First Feminist Congress of Yucatán

Historian Anna Macías argues that elite Yucatecan women began to figure into the spirit of enterprise by 1846, upon establishment of the first public primary school for girls in Mérida.

[5] Historian Anna Macías argues that progress and modernity was achieved at the expense of forced labor of Indigenous Mayans on henequen plantations.

Macías notes that, "From 1830 onward, the self-sufficient Maya villages, protected by the Crown before independence, lost ground against the encroaching plantations, 36 and compliant state legislatures passed debt peonage laws that forcibly attached the Maya population to the estates created after independence.

By 1910, out of a population of 339,613 there were 76,896 agricultural workers and some 99,058 domestic servants in Yucatán.”[6] The Mexican Revolution began in 1910, preceding the First Feminist Congress.

Historians Alejandre Ramírez and Torres Alonso consider the Revolution a "democratic opening" whereby a new social contract was being negotiated between the Mexican and society.

One of them was Governor of Coahuila Venustiano Carranza, who created a state militia with broad support from Northern Mexico known as the Constitutionalist Army.

[10] In his book The Reconstruction of Mexico, Volume 1, Alvarado shows an affinity and appreciation for state sponsored socialism.

State socialism: in it lies the formula that we invoke, providing the practical means for its application, in order to group the great Mexican family into one sole project of national aggrandizement: the conquest of our economic independence, as the base of all our liberties; those which tie us to one another, and those which unite us with the rest of the world’s nations.

Among the participants were Elvia Carrillo Puerto, Beatriz Peniche Barrera and Raquel Dzib Cícero, Yucatán locals who were later elected to the national legislature as its first women deputies.

Director of the newspaper at the time, Antonio Ancona Albertos had extensive ties to the Alvarado government, eventually becoming interim governor himself.

Soto argues that the newspaper became the "semi-official organ of the Constitutionalists, and Alvarado's proclamations and speeches were given full coverage within its pages.

"[17] 620 participants, of whom 617 were women, convened at the José Peón Contreras Theater in downtown Mérida on the morning of January 13 through 16 to discuss the issues raised by Governor Alvarado.

Soon after, the Congress reached a flashpoint when César González, an education official under President Carranza, read a speech by prominent Mexico-City based feminist Hermila Galindo, who was not in attendance.

Galindo's speech "The Woman of the Future" touched on topics such as abortion, sexuality, and prostitution.Needless to say, there exists an overwhelming need for revision of the civil and penal codes, increasing the punishment in cases of seduction and abandonment.

When a woman, mesmerized, surrenders herself to her lover, compelled by the ineluctable sexual instinct, the man stands before society as a kind of daredevil: a charming copy of Don Juan Tenorio.

The impunity of his crime renders him cynical, and he relates his deed in the mighty tone a Revolutionary Chief would use to tell of taking a town.

But the wretched woman who has done no more than comply with one of the demands of her instinct, not denied to dhe lowest of females, is flung into society's scorn: her future cut off, she is tossed into the abyss of despair, misery, madness, or suicide.

[19] According to Shirlene Ann Soto, the Catholic conservative delegates were concerned with maintaining women in the traditional roles of wife and mother.

In the last session of the Congress, the delegates drafted an amendment to the Yucatán Constitution allowing women the right to vote in municipal elections.

But protest against the state surged which women today maintain, against the minimal protection that the laws give them, against education, which does not prepare them for the clean fight against existence nor for the home, against the concerns which have eternally tied her to tradition and routine, which have made her not an element of progress and fight but rather of simplicity and resistance, this First Congress has been enough to recognize that the Mexican woman, represented in Yucatán, has finally realized the situation which she maintains...[23]Governor Alvarado convened a Second Feminist Congress, which took place in November 23 to December 2, 1916.