family feud vibe to it. Okay, okay, cool, cool, cool.

So 1895, you'll notice if you have a good memory and were taking notes during my initial preamble about Spanish history, right around the time of the Spanish-American war in which Spain gets gutted. Right, okay. This is the perfect time for Aurora to apply her many political ideas,

which are what I will call an Azalea Banks array. Some where you're like, okay, you're right. And some where you're like, I don't know. Okay. I don't know about that. Yeah. Aurora's politics broadly are socialist and fiercely pro-woman.

She believes in the power of women to lead in revolutionary political ways. She believes in contraception and that marriage should be fundamentally disentangled from the church. She loudly decries prostitution in all forms, feeling that it is fundamentally degrading. She loves eugenics so much.

We were on the same path and then the prostitution, I was like, wait, what? And then it was like, oh, hard left. Or anywhere you're like, you're spittin' facts and then you're like, oh, you're just spittin'. What's next? You're just, yeah. Well, and it was also at odds with like,

I believe in the power of women, but my sister's a total slut. It's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold up, what? Okay. But perhaps a little bit too much of an acquiesce to dissenting voices against feminism. Sure, sure, sure. And so Josie, talk to me a little bit about, you had the same reaction that I did to the

eugenics piece. What is your understanding of eugenics? When we talk about eugenics, what does that mean? So my understanding, big caveat, is that it was considered a scientific practice where you could understand the human species by taking particular measurements and doing particular tests and that kind of thing to determine who was the best of the species. And in that process, of course, it was riddled with racism and colonialism and all of these… Fundamentally discriminatory against people with disabilities just by its nature. Yes, yes. And it also included the theory that the lesser humans, the lesser races,

the lesser whatever weird terminology that they're using, did not need to be part of the human race. We could breed them out effectively. Yes, that this science was based in enough fact, quote unquote, that we could start the process of breeding them out, either by extermination or by exclusion from... The gene pool. Sterilization, these sorts of things. Yeah, so pretty horrendous through and through.

Yeah. Easy perhaps to see how in a time of many roiling ideas with quite revolutionary thought processes and a time of developing medicine and a time of developing knowledge and awareness around things like disease and disorder and around things like sexuality, all of these things, right? Truly, truly we're expanding our minds scientifically

at this time. It's easy for me to see how we could get to this notion of like, we need to like make sure that we are the best of ourselves. Also telling that, like, the woman in, at least in this story who's espousing this, is someone who is, like, from a society that is pissed off that its empire is declining. STACEY Right, yeah. JAYLEE And so it's easy to see how those sorts of,

like, very human emotional things might influence one's idea about in what ways the species needs to be selectively bred. Yeah, and attempt to control, perhaps. Yeah, last gasp at control. Yeah, yeah. In its best light, but in its most honest light, it's just, yeah, colonialism, racism. It is. Well, the thing is too, is like, I think that you need to like hold those both contradictory lights in your mind to sort of understand Aurora's thought process here,

because she will have seen herself as like a very intellectual, very enlightened, superior, can I shock ya, person. And so her understanding of eugenics wouldn't have been that it was this like problematic thing. It was just another one of her like very rigorous set of beliefs to include like, oh, we should be able to have sex for pleasure and these sorts of things.

And that is kind of a hallmark of eugenics is that it is presented in this very scientific, in this very everyday, like, no, these are the facts and here's a graph and here's a experiment and here are the results and da da da. It went through the scientific process. This is all above board, yeah. So for a lot of people what comes next might seem a bit out there, but for Aurora and her

set of values and traumas and familial relations as we've established her, it's actually pretty logical. Okay. In 1913, when Aurora is 21, her beloved father dies. RIP. Oh, yeah. Whether directly influenced by this or not, it also seems to be the time that Aurora conceives of a personal project. In order to make an impact on the world, she is going to have a child,

specifically a daughter, as a eugenics experiment to create the perfect woman as a eugenics experiment to create the perfect woman to affect political change by espousing basically Aurora's exact socialist leaning political beliefs. Woo! Oh wow. Wow. For most people you would say how the fuck did you get there, for Aurora you're like honestly it feels like your life might've been leading up to this moment. I get it. I, yeah, I see why you were defining eugenics so carefully because now, yes, okay.

Because she had, like, literally in her letters, Hildegard told Havelock Ellis, who's this big name researcher, we'll get to it, she literally said, I am a eugenics child. Yeah. It has never been made secret to me and it has been made a very straightforward fact of my existence that my mother had me for eugenics reasons to create the perfect socialist woman. Oh my gosh. Wow.

Wow. Wow. Put all your hopes and dreams on your children's high school sports teams. I've heard that before. I've heard that before. And she's right. And Aurora agrees. And Aurora's right. And Aurora agrees.

And Aurora's like, amen. So determine not to repeat the Pepito fumble, because remember, she had a dry run at a child prodigy before this. True, true enough. Yeah. Aurora will maintain strict

control over this girl and Josie, it will be a girl. Yeah. OK. It just will be a girl. What if you have a boy?ie, it will be a girl. Yeah, okay. It just will be a girl. What if you have a boy? No, it'll be a girl. Oh, okay. So yeah, there's no way that she's controlling that

not at this point in time. Okay, right. It's gonna be a girl. Yeah. I don't need a gender reveal party. It's a girl. No, no, no, send the pink cake over, gracias. So she's now determined to maintain

strict control over this girl in every aspect of her life, continuing her eugenics theories past the point of conception and into the raising of this child. I will raise this child perfectly. Oh God, oh God, oh. Oh, Alice looking pretty good now, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Oh. Alice looking pretty good now, huh? Yeah.

