Calle de Mercedes Fórmica

Before bearing a lawyer’s name, this street in the Fuente del Berro neighbourhood honoured a politician. It opened in 1926 as Calle de Eduardo Aunós, a minister under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and, years later, under Franco. On 4 May 2017 Madrid’s City Council renamed it Calle de Mercedes Fórmica, in a batch of changes driven by the Memory Commission. Fórmica joined the Madrid Bar in 1950 as the third woman registered as a lawyer there and opened a practice devoted to Family Law. From there she fought a battle that left its mark on Spanish law: her article “El domicilio conyugal”, published in ABC in 1953 after three months held by the censors, and then her novel A instancia de parte pressed the regime until it yielded the 1958 law that abolished the so-called “deposit of the wife” and cut back the powers the law reserved for the husband. Her Falangist past weighed on her memory: in 2015 the Cádiz City Council removed her bust from the Plaza del Palillero.