A Constituent Assembly without women

The question of whether there could have been a woman constituent in 1916-1917 is answered with a resounding yes.

Hermila Galindo is the woman who could have been in Querétaro legitimately occupying a space as a constituent. She was very close to Carranza and had his full confidence. She could have been one of the 14 deputies from the Federal District, where she resided, or one of the 7 from Durango, her homeland.

The constituents met in November 1916. That same year, in January, Hermila Galindo had been instrumental in organizing the first Feminist Congress in Mexico held in Mérida Yucatán. There, a large group of women, mostly teachers, had filled the Peón Contreras theater for several days to discuss women's rights. Basically four: the right to education, the right to health, the right to work and the right to vote. Hermila Galindo was unable to attend, but sent a written paper.

Thus, in spite of the great effervescence that the issue of women's political participation had in 1916, none were among those elected to be Constituents in the 214 districts into which the country was divided. In 29 of them it was not possible to hold elections because pacification had not been achieved.

Hermila Galindo was not a constituent, but she managed to be very close to the men who drafted the Constitution by joining the group that was formed to support them in their work.

Everything indicates that Hermila's calculation was that it would be beneficial for her to be close to the Constituent Assembly and, in that way, influence the issues that mattered most to her, and with the Constitution enacted, she would be able to participate in the first elections to be a deputy for the district where she lived.

In labor matters, the new Constitution took up the postulates of the workers' struggles in which Hermila Galindo had deepened her reading of the publications of Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai.

Regarding the right to vote, Hermila was convinced that it was not necessary to expressly grant the vote to women, but only to interpret the Constitution in the sense that, where it said Mexicans, it should be understood that men and women were included.

She was so convinced of this that she registered to run in the first elections held in 1917 and there were some women who voted for her, as Rosa María Valles states in her work Sol de Libertad. Hermila did not have enough votes to win the election, but her interpretation of inclusion was shared by more people. Otherwise, the reforms to the constitutions of Yucatán, Chiapas and San Luis Potosí that made possible the election of the first local women deputies in 1920 and 1926 would not have been possible.

This argument that women were included in the "Mexicans" of Article 34 was reiterated by Margarita Robles de Mendoza, another of the relevant suffragists of the first period, in an interview with Emilio Portes Gil, then President of Mexico, at the National Palace, which she narrates in her writings.

Women's right to vote was being recognized and granted in different countries of the world since the end of the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century. Mexico was accompanying the international movements and tracing its own route, but it should be noted that the first attempt was the bet on the grammatical interpretation appealing to the rule of the supposed inclusion of the feminine in the masculine generic.

The express inclusion reform was achieved very late, until 1953, at the national level. Hermila died a year later, in August 1954.

Hermila Galindo has received countless posthumous recognitions. Her name was written in gold letters in the Chamber of Deputies in the LXXIV legislature and today her face appears on thousand peso bills.

Hermila Galindo could have been elected Constituent in 16; she did not lack merits, but... she was a woman.

The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.

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