I should ask Josie, were you to your knowledge a eugenics experiment? No, I was a, to my knowledge, a mistake. What's more human than that? Not a mistake. I surprise. Well, you know what? But I think that's very nice because like,

you know, in a liberated sexual society such as the one that Aurora and Hildegard conceived of, that should be allowed, surely. Yeah! If we're in the middle of boning for pleasure, why not? Yeah! So, she deliberately chooses as this child's father a man who is healthy and intelligent because duh, eugenics.

Yeah. And someone who will not lay a claim to the child. For this reason, she chooses a priest. Albert Palas-Montseny. Wait, um, a priest? You don't think the priests are fucking, you fucking naive? Come on. Okay.

Well, I'm like, is this a sperm donor situation? Effectively, yes. They fornicate thrice before Aurora gets pregnant, according to some stories in which it's quite popular to paint her as this asexual person disgusted by sex in its entirety. Although, because a lot of her research will go on to be around sex, I don't know if that's entirely true. But there's this version where she then has no further use for a man and his sex, so she vanishes alone to raise the child como una madre soltera, a single mother. In others, like that of one of Aurora's servants, Aurora had a maid who had loose lips apparently, she suggested that Aurora was in love with this priest and maintained a relationship with him

where he met the girl after her birth. Oh, okay, okay. I like the maid story. Who knows? Well, everyone loves what a gossipy maid tells them. That's just human nature too. Yeah, yeah. One oft repeated piece of innuendo

about the pregnancy says, quoting the Daily Mail, so that's how you know it's true. For nine months, she adopted a strict regime supposed to ensure the health of the fetus, bathing twice a day and waking every hour throughout the night to commit to a pseudo-scientific ritual of changing position. Okay, that does not sound like the best prenatal situation. If you let the baby rest in one position for too long it will get lazy and soft and decadent and bourgeois, Josie. Everybody knows this. Okay, okay, keep moving the

baby. Gotcha. Either way in 1914 Aurora has her daughter. She names the girl Hildegard Leocadia Georgina Hermenegilda Maria del Pilar Rodriguez Carballera. We'll just call her Hildegard, Leocadia, Georgina, Hermene Gilda, Maria del Pilar, Rodriguez Carballera. We'll just call her Hildegard. Perfect. Which is supposed to mean something like garden of wisdom, but this particular spelling seems to be something Aurora just made up. Oh, oh, okay.

Which is very her, I like that. It means garden, garden of wisdom. Did you make it up? No! Yes. Caitlyn with the G-H in there somehow. You got it, you got it. Aurora raises Hildegard in what seems to be

a pretty comfortable lifestyle in Madrid, the nation's capital. As she envisioned, Aurora is extremely hands-on with Hildegard and her schedule, educating the girl personally up to a certain point. I think she went to like a parochial school or something after a point, but like for a long part of this child's childhood raised her by hand.

The story goes that by two, Hildegard can read, by three she can write, by four she can type. Oh, oh, okay. She's got to be published in articles, Josie, and positioning herself as a thought leader. She needs to learn how to type. This is very important stuff for Child 4. Yeah, it's true. It's true. She couples Josie and positioning herself as a thought leader. She needs to learn how to type. This is very important stuff for a child to learn. Yeah, it's true. She quickly knows six languages.

Spanish, French, Latin, Italian, Portuguese, and German. Those little sponge sprains at that age. They can really sop it up. When she's genetically perfect? Fair enough. A genetically perfect socialist woman. How did Aurora know that the priest was genetically perfect? Vibes Josie. Vibes, sorry.

God get with it. I forgot the scientific method of vibes. This is eugenics right? So you're like probably literally like looking at the length of his fingers and the depth of his like eye sockets and shit too. Why not? That's yeah, that's okay. by 1924 at the age of 10, Hildegard begins high school and by 1928 at the age of 14, she begins to study medicine and law. By 17, Hildegard has obtained her doctorate with honors and is the youngest practicing lawyer in Spain.

Oh my gosh, a Doogie Howser situation for sure. Aurora presides over Hildegard's perfectly balanced study, diet, and exercise regimens, ensuring that her eugenically conceived revolutionary daughter has only the best of everything. She also of course instructs the girl personally on morals and politics. We can take a look at a sample of some of those politics in Hildegard's own writings. Quoting academics Ricardo Campos and Rafael Huertas, quote, the themes covered in her works include topics such as sexual education from childhood, the problem of contraception, reproduction, couple relationships, and the abolition of prostitution. Hildegard represents

one of the most progressive, critical, and emancipatory currents of Spanish thought of her time. For example, when she writes about couple relationships, she makes presentations that are very advanced for her time, also considering the natural possibility of both heterosexuality and homosexuality, monogamy and polygamy. Okay, okay, okay, from a 14 year old. Because she's a child! Cool, cool, cool, yeah! Damn, okay. Among her works on sexual liberation include Means to Avoid Pregnancy, Voluntary Parenthood,

Contraceptive Prophylaxis, The Sexual Problem Treated by a Spanish Woman, and a contribution to a book of essays called Sexual Perversions, The Sexual Instinct, and Its Morbid Manifestations. Okay. She also, like her mother, advocates for eugenics as the solution for an egalitarian society, such as in her work, The Eugenic Problem, points of view of a modern woman. Yeah. Wow. This kid does not know how to tie her shoes.

