Alicia Moreau de Justo

Alicia Moreau de Justo (1972)

Alicia Moreau de Justo (born October 11, 1885 in London ; † May 12, 1986 in Buenos Aires ) was an Argentine politician and human rights activist , one of the leading socialists and feminists in Latin America and one of the first women doctors in Argentina.

Life

Alicia Mureau de Justo was born in London in 1885 as the youngest daughter along with two other siblings. Her father Armand Moreau was active in the French Revolution . Due to the repression of the French Revolution, he first emigrated to Belgium and later to Great Britain . Alicia y María Denanpont, her mother, immigrated to Argentina and lived in Buenos Aires . After starting the family, her father opened a bookstore in 1896 and became a member of the socialist groups that started the Argentine labor movement.

Alicia Moreau de Justo, whose socialist parents fled into exile in England after the end of the Paris Commune in 1871 , later emigrated to Argentina, became a member of the Partido Socialista, founded in 1896, and was a member of the then leading politicians such as José Ingenieros , Enrique del Valle Iberlucea and Ángel Giménez. In 1902 she co-founded a feminist socialist center and a trade union. Already at school she met Hipólito Yrigoyen , who was her philosophy teacher and in 1916 became the first democratic president of Argentina. Between 1907 and 1914 she studied medicine at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) and was one of the first six women to study in Argentina. She then worked as a doctor .

In 1910 she was a co-founder of Ateneo Popular , an association for the promotion of school and university education, and at the same time became its general secretary. In addition, she was one of the participants in the First International Women's Congress in 1910. She was also editor of the daily Humanidad Nueva and professor of physiology at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP).

In 1920 she founded the National Women's Union ( Unión Feminista Argentina ) and in 1922 she married Juan B. Justo, a doctor and co-founder of the Partido Socialista . In 1925 she had her first triumph in parliament, stipulating that women worked no more than eight hours a day 48 hours a week. Pregnant women could also no longer be dismissed and the employer had to ensure that infants were breastfed. She not only campaigned for better working conditions for women and child labor , but also wrote a declaration in 1926 on women's civil rights . In the following years she worked for a stronger participation of women in politics and used her contacts in socialist organizations.

During the Spanish Civil War , which lasted from 1936 to 1939 , she organized solidarity events for the Second Spanish Republic . Later she was one of the leading critics of the presidency of Juan Perón and the Peronism established by him .

She published the fight for women's political participation rights in 1945 in her book La Mujer en la Democracia (The woman in democracy).

In 1956 she became director of the socialist magazine La Vanguardia . After the Partido Socialista Democrático (PSD) split off in 1958, she remained a member of the Partido Socialista and became its general secretary.

In addition, she was a member of the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights ( Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos ) from the mid-1970s until her death and belonged to the so-called Madres de Plaza de Mayo ("Mothers of the Square of the May Revolution"), an Argentine organization Women whose children “disappeared” during the military dictatorship of the 1970s .

After her death, the street Avenida Alicia Moreau de Justo in Puerto Madero , a district of Buenos Aires, was named in her honor.

Background literature

Gladys Lopez: Alicia Moreau de Justo: Pionera Del Feminismo Y La Igualdad , ISBN 987-614-098-1

Web links and sources

personal data
SURNAME	Moreau de Justo, Alicia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Argentinian socialist politician and feminist
DATE OF BIRTH	October 11, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH	London
DATE OF DEATH	May 12, 1986
Place of death	Buenos Aires