Trinidad Arroyo, the woman who voted 17 years before the others

The image must have been shocking at the time, and not because of the crude addition of a man with a mustache.

The photograph, published in the

newspaper on April 24, 1916, showed a single woman, Trinidad Arroyo, bringing her vote closer to a ballot box, surrounded by twenty men in ties.

A few days later, the popular magazine

published that Arroyo was the first woman to vote in a general election in Spain.

The rest could not vote until almost two decades later, in 1933, after the approval of women's suffrage in Spain.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of that pioneer, with a life as amazing as it is forgotten.

Trinidad Arroyo was born in Palencia in 1872, fought at just 16 years of age to be admitted to the Valladolid Faculty of Medicine —where she was the only student— and became the first ophthalmologist in Spain.

She and her husband, Manuel Márquez, established a successful clinic in Madrid, which was attended by celebrities of the time, such as the writer Benito Pérez Galdós, who in 1912 underwent surgery there for the cataracts that were leaving him blind.

The republican newspaper

he celebrated the result of that intervention in this way: “You see the Spanish writer who has seen more, who has seen better, who has penetrated deeper, deeper, into the soul of men and things.

[...] This famous marriage in science, and to whom Spanish letters owe gratitude, has saved Galdós from blindness, and has saved Spain from losing the Galdosian fruits”.

Arroyo herself referred to the delicate operations on her eyes as “lady surgery”.

The doctor and journalist Juan Fernán Pérez interviewed the ophthalmologist in the magazine

, in the summer of 1912. "I naively confess the gross error in which I was judging the medical profession and the work of her sex incompatible in women," he began. the reporter.

“The net curtains, the transparent ones, the velvet curtains that are in her house, everything is cut, sewn and embroidered by her,” added the journalist, surprised because Trinidad Arroyo rode a horse, knew French and German and played Mozart pieces at the same time. piano, in addition to cooking when his cook was absent.

The interview was illustrated with a photograph of the ophthalmologist having a consultation, but also with another image in which she appeared with the sewing machine.

Photographs by Trinidad Arroyo for the magazine 'España Médica', in 1912.

That year of 1912, a sector of the British suffragettes had already decided to resort to violence to demand the vote of women: they sent explosive letters to politicians, planted bombs and burned churches, but they did not manage to vote until 1918. In Spain they did not the anger was contagious.

Arroyo was able to vote before the others because some senators were elected by the universities and, in 1916, she was an assistant professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the Central University of Madrid.

Was Trinidad Arroyo really the first woman to vote in Spain?

A new book,

(Next Door Publishers), now rescues from oblivion the biographies of a dozen pioneers of science, including the first ophthalmologist.

"Trinidad Arroyo became in 1916 the first woman who could vote in the elections to the Senate," says the neuroscientist María José Barral in the book.

The head of the Archives of the Congress of Deputies, Maruca Martinez-Cañavate, is not so clear.

"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack," she warns.

The archivist recalls that some senators were elected by a multitude of corporations, from archbishoprics to universities, including royal academies and economic societies.

It would be necessary to investigate whether there were any women in each of these institutions and review the shift files, if they still exist, in search of the tally sheets, to find out if they voted in any elections.

The record of the Trinidad Arroyo vote in 1916 at the Central University (today Complutense) does not appear in the historical archive of the Madrid institution, according to its manager, Ana Rocasolano.

The first Spanish woman to vote, according to the magazine 'Mundo Grafico' of May 3, 1916.

The Senate last year proposed another solution to the puzzle of the first voter.

On May 12, 2021, it was a century since the death of the Galician writer Emilia Pardo Bazán.

On the occasion of the anniversary, the Senate issued an institutional declaration: “In 1912 [Pardo Bazán] was elected the first female member of the Real Sociedad Económica Matritense de Amigos del País, which allowed her to vote for senators for the quota of economic societies and became the first woman to vote in Spain in political elections in the General Elections to Cortes of 1916. The rest of the women had to wait until the elections of 1933″.

The historian Isabel Burdiel, biographer of Emilia Pardo Bazán, acknowledges that she had never heard that the Galician writer was the first woman to vote in Spain.

Her monumental biography (Taurus, 2019) does not even mention those supposedly historic elections of 1916.

In the newspaper library of the National Library, however, a couple of brief news items do appear in the press of the time, such as the newspaper

of March 25, 1916, which briefly mentioned the voting in the Matritense.

"The election had the interest of being the first in our country in which a woman exercises electoral rights: the illustrious Countess of Pardo Bazán."

At that time, the voters voted for some delegates, who then met to vote for the senators, according to Burdiel, professor of Contemporary History at the University of Valencia.

It was an indirect vote.

“Pardo Bazán never mentioned it as a conquest.

And he mentioned everything ”, emphasizes the historian.