We know that, right? The kid knew how to tie her shoes at six months old, as a matter of fact. Yeah, no. she had no clue. Well, it's interesting that you say that because Hildegard's interest in political leanings seem to reflect those of her mother, Aurora, especially the eugenics bit. But they present that interesting contradiction

that you're talking about. While throttling presenting these very thoughtful and articulate views, like as peer reviewed, there are like very big names in the worlds of thought and the worlds of sexology who read her stuff and are like, this is excellent work. This is very thoughtful and modern. Especially around the need for liberated sex for women, Hildegard was herself a virgin at the insistence slash micromanagement of her mother. Yes, right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, as I can imagine to a 14 year old, sure. But are we talking

about like that young or are we talking about as she is a young woman in her twenties? Kind of both. Kind of both. Okay. Extends from then. Not twenties we're talking about, but like, let's say like 11 to 18, sure. woman in her 20s? Kind of both. Kind of both. Okay. Extends from then. Hmm. Not 20s we're talking about, but like, um, let's say like 11 to 18, sure. Okay. So she knows in this very, she has been instructed and intellectually knows about these sort of very, I would say like, kind of concepts around sex and sex education and sexuality

that seem to me quite like university level modern in our context. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But she is sort of very specifically a virgin. Like her mother is raising her not to fuck around with men because she she didn't need a man. She just needed a sperm donor, right? She raised this girl herself. Oh, I see. Okay, so that was my question is like, is her mom's insistence that she not have sex

a thing of like, you don't need a man or is it that like that's impure and tawdry and you're gonna be like your auntie and we're not gonna allow that? Or is it justified by one to the other? Or is it that a man will pollute you with outside rhetoric and I need to be entirely in control of you in your life? Right, yeah.

There's that option C. Which even if she doesn't consciously recognize that throughout this story, Aurora is gonna sort of be able to like intellectualize the ways in which she feels a bit betrayed by Hildegard starting to get out from under her thumb. But underpinning it all, always remember that like, this is a controlling mother who wants control, extreme control, like the most extreme kind of, you have to read for two hours and study for three and see for this exact amount,

like very rigorous control. It must be very threatening and frightening the concept of losing control over something that you've put that much time and mental acuity into controlling. Helicopter mom for sure. That's like my friend in high school who her mom made her eat like 14 grapes every day.

That's fucked. Perfect amount of whatever. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. I mean, that actually sounds pretty, like 14 grapes a day. That's fucked. Perfect amount of whatever, right? Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. I mean, that actually sounds pretty, like 14 grapes a day sounds pretty chill, but that sounds nice. Compared to like all this other stuff, but yeah. So imagine the cognitive dissonance

that these intellectuals, mostly men, must have faced seeing this teenage virgin present such lucid and well-considered material around the subject of sex, and then move quietly to the subject of sex, and then move quietly to the side of her mother who constantly accompanied her everywhere. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

This girl was not punching the straw in her own juice boxes. That is, that's for sure. I thought you meant that as like a euphemism for sex. Um, well, maybe she was. Dude, you gotta say, as she got older she must have even been looking at the juice boxes being like, fuck I'm so horny, why can't she leave? Yeah! Quoting socialist politician and lawyer Julian Bestero, who is Hildegard's law professor,

Hildegard is more a case of incomprehensible duality than a free individuality. At university she provoked in me a contradictory sensation. In her studies, she was simply formidable. But this tendency to be glued to her mother all the time made me think of a baby kangaroo enclosed in its invisible pouch, the umbilical cord intact, like an enormous one-way communicative hypertrophy. Mm, wow.

He's a professor, if you can't tell. Yeah. I hear it. I hear it. You get it with the kangaroo and the poach, right? There's this idea that she hops out, gives her incredibly lucid academic presentations, and then hops back in. Yeah. It's wild.

The seeming contradiction in the terms of her life earned her the nickname the Red Virgin, given to her by Havelock Ellis. And Havelock Ellis is an Englishman and a progressive intellectual sexologist who is key in developing our current theories on things like homosexuality, being transgender, narcissism. He is supposed to have like come up with narcissism. Wow. Okay. Big resume for this guy, including a bunch of stuff that I'm not even getting into. And he and Hildegard correspond with one another often, and he speaks very highly of the quality

of her mind. He specifically, there's a lot of letters between them that I think are accessible that I wasn't able to find for this telling, but they corresponded very often. This is the person that she said, I am a eugenics child to. And it's also truthful that Hildegard was in correspondence with Margaret Sanger, who was like a birth control pioneer who came up with Planned Parenthood. And apparently Havelock Ellis and Margaret Sanger

would exchange notes being like, Margaret Sanger would be like, this girl just messaged me being, messaged me. She sent me a letter, she DM'ed her. Well, you know, she did though. This girl slid into my DM's basically being like, I'm a child lawyer from Spain and I love what you do, Margaret Sanger. And Havelock Ellis was like, no, no, she's legit.

I'll vouch for her, she's the best. This chick is crazy, I love her. He would call her like my Spanish girl, like or my Spanish lawyer. My Spanish lawyer is great. You must chat with my Spanish lawyer. Oh, my gosh. Why the red virgin? Yeah. What does that mean? So I wasn't able to hunt down Havelock Ellis's original article

in which he coined this term, but I assume the red part is to do with her being a socialist. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. So we've been talking about this sort of sexual liberation slash eugenics portfolio, but she also had like a deep kind of ruby red political portfolio. Okay. In 1929, she joins the Young Socialists and quickly reaches the top of the organization. She joins and builds alliances with workers' trade unions.

