Teresa Andrade

Teresa Andrade, known at birth as María Teresa García Banús (Valencia, 1895 - Madrid, 19 November 1989), was a communist activist, translator and publisher, married to the communist activist Juan Andrade, from whom she took her surname. She was the granddaughter of the Valencian photographer Antonio García Peris and, therefore, the niece of the painter Joaquín Sorolla.

Biography In 1899, when she was still a child, the family moved to Madrid. At the suggestion of Luis Simarro, a family friend, she studied at the Instituto Internacional. Years later, she won a scholarship to the United States as a Spanish language assistant at Vassar College. Around 1918 she studied philosophy and literature in Madrid, and her feminist concerns began with her membership of a women's students' association and her approach to political activism, as she recounts in her memoirs.

In 1924 Teresa met Juan Andrade, an activist who had served on the First Committee of the Spanish Communist Party in 1920, with whom she began to collaborate, translating and writing political articles. They got married in March 1929. Although the POUM never had its own women's organisation, Teresa herself and many other militants, including Olga Tareeva, Louise Gómez, Luisa Ariño, Pilar Romeu, María Manonelles, Elisa Masso, Pilar Santiago and Luisa Carbonell, worked within the Women's Secretariat and worked tirelessly to emancipate women. Among their initiatives were a section for nurses, an educational section with language and general cultural courses, and the most successful, a sewing workshop run by Toska, a militant Trotskyist seamstress in exile. In the 1960s, and in the 1970s was involved in a number of political and social movements.

In 1978 she returned from exile with her husband and settled in Madrid. She published several books with texts by Juan Andrade and left some autobiographical stories unfinished during the last years of her life.