The female vote in Argentina: four women and a 40-year struggle

There are elections that went down in history and others that, equally important, were forgotten.

The objective of these lines is not to analyze the causes that led to hide some milestones of Argentine politics to highlight others;

the purpose is to bring to light some protagonists who brought us here.

In the electoral history that we are going to tell today,

.

First thing's first

The demand for women's right to vote in our country was not born in the middle of the twentieth century as an extemporaneous event isolated from the international context, nor is it reduced to a name of its own.

The suffrage movements date back to the mid-nineteenth century when in different parts of the world some more or less organized women began to fight for equal rights.

Among others -social, civil and religious-, the right to vote and be elected.

In Argentina, a country that was still arming itself, the first actions in this regard took a little longer, towards the end of the century, and were

.

Then the first names that must be followed to tell this story did appear, a journey of years that goes beyond party politics.

Cecilia Grierson

was born in 1859 into a family of Scottish immigrants.

She was a teacher, one of the few professions reserved for women, and with that she helped pay for the domestic economy.

But Cecilia wanted to be a doctor and she became

.

She practiced as an obstetrician, wrote, taught, founded schools, and became involved in feminist struggles because every step she tried was met with resistance: a woman was not expected to study medicine, she could not become a surgeon, she was not allowed to teach. in college.

Cecilia Grierson was the first doctor to graduate in Argentina.

She was received on July 2, 1889 at the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires.

Her study on the Civil Code allowed a change in the Law on the Civil Capacity of Women who until then was treated little more than as a girl, she was in the foundation of the National Council of Women and presided over the First International Feminist Congress that

held in Buenos Aires in 1910.

There were many who motorized and found themselves in that congress.

Many for the time.

Work by women from around the world was presented and

.

Everything was incipient but the horizon was clear.

Some relied on gradualism, others jumped headlong into action.

One of them, also a doctor, starred in one of the great moments in our political history.

She was born in Italy in 1873 as Giulia Maddalena Angela Lanteri, she arrived in Argentina, she became a national and here she was called

.

She soon came across women with concerns similar to hers, they founded the

and, with the Uruguayan journalist María Abella, they created the magazine "La Nueva Mujer".

Definitely, other times were being lived for those who were not satisfied with a domestic destination.

The Sáenz Peña Law on the secret, universal and obligatory vote had not yet been promulgated when, in the 1911 Buenos Aires councilor election, Julieta decided to go vote.

She had warned that she met the requirements: she was an Argentine citizen and of legal age.

The call did not say anything about the sex of the voters and she went to register for it.

.

Julieta's request ended up in court and the judge, in her opinion, could only agree with her.

"As a judge, I have the duty to declare that their right to citizenship is enshrined in the Constitution and, consequently, that women enjoy, in principle, the same political rights as the laws, which regulate their exercise, accord to male citizens, with the only restrictions that are expressly determined by said laws, because no inhabitant is deprived of what they do not prohibit.

Julieta Lanteri was the first woman to vote in Argentina.

It happened in 1911

On the day of the vote, the newspapers recorded the news of a woman -in a white dress and hat- appearing before the polling station authorities to exercise her legitimate right as an Argentine citizen to elect her representatives.

They also pointed out that she did not belong to any political movement without realizing that the feminist groups in which she participated were that.

So that no one else would think of doing the same, a decree promulgated that, from then on, registration would be based on the military service record and this was established in the Saénz Peña law of 1912. Julieta had another idea.

.

The response was an argumentative loop: the right to vote was only for those registered, in order to register, you had to complete your military service and to bear arms you had to be a man.

the drill

Elvira Rawson was also a doctor.

She was born in 1867 in Junín, she was a teacher and used her income to pay for her medical studies in Buenos Aires.

During the Park Revolution of 1890, she and her companions set up a field hospital to care for the wounded and soon after she was already a radical militant.

Elvira Rawson was a teacher and used her income to pay for her medical studies.

In 1905 she founded, with a group of colleagues, the

and participated in the

that organized the international congress that was held in Buenos Aires in 1910. Unlike other co-religionists who circumscribed her work for the political rights of women to the party sphere, Elvira's struggle led her to cross paths and work together with a socialist militant who was causing a stir.

