This article narrates the educational interventions of a woman teacher activist, Francesca Wilson, with displaced children and refugees in Southern Spain during the Spanish Civil War. In so doing it seeks to contribute to addressing the silences that surround the involvement of women educator-activists in the Spanish Civil War and in international humanitarian activism. Drawing on autobiographical texts and archival resources the paper then explores issues of authorial voice and individual motivation as they are reflected in this episode in her life history. (Contains 70 footnotes.)