She becomes a well-known political commentator, sort of like a pundit. That makes sense, yeah. She's very prolific, publishing two books and dozens of articles, including 70 articles in El Socialista, which you can imagine what that might be. Right. As well as La Tierra, an anarchist newspaper. When do we see that shift to anarchy? In 1931, upon the proclamation of the Second Republic. So again, most of this has been happening

through that Primo de Rivera dictatorship that I told you about. We've come out of that, the monarchy's out, we're moving into the second Republic of Spain. Yeah. The clusterfuck. The clusterfuck, exactly. The intellectual clusterfuck full of violence. Right, yeah. The socialists at this point gain entree into a coalition government, so they're not the

only party, but they're one of the parties. And Hildegard finds herself radicalizing as she perceives the socialists have become instruments of the bourgeoisie, now that they've actually achieved power they've bought in soft. Okay, right. She gets ejected from the Socialist Party and begins to campaign alongside the small, far-left Federal Republican Party which has ties to anarchism. That is not the only change in Hildegard's politics as she seemingly becomes influenced

by the thoughts and ideas of people who didn't necessarily give birth to her. Oh, you mean not her mother. Not Aurora. And begins to question the values that her mother taught her. But I was in labor with you for 18 hours. You ruined my body. I rotated every hour of the night for nine months. I didn't enter REM sleep for nine months because of you.

My eyelids are fucked up because of you. And now you're telling me that you're a slightly different branch of leftist than I am? No. So literally, god damn not. So yeah, she becomes personally acquainted with a variety of changemakers in the socialism and sexuality spaces of the era, both in Spain and abroad. We already talked about Havelock Ellis and Margaret Sanger. She becomes involved with Clara Campo Amor, who's considered by some scholars the mother of the Spanish women's suffrage movement, as well as Carmen de Burgos, very well-known

writer and women's rights activist of the era. Yeah, okay. She becomes acquainted via letter with another well-known Englishman and friend of the podcast, H.G. Wells. Oh, shit! Best known as the writer of The War of the Worlds. Uh-huh, true enoughG. Wells. Oh, shit! Best known as the writer of The War of the Worlds. Uh-huh. True enough, true enough. In 1932, she becomes the secretary of an organization called the

League for Sexual Reform on Scientific Basis. And the president is Gregorio Marañón, who's a Spanish intellectual. He's very influential on Hildegard and we start to see that influence emerge in her writings. Oh, okay. Which are all in Spanish and about sexuality. I'm sorry I didn't quote them more extensively, but you kind of got the idea. Right, yeah, yeah. And I imagine too, they're like you opened the story like of a time and place as well.

Very much, oh, they all are. The eugenics problem, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know how much I wanna dive into that specificity, but yeah. But then a bunch of it is really just pretty watertight good shit about sexuality and how like the church shouldn't be telling us how many babies we can have, which is absolutely true. So, you know.

Yeah, yeah. As a result, Hildegard starts to ignore issues that her mother cares about and speak on ones her mother disdains. And we start to see that perhaps Dona Aurora's perfect experiment is outgrowing its Petri dish. And that makes Aurora very unhappy. We have already decided on the politics before you were born in fact. Yeah.

And we will not be changing midstream based on the flights and whims of, let's be honest, a teenage girl. You should be doing homework, young lady, in six languages. Okay, so she's a teen at this point. She's like mid-teens. 17, 18. 17, 18. Okay, okay. So a little higher up there. Okay. Yeah, that's always rough, right? Girl power, but you're too young to make your own decisions.

Sit back down. But women have all the power, but you don't. No, that's the thing. There really is this contradictory, let's just call it what it is, a hypocrisy in how rigidly Aurora wants to control her daughter and specifically her daughter's body in this sexual context. Yeah. Compared to like the rhetoric that she espouses

and makes her daughter espouse about how like it is unethical that the patriarchy, even if that's not the word that they used, does this. Right. Yeah. But they probably use the word patriarchy, honestly. They're that type. That's, yeah, that's tricky.

Cause she's also, like I said, does she know how to tie her shoes? Does she know how to stick a straw into a juice box? Like I don't know. Like she's still a teen. Her frontal lobe is still developing. I don't know if we knew about lobes then. No. We were just getting into narcissism, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Oh, we got up close and personal with lobes at a point too. Yeah, yeah. We were measuring lobes, but we weren't really understanding. Maybe let's leave the lobes out of this, you know? Yeah. There is potentially another source We're measuring lobes, but we weren't really understanding. Maybe let's leave the lobes out of this, you know? Yeah.

