Irene Lewy Rodríguez

Irene Falcón Rodríguez
Irene Falcón flanked by Vicente Uribe and Planelles at a PCE meeting in Moscow, 1940
Born	Irene Lewy Rodríguez 1908 Madrid, Spain
Died	19 August 1999 El Espinar, Segovia, Spain
Nationality	Spanish
Occupation	Journalist

Irene Falcón Rodríguez (1908 – 19 August 1999) was a Spanish journalist, feminist, pacifist and Communist activist. For many years she was the assistant of Dolores Ibárruri, leader of the Spanish Communist Party, and she is best known for this role. After the Spanish Civil War she was forced into exile in Moscow and Beijing. She returned to Spain after the return to democracy in 1977.

Irene Lewy Rodríguez was born in Madrid in 1908, the second of three sisters. Her father was Siegried Levy Herzberg, a middle-class Polish Jew. Her father died when she was five, and to survive her mother rented rooms in their house in the Calle de Trafalgar. Irene was educated at the German College and learned four languages. She obtained a position as a librarian for Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934). He was a biologist who won the Nobel Prize.

In 1922 Irene Lewy met the Peruvian journalist César Falcón (1892–1970), and fell in love. Two years later the newspaper El Sol asked Falcón to move to London as a correspondent. They married, and Irene accompanied him. She was contracted as correspondent by the daily La Voz (The Voice), a Spanish newspaper. Their son Mayo was born in London in May 1926 but was not registered at the Spanish consulate due to concerns with the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera.

Irene and César returned to Spain after Primo de Rivera fell in 1930. The Falcóns published Historia Nueva (New History) and launched the party Izquierda Revolucionaria y Antiimperialista (IRYA: Anti-Imperialist Revolutionary Left). Irene founded the feminist organization Mujeres Antifascistas (Anti-Fascist Women). She edited a collection of books by women, the best feminist literature of the time, including work by Doris Langley Moore, Vera Inber and Dora Russell, wife of Bertrand Russell, whom Irene had met in London. Irene wrote in the preface to Dora Russell's Hypatia,

Female emancipation must bring peace to the people, must avoid by all means a repetition of the horrors of war, where their children, subjects of civilized nations, kill and are killed for no reason, bound by a false patriotism because true patriotism is the love of humanity. If mothers, wives know how to explain this to his men with intelligence, they will manage to overcome the pull of the trumpets and drums and all the decorative deception of militarism.