At dawn one summer morning, Aurora Rodriguez slipped into the bedroom of her 18-year-old daughter Hildegart, standing over her and holding the revolver she kept to protect against predatory men. Slowly and with careful precision, she shot the sleeping girl three times in the head and once in the heart. She then left the house, went to a lawyer’s nearby house and woke him up to confess to the murder.
Killing her child was a loving mother’s last desperate resort, she said, claiming it was the only means of preventing Hildegart from being kidnapped by writer HG Wells – who she was convinced was working for British intelligence.
After giving birth to the girl, conceived by a sperm donor with the eugenic goal of creating a superhuman “model woman of the future,” Aurora believed she had the right to take the life she had so carefully designed.
Her daughter was indeed a child prodigy, authoring two books as a teenager, earning an international reputation as a women’s rights and sexual freedom activist. But that wasn’t enough for her mother, who was a Dr. Frankenstein character and was disappointed at not having created the “perfect child”.
Little is known in Britain about the terrifying theory of eugenics that was fashionable among writers and thinkers of the early 20th century, according to which ‘good breeding’ could eradicate undesirable traits. In Spain, however, where Hildegart is known as the Red Maiden, she has been legendary for 90 years. Now her life will be introduced to a much wider audience as she will be the subject of an Amazon TV drama starring Najwa Nimri and Alba Planas.
In Spain, Hildegart Rodríguez (pictured) is known as the Red Maiden. At the age of 18, she was shot three times in the head and once in the heart
Aurora Rodriguez was born in Madrid in 1879, the daughter of a prominent Liberal politician and Freemason. At the age of 16, her older sister gave birth to a son, Pepito, who soon showed an aptitude for music. At her father’s urging, Aurora took over the child’s education, teaching him piano practice for hours every day.
This went on for three years until her sister got her little boy back. Aurora was furious and accused her family of taking advantage of the boy’s genius.
Since she was denied this human project, she decided to tackle her own project. She had no intention of getting married: the thought of sex repelled her. As a feminist and socialist, she also viewed sex as a ploy to enslave women and degrade them to the level of breeding animals. But by the time she was 30, she decided she was ready to endure intercourse until she got pregnant.
She needed a partner who met her criteria of education and social standing, who would agree to a physical relationship without emotional attachment, and who could be trusted to never claim paternity rights as a birth father.
Eventually she settled on a military priest, Albert Pallas Montseny. As soon as she was certain that she was expecting a child, she broke off all contact with Pallas.
For nine months, she followed a strict regime designed to ensure fetal health, bathing twice a day and waking up every hour throughout the night to undergo a pseudoscientific ritual of changing positions.
On December 9, 1914, Aurora gave birth to a daughter and named her Hildegart. Claiming the name means “garden of wisdom,” she began schooling the baby. Her goal, she later explained, was “to form the most perfect woman, who was the standard of humanity and the final Redeemer.” Hildegart once explained to the English sexologist Havelock Ellis: “I was a eugenic child.”
Eugenics was a term coined by researcher and anthropologist Francis Galton, a cousin of evolutionist Charles Darwin. He developed a twisted theory of natural selection for humans.
Najwa Nimri (left) and Alba Planas play Aurora and Hildegart in the new Amazon drama
Galton classified people by class and race and taught that the so-called lower classes “must be subjected to severe selection.” Only the finest few specimens of this breed can be allowed to become parents, and not many of their offspring can be allowed to survive. When a higher race takes the place of the lower, all this terrible misery disappears.
His views were not only adopted by the Nazis, but also by many suffragettes interested in making birth control and abortion legal and easily accessible.
Marie Stopes, now considered a pioneer in family planning, was an avid eugenicist. She believed that interracial marriage should be outlawed and called for the sterilization of “hopelessly depraved and racially ill people”.
Her views are now considered so repulsive that in 2020 the charity Marie Stopes International hid her name behind an acronym and became MSI Reproductive Choices.
When Hildegart was 11 months old, she knew her alphabet and could recognize letters on wooden blocks. She was reading by the age of two, could hold a pen and write a letter by the age of three, and by the age of four she could type and play the piano.
At the age of ten she spoke German, French, English, Italian, Portuguese and Latin in addition to Spanish. At the age of 13 she began her studies. Aurora also taught her about reproduction, although sex education was taboo in Spain at the time.
“I remember,” wrote Hildegart, “when I was about three years old, I found out that the rose was hermaphrodite.” One of our maids was called Rosa at the time, and on the same day I ran to her and said: “Rosa, you are a hermaphrodite!”
