A few weeks ago, the Mexican government recognized the day 68 years ago when women were permitted to emit a vote in a federal election for the first time.
July 3, 1955 was the culmination of a struggle that, according Mexican government archives, began more than 130 years earlier shortly after the dawn of the republic, when a group of women in Zacatecas asked the new government if they might be considered “citizens” and be allowed to vote in forthcoming elections. Their request was denied.
Scant progress for women’s rights was made over the next tumultuous 50 years, although the seeds of feminist movement had started to emerge by the latter years of the 19th century.
In 1887, the publication of the magazine “Violetas del Anahuac,” founded and edited by Laureana Wright de Kleinhans, began to highlight the issue of suffrage. The aim of the journal, whose articles were written exclusively by women, was to promote female education and assert that women and men were intellectually equal. Women’s suffrage was one of their chief demands.
The cause was taken up by Elvia Carrillo Puerto, who emerged from the ranks of the Yucatán feminist society La Siempreviva, an institution founded by the teacher and poet Rita Cetina Gutiérrez that opened Mexico’s first secular school for poor girls, as well as an art college for young women.
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