There is potentially another source of falling out between mother and daughter, as it is heavily implied by many sources and outright stated in others that Hildegard was gradually unthawing to the idea of male company. The Red Virgin is on the market. Right. She's horny as fuck. Come on. Who wouldn't be? This is thought to be a man who traveled in the same political circles as Hildegard,

who much to Aurora's disgust had his own political influence on Hildegard and her ideas. Names tied to Hildegardist paramours include Catalan lawyer Antonio Viena and socialist writer Abel Velilla. She liked that set of initials, very auspicious for her apparently. Yeah, I guess so, yeah. Given that she's Hildegard Rodriguez Carballera, the other HRC, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. So no matter who her man was or who her men were, Aurora will not have been pleased at Hildegard's burgeoning interest in romance. One of the great frustrations of this story for me was that while it's relatively easy to piece together Hildegard's impressive resume of achievements and publications, it's harder to trace the breakdown of friendly relations between mother and daughter with any kind of

precision. But when we consider the eugenics obsessed Aurora and her reasons for having given birth to her daughter, we can imagine, and I will say in addition to what has been implied to be a deteriorating mental situation, always have mental illness kind of in the back of the conversation here. Okay. However, amorphously, we can imagine how frustrating the situation must have been for Aurora as the purity of her experiment was gradually compromised by the introduction of foreign ideas, the influence of others, and finally the specter of contaminatory sex in purifying the Red Virgin, paradoxically

one of Spain's foremost sex scholars. That must have really fucked with her. On the other hand, it's also like, couldn't you see that coming? Like sometimes smart people are really, really, really dumb. That's true. Don't know how to tie your shoes. Yep. Let's put the elephant on the table as we say when we're mixing up our metaphors.

Right. The pursuit of perfection is in my opinion, I don't want to go as far as worthless, but kind of worthless because perfection is unatt in my opinion, I don't want to go as far as worthless, but kind of worthless because perfection is unattainable and subjective. Yeah, it's only gonna lead to heartbreak. It's only gonna lead to heartbreak, it's only gonna lead to like discrimination. It's the eugenics question, right? It's the folly of eugenics as category is that you can't breed the perfect human.

What we think is the perfect human just seems to be whatever the angsty Europeans of any given era think because they're fucked up about immigration and things, you know what I mean? And changing political tides. Yeah, yeah. Like it doesn't work. So like to begin with, that is a, in my opinion,

subjectively and yes, I have the benefit of hindsight in my own social context and whatever, a stupid and wrong idea, let alone to like subject your own daughter to that by like rigorously controlling her upbringing in ways that are entirely subjectively decided by you. And it's also like, I wanna quote unquote, breed this woman to be at the forethought

of every political discussion, but I don't want her to have anything that I don't know about. It's like, that's contradictory. You can't have a cutting edge thinker. And at that point, why is Aurora not simply doing this herself? Why does she need to bring a child?

When she had her kid at like 30 or whatever, she was very capable of going to these same halls and typing up these same articles. And if anything, she probably wasted a lot of time instructing her child in this way. When she could just be doing this herself. No, that's a really, really good point. Because when you are foisting this thought, this like perfectionism on somebody else, how is that not a type of like supremacy?

It's oppression. It's oppression. But if you're doing it for yourself, that is self advancement, that is like working through your own shit. It just, that is an interesting, I guess, move to make is that I want to create the foremost thinker. So I will birth it versus I will become

the foremost thinker on sexual. But don't forget about Pepito either. So I will birth it versus I will become the foremost thinker on sexual. But don't forget about Pepito either. So we have this latent trauma where she had attempted to essentially like raise a child. So there's a wound there, raise a child that got snatched away from her. And she was attempting to raise this child in this particular way, allegedly. Both movies that I watched, both fictionalized treatments, but I ended up watching Mi'kha Hildegard twice because I actually really liked it. Yeah. In that movie, they really did talk about like,

there is this latent emotional wound of Pepito that she doesn't seem to have taken into her own decision-making. Yeah. Well, and as you very expertly laid out too, the idea of eugenics is to further progress through propagation of the human species. So if she is really holding on to the eugenics idea, if that's a really fundamental part of the way that she sees the world, then yeah, it makes sense that perhaps her way of putting

that into the world is to propagate a daughter to do such, to do just that. There's something also kind of like limited, I think, in the way that Aurora doesn't allow herself to do that, but she has to mother somebody to do that. Like that also feels like a very limited view of femininity. feels like a very limited view of femininity. That like the best use of my intellect and in a feminine context is to birth somebody to extend my beliefs and thoughts. You sort of talked to me around and raised a good point on the eugenics front though.

If she does feel duty to propagation, genetic propagation of the species, well then it does make sense that she would like, I suppose if I am forced by my beliefs to have a child then I must justify it by making her like the perfect vessel for socialism through a 1930s Spanish lens. You know what I mean? And it would be interesting too to see if like her thoughts around eugenics and being a woman is that like, well my biology asks me to do this. You know, like, if I can bear children. Who knows?

I'm sure that this is stuff that would be found out if I had access to the archived materials and time to research, just to let y'all behind the curtain. I ended up having to pinch hit something with a quick turnaround this time, unexpectedly. So I didn't have the time to like go into the, you know, the El Mundo archives from 1910. Loathe though I am and read it all in the original Spanish. As I say to you, I hope I too brought you much to consider with this one. Yeah. Yeah. No, you have. And again, I really want to redirect it back to this lens of independent of all of this intellectualization, we have this controlling and potentially mentally ill mother.

Who is abs- and I don't say that in any way to stigmatize mental illness, but I do that to put into the perspective that like, I personally would say, and people have theorized that, like relevant people of her era even theorized that this is a woman whose many intellectualizations of the way she treated her daughter are also belying the fact that she is maybe suffering from either some sort of mental illness or personality disorder. Yeah. Specifically one that makes her very obsessive and very paranoid. We hear a lot that she's quite a paranoid woman. Can I shock you? The lady who produced a child entirely as a genetic thought experiment and

then micromanaged her entire life has some mental shit to deal with. Oh, interesting. Who knew? As Hildegardt begins to grow past Aurora's scope of influence, these qualities of Aurora's begin to take center stage. She becomes very paranoid that Hildegard, who she raised from the creche as this perfect liberatory woman, will become the tool of manipulative thought leaders and foreign imperialists who will use her for their own perverted ideological purposes. It's these letter writing things that she's doing with Havelock, Ellis, and Margaret saying they're going to get her and use her. They're going to take her. Oh, the helicopter mob, yeah.

