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URUGUAY: Women Breaking Out of Political
Corset
By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, May 28 (IPS) - When Uruguay
returned to democracy in 1985, "a political
corset was put on women," said a member of
the opposition Colorado Party.
In the first parliament to emerge from the
1984 elections that put an end to the
1973-1985 dictatorship, "there was not a
single woman lawmaker," said Glenda Rondán,
a city councilor for Montevideo and former
member of the lower house of parliament, at
a breakfast held this week for women
politicians by the Foreign Press Association
in Uruguay (APEU).
The democratic state "was born crippled in
that respect," because women "did a great
deal to bring about the return to
democracy," she said.
Twenty-four years later, Uruguay is in 91st
place on a list of 134 countries drawn up by
the Inter-Parliamentary Union, ranked
according to women's participation in the
legislative branch.
With four women in the Senate and 11 women
members of the lower house among a combined
total of 130 parliamentary seats, 11.5
percent of Uruguayan lawmakers are women,
considerably lower than the 21.5 percent
average for the Americas and the world
average of 18.4 percent.
Few as they are, these women lawmakers have
just foiled another attempt to limit women's
participation, this time by the Electoral
Court, in charge of defining the regulations
for the "quota law" that will govern the
internal party elections to be held on Jun.
28.
The quota law aimed at equitable gender
participation in elected national and
provincial bodies and in the leadership of
political parties, approved in late March
and promulgated Apr. 3, stipulates that one
out of every three candidates nominated for
these posts must be of a different sex than
the other two.
Candidate lists must include persons of both
genders all the way down the list, the law
states.
Uruguay’s parliamentary electoral system is
party-list proportional representation:
political parties present a list of nominees
in order of preference, who are elected to
parliament in proportion to the votes
obtained by the parties. Each permanent
candidate has one or more alternates.
According to the rules approved by a
majority of the Electoral Court, the groups
of three candidates could include both
permanent and alternate nominees, without
differentiating between them, which meant in
effect that the women candidates could all
have been substitutes.
The bicameral women's caucus, a multi-party
bloc which lobbied for the quota law,
reacted immediately to what it called a
"misogynistic and perverse" act, and in the
space of a few days presented a draft
interpretative law to block the Electoral
Court's regulations.
The interpretative law was pushed through
parliament at top speed and came into force
on May 5. The deadline for presenting the
lists of candidates for the political party
internal elections is May 29.
Getting the quota law approved "was an
uphill battle for us, so we were very harsh
in our criticism of the majority opinion of
the Electoral Court, and we had no
hesitation in immediately presenting an
interpretative law," socialist Senator
Mónica Xavier, of the governing leftwing
Broad Front, told APEU.
The law will apply to the primary elections
in June, when the political parties will
hold their conventions and decide their
presidential and vice-presidential
candidates for the October national
elections. However, it will not apply to
national and local parliamentary elections
until 2014.
The new law makes it clear that the
Electoral Court must reject any list that
"does not conform to the quota
requirements," Xavier said. "We did not seek
legal penalties or economic sanctions;
instead we made sure that the supervisory
body has to check the lists for the
inclusion of both men and women."
"After so many failed attempts to open doors
to participation by more women, this law has
finally cut through what we call the
'Gordian knot' that was frustrating women's
participation, which is the political
parties themselves," she said.
The quota law is one of the fruits of the
bicameral women's caucus, which has operated
since 2000 on the basis of voluntary
attendance. It meets once a month and has a
secretariat and a three-woman committee. Its
agenda and links with civil society and
academia are growing apace.
The women's caucus "has taken formal shape
because of the political will" of its
members, Xavier said. Because of its
"persistence and achievements, and because
no woman lawmaker is excluded," it is
regarded as a pioneering model in Latin
America.
In terms of women's representation, "we are
very badly off compared to other countries
and compared to other periods in our
history," added Xavier, a medical doctor who
was the first Latin American to chair the
Inter-Parliamentary Union's Coordinating
Committee of Women Parliamentarians from
2006 to 2008.
Quoting an expression coined by local
historian José Pedro Barrán, Rondán said
that women "in Uruguay have gone through
corseted and uncorseted periods."
Women were at the forefront of the early
struggles against Spanish colonialism, said
Rondán, a former literature teacher,
mentioning several outstanding women.
"In the first period of our national
history, which Barrán describes as
'barbaric,' women had complete freedom," she
said. "Foreign visitors to Uruguay were
astonished to discover the freedom women
enjoyed, and their position in society."
Then came a time of "discipline," and women
were the most heavily disciplined, by the
family and by the Catholic Church. "It must
have been one of the few times that
Catholics and Masons joined forces to
discipline women," said Rondán.
In 1932, Uruguayan women won the right to
vote. But although "civil rights in this
country were won very early on, the 1900s
put women into a corset, which we are still
wearing," Rondán said.
Uruguay's image as a liberal democracy, with
a divorce law since 1913 and a high level of
participation by girls and women in
education and the labour market, was at odds
with the closed doors of its political
system.
And during the transition to democracy "they
really trussed women up tightly into
corsets," she stressed.
However, in 1984 the Concertación Nacional
Programática, a multi-party forum designed
to forge a common legislative agenda, gave
rise to the Network of Women Politicians,
which took on formal status in 1985 and is
still in existence.
Since then, the conservative Colorado Party
"has undergone a huge setback" in terms of
gender equality, which could be attributed
to its "meagre voting results" in the 2004
elections, when it fell from power, said
Rondán.
In the previous term, from 2000 to 2005,
during the administration of former
President Jorge Batlle of the Colorado
Party, there were "four women members of the
lower house, and not one woman senator,
minister or deputy minister," she said.
None of the Colorado Party woman lawmakers
was reelected in 2004. Today Rondán is the
only woman on her party’s 15-member National
Executive Committee.
By contrast, incumbent President Tabaré
Vázquez of the Broad Front brought about
change from the outset of his term by
appointing an unprecedented number of women
to his cabinet, Xavier said.
He named female ministers in areas
previously identified as the exclusive
domain of men, like the ministries of
defence and the interior, as well as to the
ministries of health and social development.
"There's no going back now," she said.
The socialist senator pointed to a string of
17 laws touching on gender issues that have
been approved since 2007.
One of these is the law on sexual and
reproductive health, which Vázquez modified,
however, by vetoing the decriminalisation of
abortion, going against his own party on the
issue.
There are still a lot of corsets to be
discarded.
In this country of 3.3 million people, women
make up 60 percent of the university student
body, yet they still earn, on average, 30
percent less than men.
Currently, one woman is killed by her
partner every 13 days. In 2008, one woman
died every nine days.
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