Today is International Women’s Day so this column is perforce dedicated to what not so long ago was called the weaker sex. Not that they ever were – Going as far back as the Middle Ages, we see such important countries as the Anglo-French Angevin Empire or France itself dominated for decades by such powerful personalities as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Blanche of Castille. And for each of such forceful women there were hundreds or thousands of examples of soft power – thus the 11th century queen Saint Margaret of Scotland was never anything but a wife and mother but had an enormous influence on her husband and sons (a kind of Lady Macbeth in reverse). When confronted with the choice of right class/family/wrong gender or wrong class/family/right gender, traditional societies picked the former time and again – we can see this syndrome at play far more recently in South Asia with the careers of Indira Gandhi or Sri Lanka’s Sirimavo Bandanaraike.
But enough of such ramblings – time to give this column some focus, limiting its time frame to the years since the first International Women’s Day (whenever that was) and concentrating on Argentina. The enshrinement of March 8 has been variously attributed to the Socialist Party in the United States in 1908, an ukaz of Vladimir Lenin in 1922 and its declaration by the United Nations in 1975, while there is an insistent myth that it commemorates a horrendous sweatshop firetrap in New York City claiming the lives of almost 150 female garment workers but that was actually March 25, 1911.
So let us limit scrutiny to since 1908 and out of the vast panoply of female rights, let us start with the most basic to any democracy – the right to vote. Back in 1908 women could only vote at all levels in New Zealand (since 1893), Australia and Finland (then part of the Russian Empire so only when the czar condescended to hold Duma elections) while various parts of the English-speaking world, Denmark and Siam permitted female suffrage in local elections. Curiously enough, Argentina housed one of the earliest pioneers – way back in 1862 the San Juan provincial governor, none other than Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, extended the vote to literate women in local elections in his province (a tradition revived in 1928 by the Bloquistas).
But in both Britain and the United States the suffragette movements (founded a couple of decades previously) had become virulent from the start of the century, gaining women the right to vote within a decade or so of 1908 and setting the pace for the rest of the world. But the achievement was not entirely linear, carrying its complexities. US feminists had their priorities – the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote duly arrived in 1920 but taking second place to the prohibitionist 18th Amendment of 1919, almost entirely the work of female pressure since wives gave more importance to putting the lid on drunken husbands every night than being able to cast a ballot every couple of years.
In Britain depending on an all-male parliament to grant female suffrage was difficult enough but the problem was that all men across the political spectrum had reasons to be opposed – while conservatives were naturally against, the more liberal and less prejudiced had to bear in mind that they were committing political suicide, condemning Britain to a generation of Conservative rule due to the housewife vote (which is more or less what happened). This factor was only enhanced by the Representation of the People Act in 1918 setting an age floor of 30 for women with the “flapper vote” (females in the 21-30 age group) only allowed in 1928.
Female suffrage arrived in Argentina in 1947 with Law 13,010, more commonly known as the “Ley Evita” after Eva Perón who announced it in person, with women voting for the first time in the 1951 elections. Space does not permit a comparison with all the world’s 200-odd countries so let us see the standing within two smaller groups also including Argentina – the G20 and the South American republics. Within the G20 only South Korea (1948), Mexico (1953), Indonesia (1955) and Saudi Arabia (2015) are predated by Argentina, which fares rather better within this region with only Brazil (1932), Uruguay and Venezuela preceding Evita.
Much like labour rights, female suffrage was granted from above by Peronism as much as being the fruit of a long mass struggle with only a few enlightened but isolated voices, like the pioneering doctor Cecilia Grierson and the centenarian socialist Alicia Moreau de Justo (1885-1986) advocating the cause. The female suffrage bills presented by the socialist deputies Alfredo Palacios (the great-granduncle of Paraguayan President Santiago Peña, curiously enough) and Mario Bravo in 1911 and 1929 respectively point to a sporadic rather than sustained drive.
The right of women to vote is one thing and the right to run for office another. There is an interesting story here about the loophole exploited by Julieta Lanteri in 1919 – when armour-plating the law against women voting, men forgot to prevent them running for office so without being able to vote, Lanteri was able to run for Congress for the Unión Feminista Nacional, garnering 1,730 votes (all of them male, of course). In 1932, Lanteri was run over by the far-right militant David Klappenbach with her death officially ruled an accident but the sluggish pace of cars back then suggests otherwise.
Nowadays gender parity for all parliamentary candidacies has been the law since 2016 (not installed by Peronism like the female vote but by the Mauricio Macri administration). Progress, it goes without saying, but not linear – this law is all too often heeded in letter rather than spirit by filling the quotas with the wives and sisters of local strongmen, the distaff side of dynasty, rather than women on their own merits. And while the latter are also to be found, it cannot be said that politicians have gained in prestige in the public eye during the nine years the law has been in force even if the reasons for discredit lie elsewhere.
Neither space nor time permit an analysis of the huge question of how gender figures in voting patterns except to say that it is well worth exploring – perhaps later this year as election day draws closer.
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