She begins to impose even more control over Hildegard and her activities, supposedly even confining her to the house and disconnecting the phone, although this may be a bit of historical sauce. The situation reaches a boiling point when Hildegard is invited to England by some of her foreign colleagues, including Havelock, Ellis, and H.G. Wells. Basically, Hildegard is envisioning it as sort of, I can propagandize for the Republican party while I'm there, but they're basically like, come do a semester abroad and it sounds like things are getting a bit stuffy in that house and you might want to get out of there. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Come see the world too. That might be part of it. Part of your education should be to see other countries and Exactly. Well, shock of shocks, Aurora doesn't feel this way. She feels like she needs Hildegard. You need to stay on the home front and focus on spreading feminist theory and eugenics. Aurora becomes increasingly convinced that this is a ploy by noted writer H.G. Wells to effectively brainwash Hildegard and use her for British intelligence purposes. We need to make a Manchurian candidate out of Hildegard basically and then send her back to Spain as a British spy. Right, yeah. Which, I mean, stranger things have happened. This is a very tumultuous era in European politics as we ease into World War II, you know? Yes, fair enough, yeah.

Aurora's fears of Hildegard becoming an instrument of the oppressors have seemingly come true, and on top of that, she's being abandoned as a mother. She's lost control of the experiment. She threatens suicide if Hildegard leaves, but Hildegard still plans on going to England. So as Aurora sees it, she only has one choice. Killer? On the morning of June 9th, 1933, Aurora Are you fucking kidding me? Okay, keep going, sorry. Don't give me a fucking date morning of what? She's dead! Aurora enters Hildegard's bedroom while her daughter is sleeping and

shoots her four times with a handgun. Oh my god. Killing her in her sleep at the age of 18. Oh my god. Okay, now I know why you were laying mental illness real thick too, because that is... Oh that... Oh my god. RIP. Oh my god. Alice's childhood she provided looks so much better right now. I told you. I told you. RIP, life was a bitch and then you died. What a shame. That poor girl.

That poor intelligent girl. Oh, the poor mom, the poor girl, the poor story. Jesus. Oh my god. I mean, let's not poor mom her too hard. She did shoot her daughter for eugenics reasons. Fair, fair. This is a lot of humanity here, right?

A big tangle of humanity in this story in every possible context. She's obviously unwell. Yeah, she's not. She's one of our unwell divas. Yeah. Another playlist title for us. One of our signature bittersweet, infamy, unwell divas. Yes, absolutely.

She can make a playlist on Spotify on Well Divas. So dead at the age of 18, obviously horrifying to her intellectual contemporaries like Half Walk Alice and Margaret Sanger. We know that like we have, you can look in like the Sanger letters and the Alice letters and see that they were quite distraught. This represents a great loss of a potential thought leader for women in Spain. Yeah. Quoting Julian Valdillo, Professor of Contemporary History at Carlos III University of Madrid.

Yes, I did say Madrid. Yeah, you did. Hildegard's murder was like an earthquake. Her death meant the end of one of Spanish feminism's greatest hopes. Oh. her death meant the end of one of Spanish feminism's greatest hopes. After the murder, Aurora immediately goes to the home of a lawyer, Juan Blotea Asensi, the future Minister of Justice of the Second Republic, because again, we're very politically well connected here, especially among the socialistas. And she says, I just killed my daughter. What now? He obviously immediately starts work on an insanity defense.

Oh, yeah. And the question of Aurora's sanity is hugely important in this trial and the practicalities of what constitutes sanity are hotly debated and they end up making a little panel of thinkers to kind of go over this because in the Second Republic, we're open to new ways of thinking

and that includes mental illness and how it constitutes guilt and interacts with crime and so on. Okay, okay. Hard to deny Aurora is one of our unwell divas, if not in the way that we typically determine it in a North American context, the capacity to distinguish right from wrong

as it specifically pertains to the crime committed tends to be how we determine guilt. So like when you killed that person, did you know that killing people was wrong? Yes. Yes. Manslaughter one, two. Yeah. Sure. Sure. And so this is interesting because like. I'm open to conversations that like, while she may have known that murder was wrong, she didn't seem to know that like raising your child as eugenics experiment was wrong.

You know what I mean? So like there's a weird way or like perhaps she didn't know that the murder was wrong, but did legitimately believe that it was her only solution or something. Right. But then we also look at, especially when we're talking in the context of guilt in the, did I know what I did was wrong capacity, she immediately went to a lawyer and lawyered up. Yes. Yeah, that's true. So there's that component too. She didn't sit there and live with the body for 10 days and go, da da da da da, woo, da da da da da.

She went to, and she asked, apparently she asked the maid to go walk the dog when she did it. So she knew. Oh wow, yeah, there was some planning involved. One major point of note is that even in court, Aurora herself vigorously denied having committed the murder in quote,

a state of mental disturbance. So she did and does admit that she did the murder. And she says, and I was not mad. She insisted my reasons were clear because to her, this is, which to me, that's a point in favor of her being crazy. But yes, my experiment got out of my control. That's what it is. I had to pull the plug on the experiment. So I shot my daughter four times while she was sleeping. The way she supposedly

puts it, I should say, because again, I couldn't track down the exact source of this quote. Maybe this is just like one of the many dramatic versions of her that have said it, but the quote that is attributed to Aurora Rodriguez Carballera is, El escultor tras descubrir la mas minima imperfection en su obra la destruye. The sculptor, after discovering the most minimal imperfection in her work, destroys it. Not necessarily, my friend.

