The sacred mission of forming future wives and mothers was entrusted to the women's cadre of the Spanish Falange, otherwise known as Sección Femenina (1934–77). Its modest origins (not to be confused with its far less modest social and political underpinnings) can be traced to a group of seven women, mainly kin of male activists, who, a year after the launching of the party by José Antonio Primo de Rivera and two years before the breakout of the Civil War, coalesced under the leadership of José Antonio's sister, Pilar. With the absorption of the Falange into Franco's National Movement, Sección Femenina assumed the role of mediator between the state and its female constituents, thus forming a dominant cultural filter through which to interpret women's familial, social, and political obligations. Despite the Falange's waning prestige, that Sección Femenina remained one of its most active and staunch proponents for over four decades (nominally outlasting Franco's regime) was by and large due to Pilar's proselytizing zeal and unflagging devotion to her brother's pronouncedly fascist program of national-syndicalist revolution. By a broad consensus, she was “both the link with the original truths of Falangism and the guarantor of their survival within the National Movement.”

It was the war that gave the Falangist women the necessary impetus for mobilization, and by 1939 their cadres counted over a half a million adherents. While not everyone chose to join the party, the members of the Sección Femenina were in charge of providing venues to all who wished to lend their assistance to the nationalist troops. Their activities ranged from distributing leaflets and other propagandistic materials, to attending to the prisoners, caring for the children, looking after the sick and the wounded, facilitating blood donations, organizing training centers for the nurses, founding orphanages, setting up diners and sewing workshops, making clothes, sending women as laundresses to the front, embroidering the Falangist insignia, and writing letters to unknown soldiers as expressions of moral support.