Elvira Laura Albornoz Pollmann (born 27 March 1968) is a Chilean lawyer, academic, researcher and politician. She served as Minister of Women's Affairs (the National Women's Service) (May 2006-March 2010) [1] during President Michelle Bachelet's first term as President of Chile. [2] She has also served as president of the Inter-American Commission of Women. [3] [4]
Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria is a Chilean politician who served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2018 to 2022. She previously served as President of Chile from 2006 to 2010 and from 2014 to 2018 for the Socialist Party of Chile. She is the first woman to hold the Chilean presidency. After leaving the presidency in 2010 and before becoming eligible for re-election, she was appointed as the first executive director of the newly established United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. In December 2013, Bachelet was re-elected with over 62% of the vote, surpassing the 54% she received in 2006. She was the first President of Chile to be re-elected since 1932.
Mecha Ortiz was a classic Argentine actress who appeared in films between 1937 and 1981, during the Golden Age of Argentine Cinema. At the 1944 Argentine Film Critics Association Awards, Ortiz won the Silver Condor Award for Best Actress for her performance in Safo, historia de una pasión (1943), and won it again in 1946 for her performance in El canto del cisne (1945). She was known as the Argentine Greta Garbo and for playing mysterious characters, who suffered by past misfortunes in love, mental disorders, or forbidden love. Safo, historia de una pasión was the first erotic Argentine film, though there was no nudity. She also played in the first film in which a woman struck a man and the first film with a lesbian romance. In 1981, she was awarded the Grand Prize for actresses from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Feminism in Mexico is the philosophy and activity aimed at creating, defining, and protecting political, economic, cultural, and social equality in women's rights and opportunities for Mexican women. Rooted in liberal thought, the term feminism came into use in late nineteenth-century Mexico and in common parlance among elites in the early twentieth century. The history of feminism in Mexico can be divided chronologically into a number of periods with issues. For the conquest and colonial eras, some figures have been re-evaluated in the modern era and can be considered part of the history of feminism in Mexico. At the time of independence in the early nineteenth century, there were demands that women be defined as citizens. The late nineteenth century saw the explicit development of feminism as an ideology. Liberalism advocated secular education for both girls and boys as part of a modernizing project, and women entered the workforce as teachers. Those women were at the forefront of feminism, forming groups that critiqued existing treatment of women in the realms of legal status, access to education, and economic and political power. More scholarly attention is focused on the Revolutionary period (1915–1925), although women's citizenship and legal equality were not explicitly issues for which the revolution was fought. The Second Wave and the post-1990 period have also received considerable scholarly attention. Feminism has advocated for the equality of men and women, but middle-class women took the lead in the formation of feminist groups, the founding of journals to disseminate feminist thought, and other forms of activism. Working-class women in the modern era could advocate within their unions or political parties. The participants in the Mexico 68 clashes who went on to form that generation's feminist movement were predominantly students and educators. The advisers who established themselves within the unions after the 1985 earthquakes were educated women who understood the legal and political aspects of organized labor. What they realized was that to form a sustained movement and attract working-class women to what was a largely middle-class movement, they needed to utilize workers' expertise and knowledge of their jobs to meld a practical, working system. In the 1990s, women's rights in indigenous communities became an issue, particularly in the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. Reproductive rights remain an ongoing issue, particularly since 1991, when the Catholic Church in Mexico was no longer constitutionally restricted from being involved in politics.
María Rivera Urquieta was a Chilean professor and feminist. She was one of the founding members of the Pro-Emancipation Movement of Chilean Women. She was a lecturer for the Chilean Federation of Feminine Institutions and led one of the conference meetings at the Primer Congreso Interamericano de Mujeres held in Guatemala City, Guatemala in 1947.
Ana Rosa Tornero (1907–1984) was a Bolivian writer, journalist, teacher, social reformer and a feminist. She published the first feminist magazine in Bolivia and was one of the founders of the first feminist organization in the country.
Aída Parada Hernández was a Chilean educator, feminist, founding member of Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de las Mujeres de Chile and the first Chilean delegate to the Inter-American Commission of Women.
Rosa Amelia Guzmán was a Salvadoran journalist, feminist and suffragette. Her 1950 speech to the Constituent Assembly was instrumental in women gaining, not just the right to vote, but the rights of citizenship on 14 September. She was one of the first four women elected to serve in the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador.