No, you run a dental floss through that and you lump it back into the clay bucket. That's what she thinks. Apparently, as Aurora's character in the movie, Mieke Hildegard expresses it, I will not, so this is like a fictionalized version of her, but in a version that I thought was good and in a version that I thought like well communicated

what I took to be a plausible mental state for this woman. I will not consent to you basing my defense on mental disorders. I prefer death to having my ideas discredited to having people think that they are the product of madness. Oh. And that seems to sort of have been the tack that she took in court, which is like,

I won't have you tell me I'm mad when I'm the smartest person here. Yeah, yeah. I'm the most sane person in'm mad when I'm the smartest person here. Yeah, yeah. I'm the most sane person in this room. I'm the only one who sees society the way that it is. And my ideas are important and were important. And it's not my fault that as you say, kind of the experiment got out of hand.

Wow. But that's just a different set of values, right? Like she's not working with the same societal values of like human life is something to be, it's not an experiment. And also because she has this paranoia that she doesn't seem to know that she has, it's interwoven with also H.G. Wells

was recruiting my daughter as a British spy. So I had to do it for that reason too. Yeah, if you really thought that. Which also you're like, okay, so maybe this mental illness stuff has some legs. Yeah, if you really thought that. Which also you're like, OK, so maybe this mental illness stuff has some legs. Yeah, yeah. Maybe her refusal to be deemed mentally ill also points in the direction of like, well, maybe she's not thinking.

And I mean, all of this is no shade. I'm mentally ill and I would be a spy for HG Wells. You heard it here first, people. In the end, the jury finds that Aurora was sane and acted deliberately and culpably since her having committed the murder itself is never in doubt. Like there was never any question that there was like a one-armed man who did this, you know? Right, yeah.

She is sentenced to 26 years, 8 months, and 10 days in prison. And how old is she? In her 40s or so at this time? Yeah, 40s, 50s. After a few months in jail, Aurora is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and transferred to the Ciemposuelos Psychiatric Sanatorium. In 1941, she refuses to speak to doctors and breaks off all relations with them. In 1942, she makes rag dolls with prominent genitals to promote normalization of the sex organs. These are taken by asylum staff and destroyed. In 1948, she asks the mother superior for a pardon, which that must suck for a person like her to have to ask the nun who heads this

mental health institution for no reason for a pardon. True, yeah. Having served 15 years of her sentence but she is denied, in 1955 she dies of cancer at the Ciemposuelo sanatorium and is supposedly buried in a mass grave. It is said that until her dying day, Aurora said that she did not regret killing her daughter Hildegard and said she would do it again. Well, that's why you didn't get your pardon. Aurora, I think I'm pretty certain on that one. Should you have killed your daughter, check yes or no. Just going to check in with you again and I see it's the do not regret and all right,

here's your breakfast, we'll see you tomorrow. So again, quoting the Aurora character as portrayed very excellently, I thought, by Amparo Soler-Leal in the 1977 movie Mi Ja Hildegard, which again I really recommend, especially if you can find it's in Spanish and I watched it with Spanish subtitles, I couldn't find a version with English subtitles, but I recommend it to anyone who can either find the subtitled version for English or no Spanish. It's on YouTube for free in Spanish. To quote her character in that film, Hildegard's death represented my failure, the collapse of my efforts and desires for so many years, but it also meant my victory over those around her, over those who longed to divert her from her path, to prostitute her, to transform her into an effective and

submissive instrument of their machinations. But wasn't she a submissive instrument of your machinations? Different when I do. Do as I say, not as I do, just like any good mother teaching their children about cigarettes, you know? Yeah, I can empathize with the fear that like, oh, she's gonna fall under the, you know, the whims of some man. You can't have a child and not feel that at some point, but it's like also incumbent upon you to deal with that like a pro-social way by getting a hobby or joining a rowing group or something. Right. Yeah.

Or also maybe even like seeing the long game of that is like, if Hildegard's heart is broken or she gets into a relationship where it's not equal or it's not as it should be, imagine what her as the intellect that she is will learn from that. What she could extrapolate and apply and make available to other women. Or just poison her against the man. Just go in there, metal, poison her against the man and then repossess her that way.

Yeah, done. Oh, I think, Ror, I think. We don't have to bring pistols into this. Also, yeah, don't have guns in the house. Easy, done. I wasn't expecting a handgun in a story like this, but there we go. You have to arm yourself in the easy, done. I wasn't expecting a handgun in a story like this, but there we go. You have to arm yourself in the revolution, man.

I guess so. I think I was expecting like a kitchen knife. After Francisco Franco's death in 1975, the Generalissimo, Spain resumed its status as a constitutional monarchy, which it remains today, although not without much continued turmoil. Because of the prominence, duration,

and other particulars of the Franco regime, it attracts a lot of scholarly notice and historical appraisal. And the Second Spanish Republic, with its complexity of ideas and many involved parties, kind of gets relegated historically, along with the works of folks like Hildegard Rodriguez Carballera, who tends to attract much more notice for her status as her mother's eugenics experiment and murder victim than as a scholarly figure independent of that context. Right. I acknowledge that I'm guilty of that here, with my apologies. Regardless, she's noted as a precocious

and extremely forward-thinking academic whose time on the earth was cut short far too early by a restrictive and controlling mother unable to see the hypocrisies in her own rhetoric about women's freedom. It's a very sad and very human story and something to consider the next time Alice's backseat driving you could always be a lot worse. Yeah, she's never shot me. Not once, let alone four times in your sleep. Not once, let alone four times in your sleep. Not once, yeah. Damn. Much to consider. Much to consider.

