Breathe
By Flor Aydeé Rodríguez Campos
We are in a historic moment because 74 governors had to pass in our country for a woman to occupy the position of President of the Republic by popular election. It is historic from the fact of being able to name her President, yes in feminine, it is a way of recognizing ourselves because as we have learned "what is not named does not exist" and naming her President is to make visible the struggle of many women throughout the history of Mexico. From those who had to defy social norms to be considered in social struggles and revolutions to those who made it possible for us to vote and be voted for today, to those who faced the inequality of a system and aspired to this position. All these women have done it with the rules that historically have been written by men and for men.
Everything we have managed to advance in order to be able to exercise our rights freely and autonomously has been as a collective and breaking with the idea that women should be relegated to private spaces where we even learned that as our grandmothers used to say "dirty clothes are washed at home" and it is this same culture that built a specific role for women in society, that is, it stipulates how we are expected to act, talk, dress, groom ourselves and behave according to the sex we were assigned at birth. We have since taken these rules as a mandate.
We continue to play the role of caregivers, a secondary and always domestic role, assuming that "it is what we get" and given the circumstances the construction of public space has been entirely in charge of men, therefore these rules obey their needs and not ours, which is why the struggle to change the role of women in society has been constant. We must recognize that the struggle to change the rules has been driven, in large part, by the feminist movement, when women without knowing that feminism would become a political and social movement, came and snatched those spaces that for centuries had been denied to us. However, we continue to hear that we are not sufficiently prepared to occupy a place in public life, in those places where decisions are made.
It may seem absurd, but it is real, doesn't it seem unfair to demand so much from us when for many years we were denied access to education, to vote, to be considered people and to decide where we wanted to be? The most convenient thing has always been to infer that women are a problem because we do not know how to live together, because as the saying goes "the worst enemy of a woman is another woman", because we are irrational and merely emotional, the weaker sex.
Not only because of these arguments or positions, but also because of a whole social construction and a system, we women are occupying managerial and representative positions in politics as Deputies, Senators, Mayors, Councilwomen, Municipal Presidents and as professionals in careers that were thought to be only for men. We have become decision-makers and a great social force to generate political changes because, let us not forget that we are women who represent more than 50 percent of the population and of the electoral roll. Let us be aware of our strength and how powerful is the union among us, it is not utopia, we can change the world, this was demonstrated during the COVID 19 pandemic when the countries that were governed by women faced this circumstance in a better way than those that were governed by men.
Having a woman President for the first time in the history of Mexico is encouraging, beyond ideologies and political parties, because we believe that one way to thank all those women who made the road we are currently traveling less winding is not to follow the rules that lack that violet gaze but to change them, to rewrite the rules under the gaze of our needs and our cause to change history and not to be the first President of Mexico but the first of many Presidents.
She is a lawyer and activist for women's rights, she has
several diplomas in human rights, gender and political
given by the National Commission of Human Rights
, the Institute of Legal Research of the
UNAM, the National Institute for Women and UN WOMEN.
She is a specialist in Constitutional Law,
Human Rights, International Law of Women's
Human Rights, Gender and Sexual Violence
.
She has been Mexico's representative in international events
related to the gender agenda as
the CSW at the UN. She was a member of the Parliament of
Women of Mexico City in 2020. She was a columnist
in the newspaper "El Heraldo".
She is currently part of the interdisciplinary group that
follows up on the Gender Violence Alert against
Women for Comparative Violence for the State of
Guerrero. She is the Executive Director of the Civil Association
"Repara Lumea" against gender violence, Creator
of the podcast Voces Sin Filtro and columnist in La Cadera de Eva.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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