Rosa Inés Curiel Pichardo, better known as Ochy Curiel, is an Afro-Dominican feminist academic, singer and social anthropologist. She is known for helping to establish the Afro-Caribbean women's movement and maintaining that lesbianism is neither an identity, orientation nor sexual preference, but rather a political position. She is one of the most prominent feminist scholars in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Ana Irma Rivera Lassén is an Afro-Puerto Rican attorney who is a current Member of the Puerto Rican Senate, elected on November 3, 2020, and who previously served as the head of the Bar Association of Puerto Rico from 2012–2014. She was the first black woman, and third female, to head the organization. She is a feminist and human rights activist, who is also openly lesbian. She has received many awards and honors for her work in the area of women's rights and human rights, including the Capetillo-Roqué Medal from the Puerto Rican Senate, the Martin Luther King/Arturo Alfonso Schomburg Prize, and the Nilita Vientós Gastón Medal. She is a practicing attorney and serves on the faculty of several universities in Puerto Rico; she currently serves on the Advisory Committee on Access to Justice of the Puerto Rican Judicial Branch.
Marta Vergara Varas was a Chilean author, editor, journalist and women's rights activist. Introduced to international feminism in 1930, she became instrumental in the development of the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM) helping gather documentation on laws which effected women's nationality. She pushed Doris Stevens to broaden the scope of international feminism to include working women's issues in the quest for equality. A founding member of the Pro-Emancipation Movement of Chilean Women, she was editor of its monthly bulletin La Mujer Nueva. When she was ousted from the Communist Party she moved to Europe and worked as a journalist during the war. At war's end, she returned to Washington, D.C., and worked at the CIM continuing to press for women's suffrage and equality, before returning to Chile, where she resumed her writing career.
María Digna Collazo y del Castillo was a Cuban midwife, essayist, editor, suffragist, and feminist activist. She was one of the architects of Cuba's women's suffrage campaign of the 1910s, along with Amalia Mallén and Aída Peláez de Villa Urrutia. To this end, she participated in the foundation of the first organizations that sought to allow women to vote in her country, such as the Cuban Suffragists (1912) and the National Suffragist Party (1913) – of which she was vice president. Furthermore, together with Carmen Velacoracho de Lara, she founded the Feminist Party in 1918.
Rita Laura Segato is an Argentine-Brazilian academic, who has been called "one of Latin America's most celebrated feminist anthropologists" and "one of the most lucid feminist thinkers of this era". She is specially known for her research oriented towards gender in indigenous villages and Latin American communities, violence against women and the relationships between gender, racism and colonialism. One of her specialist areas is the study of gender violence.
Isabel Pinto de Vidal was a Uruguayan feminist lawyer and politician, and a member of the Colorado Party. Pinto de Vidal was a founding member of the National Women's Council of Uruguay(Consejo Nacional de Mujeres del Uruguay, CONAMU), a branch of the International Council of Women in Uruguay. Her activism alongside the works of feminists such as Paulina Luisi and Francisca Beretervide is credited for achieving women's rights in Uruguay.
María Teresa del Canto Molina was a Chilean teacher and politician. She was the country's second woman to become a minister of state, after Adriana Olguín. She also served as mayor of Santiago from 1953 to 1957.
Adriana Blanca Cristina Muñoz d'Albora is a Chilean sociologist and politician who serves as a member of the Senate of Chile, representing the 4th constituency of the Coquimbo Region. She previously served as president of the Senate of Chile.
The Flora Tristán Peruvian Women's Center is a feminist non-governmental organization established in Lima in 1979 in defense of women's human rights and equality.
Judith Alpi Ghirardi was a Chilean painter and teacher, who was known for her work in portraiture. A member of Generación del 13, she exhibited nationally and internationally and was awarded prizes for her works. She produced several highly-regarded portraits of the artist Laura Rodig.
Hilda Habichayn was an Argentine sociologist and feminist. She founded the Centro de Estudios Históricos sobre las Mujeres at the National University of Rosario in 1989 and an academic journal Zona Franca in 1992. The center, later renamed as Centro de Estudios Interdisciplinario sobre las Mujeres offered the first post-graduate degree in women's studies in Latin America from 1993. She served as director of the center and journal until her retirement in 2007.
Virginia Guzmán Barcos is a Chilean psychologist and sociologist, who was a co-founder of the Flora Tristán Peruvian Women's Center. After completing studies at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and École pratique des hautes études at the Sorbonne, she went into exile in Peru because of the military dictatorship in Chile. Continuing her studies, she earned a master's degree in Peru and a PhD in Spain. From 1978, she became interested in women's studies and began researching in the area of women and public policy. After twenty years working at the Flora Tristán Peruvian Women's Center, she returned to Chile. Since 2002, she has been the deputy director of the Centro de Estudios de la Mujer in Santiago.