And I love that final note too that like this era of Spanish history does kind of get like folded to the bottom of the bowl because of the Civil War and Franco. Pretty wild. But notably too, under Franco's regime, women were highly restricted. There was a lot of stuff that as a woman in 1950s Spain, you could not do. So imagine if Hildegard were around to kind of put a needle in that balloon,

that would have been cool. Well, it's kind of interesting slash sad because there was so much disappearing of people and of records that happened under Franco that for a long time, Aurora Rodriguez Carballera was thought to be one of those people who was just like killed and disappeared under Franco until we were able to like find her medical records

after the fact and reconstruct this lineage of own. Actually, she ended up in the sanatorium where she died of cancer in the fifties. Wow. That's interesting. Whoa. Yeah. And that's another way that like, yeah,

the story gets kind of like buried a little bit because there's just so many other big things happening and destruction of records and yeah. Yeah. Damn. Oh, damn. But it was really interesting to go back and learn all of that history that was, I guess, like personally relevant to my family. Yeah. You can hear it in the way that I flip back and forth between like

West Coast English speaker Spanish voice and like Spanish speaker Spanish voice. But I'm like kind of first generation North American of Spanish extract. My mom was born in Madrid, right? It was cool to piece together all of this history. That recent history, especially for grandparents, was all about. Yeah. And it made me a little sad that they're not still around because I'd love to pick the

brains about some of this and be like, did you hear about that lady who shot her daughter? That was fun. Yeah. Let's talk about that. But also like, what was it like to be like, I guess, of a similar age? They would have been like, I guess, seven or eight years younger than Hildegard when all of this was happening. Yeah. So to kind of get their perspective of like, their first memories would have been during this primo de Rivera dictatorship and what was that like? And you know, what interesting times, sad times, lots

of violence and a lot of like, a lot of people who died who didn't deserve to die, including this lady Hildegard. Yeah. Oh, damn, I'd never heard of the story. It's not such a nutsoid story. So wild. Much to consider and very much of its time and place. Yeah, as you as you say, as if this was just like on your list, too. That's wild. Yeah. Chilling on the list for at least two years. Just in the drawer.

Just hanging, hanging out. Just waiting for a bittersweet February to bust out. Yeah. Yeah. It feels a good February story. Love is in the air. Yeah, very claustrophobic. Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy,

we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfamy.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our Ko-fi account at ko-fi.com forward slash bittersweetinfamy. But no pressure, bittersweetinfamy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy, or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it.

Stay sweet. The sources that I used for this episode's infamous include an article, The Green Children of Woolpit, written by Brian Houghton at bryanhoughton.com. I looked at an article, The Green Children of Woolpit by Bethania Paulman published October 12th, 2022 on Snopes. I read the article, The Head Scratching Mystery Behind The Green Children of Woolpit

by Kalina Fraga published May 7th, 2023 at allthat'sinteresting.com. I looked at the Wikipedia article for The Green Children of Woolpit. And lastly, I watched the YouTube video, What Really Happened to the Green Children of Woolpit? Medieval Mystery, from the YouTube site, Histories Forgotten People, posted to YouTube October 29th, 2023. For this episode of Bittersweet Infamy, I watched two fictionalized interpretations of the case, the 1977 film Mi Ije Hildegard and the 2024 film La Viergen Roja. I read the article, Political Violence During the Spanish Second Republic by Stanley G. Payne from the Journal of Contemporary History, volume 25, number 2 slash 3, May to June

1990, pages 269 to 288. I read the pages on Hildegard Rodriguez Garballera on Centro de Información Documental de Arquivos SIVA, as well as Historia Hispánica. I read Derriere, Eugenique, et Meurtre, le cast d'horror origues et sa représentación dans le film Mi Hija Hildegarde by Richard Campos and Rafael Huertas for Creamy No Corpus, 2007. I read The Eugenics' Obsessed Mother Who Created the Perfect Daughter, then Shot Her Dead Because She Feared H.G. Wells Was Plotting to Kidnap Her by Christopher Stevens for The Daily Mail, July 23rd, 2023. I read Sanger and the Red Virgin, published by New York University in the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, newsletter number 30, which was released in Spring 2002.

Lastly, I read the Wikipedia pages for The Dictatorship with Primo de Rivera, King Alfonso XIII, and the Second Spanish Republic. If you want to support us making the show, you can go to coffee.com, that's k-o-h-i-f-i.com slash bittersweetinfamy and pledge to become a monthly subscriber. With your donation, you get access to the Bittersweet Film Club. You become a member, just like Terry, Jonathan, Lizzie D., Erica Jo, Soph, Dylan, and Satchel are supporters for whom we're extremely grateful. And you can suggest for us a movie to watch for the film club.

Exciting stuff. Bitter Student for me is a proud member of the 604 Podcast Network. This episode was edited by Alex McCarthy and Alexa Johnson. Our cover photography is by Luke Bentley. Our interstitial music is by Mitchell Collins. And the song you're currently listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele. Hug your mother, not too tight. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast?

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