A Crooked Path to the Franchise: The Historical Legacies of Mexico’s Failed 1937 Women’s Suffrage Amendment

A CROOKED PATH TO THE FRANCHISE: THE HISTORICAL LEGACIES OF MEXICO’S FAILED 1937 WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT Sarah Osten University of Vermont Introduction In December of 1937, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas sent a proposed women’s suffrage amendment to the Mexican legislature. Cárdenas had already advocated the electoral enfranchisement of women for several years and now sought to take action on the matter. But Cárdenas failed. The amendment perished somewhere in the halls of the federal government, after being passed by the legislature and ratified by a sufficient number of states, for reasons that remain unknown. It was another ten years before the Mexican legislature would act to expand the electoral franchise to women: first with an extension of municipal-level voting rights in 1947, and then the extension of full rights of citizenship in 1953. Mexican women would then have to wait until 1958 to vote in a presidential election for the first time. By that time, some Mexican women had already enjoyed full rights of citizenship at the state level for over thirty years. In Chiapas, at a brief moment of radical reformism in the state, women were declared to have equal political rights in May of 1925. Across the Mexican Southeast in the late 1910s and 1920s, Socialists conducted ambitious and sometimes visionary experiments in postrevolutionary reform, redistribution and institution building. These reformist projects commonly included the enfranchisement of women: three of the first four state level suffrage measures in Mexico were enacted in the Southeast between 1922 and 1925. As Cárdenas addressed the question of women’s citizenship in the 1930s, the precedent set by the southeastern Socialists in the 1920s gained new relevance and importance. The object of this article is not to offer any definitive answers to what or who ultimately derailed Cárdenas’ amendment; scholarly speculation on this matter has been ongoing for decades, and the question is unlikely to be resolved without new documentation coming to light.1 Rather, this article examines what both the formulation and the failure of the 1937 amendment reveals about Mexican politics in that moment. In doing so, it revisits the earlier extensions of political rights to Mexican women at the state level in the Southeast, and considers how and why suffrage reform at the federal level was influenced by those precedents, but ultimately took a markedly different legal course. Debates engendered by the potential C  2014 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 97 The Latin Americanist, June 2014 inclusion of women in the polity forced activists and politicians alike to articulate their understandings of the relationship between all Mexicans and the state.2 The suffrage measures undertaken in the Socialist Southeast a decade earlier provide additional context for the debates over women’s political rights that took place in the 1930s, and offer new insight into how and why conceptions of citizenship remained in flux both in law and in practice for several decades following the Mexican Revolution. The 1937 Suffrage Amendment President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) described the political enfranchisement of women as a natural and expected part of the postrevolutionary democratic progress of Mexico, which would only succeed with the support of a broad spectrum of social sectors and movements, including women themselves. It was a time in which the President seemed to be making good on many of his ambitious political promises, and so the Mexico City press described women’s suffrage as a political fact, rather than still just a possibility, based solely on rumors that Cárdenas was drafting a suffrage amendment.3 “Women will have the same political rights as men,” a front-page banner headline of El Universal confidently announced the day Cárdenas gave a speech in Veracruz in August of 1937, announcing that he would submit a suffrage amendment to the federal legislature.4 When the Mexican constitution of 1917 was drafted, members of the Constitutional Congress argued over whether or not to include women in the new constitution’s definition of citizenship. Their negative determination was hardly resounding. They justified their decision by arguing that Mexican women were yet to leave the domestic sphere...