“She asked what that was, and when I explained quite frankly that it meant being a man and a woman at the same time, as you can imagine, there was a scene.”
Tragic story: Aurora Rodriguez said killing her child was the only way to prevent Hildegart from being kidnapped by writer HG Wells (pictured)
Although she was taught sex, there was no affection in her upbringing. Aurora was proud that Hildegart had no friends her age and no other adult played a significant role in her childhood. She was almost never hugged.
At age eleven, Hildegart Rodriguez was a pioneer in the feminist cause of sexual liberation.
She lectured to packed audiences, preaching that women would never be free until they could indulge in sex outside of marriage like men, without fear of pregnancy. Before she was 16, she published two books, Sex And Love and The Sexual Rebellion Of Youth, and three pamphlets on the subject while attending law school.
Such views were outrageous in Catholic Spain, but Hildegart was able to voice them because she was so obviously innocent.
At the same time she became a fervent socialist. This combination earned her the nickname “Red Virgin”. In 1930 she wrote to Havelock Ellis. His books on sexual psychology were so controversial that they were not allowed to be printed or sold in Britain. Most notorious was “Sexual Inversion” – a sympathetic study of male homosexuality in the workplace.
Another, Autoeroticism, dealt with masturbation, and a third, Women’s Erotic Rights, argued that men did not have a monopoly on sexual pleasure. Havelock Ellis, then 71, was fascinated by Hildegart, all the more so because he approved of her left-wing politics. He attended her lecture and reported that she received a standing ovation for five minutes.
She also reached out to Dorothy Sanger, America’s leading contraceptive advocate, for help in obtaining educational materials and contraceptives.
“My mother has read your book My Birth Control Fight many times,” she wrote, “and asks me to convey her warmest regards.”
At her trial, Aurora tried to justify the murder, saying, “The sculptor destroyed it after discovering the slightest imperfection in his work.”
Maintaining control of her precocious daughter, Aurora joined her on stage and insisted that they both dress in head-to-toe black to deter lecherous men. But she couldn’t promote Hildegart as a public icon and keep her away from potential suitors. One of them was the Catalan lawyer Antonio Villena. Another was the socialist writer Abel Velilla, whose attentiveness so alarmed Aurora that she ordered him to keep his distance.
In 1932, when Hildegart was 17, Spain had deposed its king and become a republic. A fascist opposition formed and the nationalist General Francisco Franco gained influence.
At the same time, Hildegart began forming her own opinions instead of reciting the opinions her mother had taught her. She expressed doubts about communism and wrote a pamphlet entitled Was Marx Wrong?, which led to death threats from left-wing extremists.
The final crisis came when Havelock introduced Ellis Hildegart to the writer HG Wells, whose prophetic writings (including The War of the Worlds) exhorted mankind to do better. The couple exchanged letters and the then 66-year-old staunch socialist invited the teenager to travel to England to work with him. But as a shameless womanizer, it’s unlikely that his interest in her was purely political.
Hildegart refused, but her mother was convinced that the two Englishmen would take her daughter away. She suspected them of being British secret agents – a ridiculous accusation, but no crazier than many of Aurora’s other ideas.
In May 1933 she locked Hildegart in the house and even cut off the connection to the telephone.
She was also shaken by the discovery that Pallas was far from the genetically pure father she believed was an incestuous rapist who sexually assaulted his own niece.
By the insane logic of eugenics, Aurora hadn’t created the “perfect girl,” but a monster that had to die.
At her trial, Aurora tried to justify the murder, saying, “The sculptor destroys it after discovering the slightest imperfection in his work.”
Havelock Ellis was appalled by the murder. He called her Saint Hildegart and “a miracle”.
“The murder of Hildegart was like an earthquake,” said Julian Vadillo, professor of contemporary history at Carlos III University in Madrid. “Her death marked the end of one of the greatest hopes of Spanish feminism.”
Aurora was sentenced to 26 years in prison. At first she tried to continue her socialist mission by campaigning for the formation of a prisoner’s union. But her delusions consumed her. During the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and transferred to the nun-run Ciempozuelos Psychiatric Hospital in Madrid.
In 1948, at the age of 69, she wrote to the Mother Superior asking for parole: “I’ve been here 15 years. “I’m old and rarely have visitors.” She was denied clemency and died of cancer seven years later.
In order to keep herself busy in the institution, she made rag dolls. The nuns did not allow her to keep them.