The electoral records that are preserved in the Senate Archives —brief certificates of the decision of the delegates— do not clarify the mystery either.

“The names of the voters do not appear in the documents, so we cannot know if Mrs. Pardo Bazán and Mrs. Arroyo participated in the elections or when,” acknowledges a spokesman for the Senate Archive.

The solution could lie in the labyrinthine files of the corporations that appointed senators.

List of members of Matritense with the right to vote in 1916, in which Emilia Pardo Bazán and 200 men appear. RSEMAP

To find a clue, you have to go through one of the oldest gates in Madrid, the one that gives access to the Torre de los Lujanes, a 15th-century building in the Plaza de la Villa.

Inside it is the Matritense, an economic society founded by King Carlos III.

The person in charge of her file since 1999, Fabiola Azanza, also acknowledges that she was unaware of Pardo Bazán's supposed vote and stresses that no one has ever asked her about it.

Her institution guards more than 10,000 documents written since 1775, the year of creation of the Matritense.

This Thursday, at the request of this newspaper, Azanza searched for hours and found the complete file of the 1916 vote. Pardo Bazán actually voted on March 23.

The Galician novelist and 200 men appear on the "List of Members" with the right to vote that day, including the writer Jacinto Benavente, who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature six years later, and the student Juan de la Cierva, who Later he would invent the autogyro.

In 1921, Judge Manuel Sanmartín Puente analyzed the possibility of women's suffrage in a reference work,

.

The author recalled that, on June 27, 1907, laughter was heard in Congress when the federal republican deputy Joaquín Salvatella mentioned that in some countries there were already women parliamentarians.

“I feel that the first time this is said in the Spanish Parliament, it does not deserve to be answered except with laughter,” Salvatella lamented, before proposing that, at least, widowed women have the right to vote.

The 1921 treaty stated that Spanish law excluded “females from the exercise of electoral rights at all”, but noted an exception in a footnote: Trinidad Arroyo, “the first Spanish woman to have exercised such a right” .

Trinidad Arroyo was one of the first Medicine graduates in Spain. Royal Academy of History

The photograph of the ophthalmologist voting is dated March 31, 1916 in the

archive , although it could be earlier.

For the neuroscientist María José Barral, there is a technical tie: “Personally, I think that Arroyo and Pardo Bazán voted at the same time, since it was in the same elections.

The two were the

, if that word is the one that matters.

Of course, 17 years before the rest of the women in this country”, explains Barral to this newspaper after learning of the existence of the Galician writer's forgotten vote.

The jurist Paloma Durán, author of the book

(Assembly of Madrid, 2007), is forceful.

In her opinion, it is not known with certainty who was the first woman to put her vote in a ballot box in a general election.

“In Spain, historical research is needed.

And not only about the women who worked in the experimental sciences, but also about those who dedicated themselves to the social sciences”, laments Durán, professor of Philosophy of Law at the Jaime I University, in Castellón de la Plana.

The deputies of the Second Republic debated on October 1, 1931 if they finally approved the female vote.

A sector of the Republicans defended then that it was not the time to grant the vote to Spanish women, because supposedly they were manipulated by their priests and would vote for the Catholic and monarchist right.

But Trinidad Arroyo was not exactly a pious conservative, as Cristina Márquez Arroyo, granddaughter of a cousin of the ophthalmologist, emphasizes.

“Trini was a communist.

I think that is why she is not well known in Spain, ”she reflects on the phone from her home in New York.

Trinidad Arroyo entry form in Mexico as a political asylum seeker, in 1939. PARES

Arroyo was vice-president of the National Committee of Anti-Fascist Women and in 1937, together with her husband, founded the Spanish Association for Cultural Relations with the USSR.

In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, both traveled to Stalin's Moscow to celebrate Labor Day.

And both fled from Spain before the advance of Franco's troops.

The granddaughter of Arroyo's cousin recalls that her new home, in Mexico City, became a meeting point for exiled intellectuals, such as the poet León Felipe and the writer Max Aub.

Trinidad Arroyo died in the Mexican capital in 1959, at the age of 87, without children.

The ophthalmologist did not forget the country from which she was expelled.

She left her assets to the Jorge Manrique Secondary Education Institute in Palencia, where she had studied, with the mandate to finance scholarships for poor students, with the possibility of also paying for their Medicine degree.

The inheritance included shares, a house in Palencia and some 11,000 square meters of land in Madrid, in the Puerta de Hierro area, according to Isidro Prieto, a retired Latin teacher from the institute and former secretary of the foundation created to manage the scholarships.

The land was sold in the eighties for about 300 million pesetas.

According to Prieto's accounts, some 150 young people have studied Medicine thanks to the legacy of Trinidad Arroyo.

Most women.

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