Alicia Moreau de Justo

was first a feminist.

She was born in London in 1885, in exile, after the defeat of the Paris Commune in which her father actively participated and shortly after the family landed in Buenos Aires.

At the age of twenty, she was at the

and that confirmed some convictions that she already had about her: she wanted to think for herself even if that was not what was expected of a woman.

While she was studying at the university - she was also a doctor - she got closer to different labor associations and socialist leaders with whom she began her party militancy.

She traveled to the United States, she got in touch with the suffragettes and when she returned she founded the

in which different associations that had been operating separately converged.

There they met women from different fields and backgrounds.

Among many others, there were the writers Julia García Games, Emma Day and Alfonsina Storni, the journalist Adela García Salaberry, the dentist Sara Justo, the doctors Petrona Eyle and Ángela Costa, the educator Raquel Camaña and the first engineer in the country and South America Elisa Bachofen. .

They soon joined the committee chaired by Elvira Rawson and began to work together, even supporting a candidacy outside their parties.

1919 was a busy year for the Argentine suffragettes and the elections brought an old acquaintance.

Julieta Lanteri used the generic masculine of our language to argue in front of the electoral board:

They found no fissures in their argument and Julieta launched herself as a candidate for National Deputy with the support of others who were fighting for the same thing (civil equality before the law for children out of wedlock, mixed education, women's suffrage, abolition of prostitution, equality remuneration between men and women for the same work) regardless of their party affiliations.

With the Constitution in hand,

.

Her brochures with her name flooded the streets of Buenos Aires and her slogan was replicated:

. "

Election day arrived and only men were able to vote, 1,730 of them did so for a woman.

She was not enough to get a bench but to confirm the path to follow.

The feminists organized themselves for an unprecedented experience: an election test.

From the pages of the magazine Nuestra Causa, Alicia Moreau called on women to participate in a historic day:

The women of the time did not even believe that politics was something for them, much less a right.

However,

.

The candidates were Alicia Moreau for the Socialist Party, Elvira Rawson for a sector of the Radical Civic Union and Julieta Lanteri for the National Feminist Party.

That was much more than a simulation, it had repercussions throughout the country, it was observed from different parts of the world and replicated by other feminist groups.

At the institutional level, in parallel, the representatives of the people found themselves obliged to discuss the issue when the radical deputy for Santa Fe Rogelio Araya presented for the first time in the Chamber of Deputies of the Nation a project on women's political

.

Meanwhile in San Juan

In February 1927, the country's newspapers reported, in a small box, a novelty:

. "

Indeed, Governor

–originally a socialist militant and later founder, together with his brother Federico, of the Bloquita Radical Civic Union–

and, among other modifications, included the vote for resident women older than age.

The election was held on April 8, 1928. For the first time in the country, women -only those from San Juan- exercised the right to elect and be elected.

.

For a woman to reach provincial positions it took a decade.

Emar Acosta

grew with the century.

She was a girl when Alicia Moreau, Elvira Rawson, Julieta Lanteri and others got together to discuss free thought in 1906 and soon after at a feminist conference.

All this happened in Buenos Aires, far from her birthplace: La Rioja.

Her first concerns appeared when she went to study law in the Capital.

With her newly obtained title, she settled in San Juan and Governor Cantoni appointed her Defender of Minors and later in the Judiciary;

.

As a civil servant, she took care of the rights of women and children, defended secular education and divorce.

She later left the government due to political differences, she continued working as a teacher, founded the

and finally ran as a candidate for provincial deputy for the National Democratic Party.

On August 19, 1934, the New York Times, on its cover, showed an oval photo with a young woman with hair at the nape of the neck as was the case at that time and a half smile looking at the camera.

Next door, the news that she went around the world: The first woman legislator in Argentina.

Some media pointed out that Emar Acosta was not only a pioneer in Argentina but in all of Latin America and others reviewed her work for women's rights from a paradoxically conservative militancy.

Women's suffrage in Argentina 1951. November 11, 1951 was the first time that women voted in Argentina.

/AGN

Emar was re-elected in 1941 and remained a deputy until her mandate was interrupted by the June 1943 coup, she ran as a candidate again in 1951 and was defeated by Peronism in the first national elections in which men and women voted

.

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