Voting in Mexico

Women’s lives — their work, their family life, their educational opportunities, the health care they can expect, their social standing, and political participation — have changed over these hundred years. 

As we already know, women have been fighting for a long time now a tough fight for their rights. Back then, women didn´t have the right to either vote, have access to education or to work. It was thought women should stay home and be housewifes. It was also thought men were better at almost every activity and job. That now, of course, has changed.

Women in Mexico were back then considered more a sexual object rather than a human being able to perform whatever he wants.

It was women making petitions to the mexican goverment how the story began. It all started with Hermilda Galindo, Venustiano Carranza´s secretary. On 1916 she sent a letter demanding women´s right to vote. In her letter, she explained her point of view which was: “men pay and help with the house payments, but so do women, if men do something ilegal, they go to jail, but so do women, so, if the law applies to both of them, women and men equally, why when it comes down to voting, does it have to be different?”

-Women and men have obligations and they both have responsabilities.-

Hilda´s petitions was denied after analized by the goverment, but this didn´t stop women. It was just the beginning. Women kept fighting and fighting. It wasn´t until the 17th of October of 1953 that is was ofically published on a newspaper that women were oficially allowed to vote. In 1982 a woman postulated herself for the mexican presidency, Rosario Ibarra de Piedra. Unfortunately, she wasn´t taken seriously.  

Now, in the 21st century, we can say everything has changed. In 2012, Josefina Vazquez Mota,

Currently, women’s participation in public life is incomparably greater than it was a century ago: women did not get the vote until 1953, but there are 140 women deputies (28% of the total) in the present legislature. Mexico has had two more women candidates for president since Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, leader of the human rights struggle against repression and for the presentation of the disappeared, became the first woman to run back in 1982.

Election laws stipulate that no more than 70% of a party’s candidates must be from a single gender — a round-about way of saying that at least 30% must be women