Matilde Hidalgo

Matilde Hidalgo

Matilde Hidalgo Navarro de Procel (born September 29, 1889 in Loja , † February 20, 1974 in Guayaquil ) was an Ecuadorian doctor and suffragette . She was the first Ecuadorian to graduate from high school, the first woman to take up and graduate medicine in Ecuador, and the first woman to vote in presidential elections, and also the first to stand in an Ecuadorian cantonal council and the national one Parliament was elected, but was not a member of the latter.

Life

Matilda Hidalgo was one of her parents' six children. After the death of her father, the mother worked as a tailor. With the help of her mother and one of her brothers, Matilda succeeded in 1907 in enrolling in a secondary school in the Catholic Loja, despite numerous opposition and social rejection, and studying there successfully. In October 1913 she graduated from high school. She applied for admission to the Universidad Central del Ecuador in Quito to study medicine, but was refused. Instead, however, she managed to get a place at the Universidad del Azuay in Cuenca . Although she was exposed to mocking remarks from fellow students and fellow citizens during her studies, she graduated with honors as Licenciada en Medicina in 1919 . She has now been admitted to doctoral studies by the Universidad Central, which she completed with a doctorate in 1921.

In 1922 she married the lawyer Fernando Procel and moved with him to Machala , where she opened a practice. In 1924, based on the fact that women were not expressly forbidden to vote, she was registered on the electoral roll for the presidential election, which first had to be approved by the Council of Ministers. She became the first woman in Latin America to vote in national elections.

In 1925 she was the first woman to be elected to the council of a canton , in her case Machala, of which she had been vice-president since 1936. She was involved in the establishment of the Red Cross and the establishment of the state cultural institute Casa de la Cultura in the province of El Oro , the capital of which is Machala. In 1941 she ran her candidacy for a seat in parliament for her home province of Loja on the list of the Partido Liberal . When the results were announced, she had received enough votes to move into parliament, but had only been placed on a replacement post by her party, so that although she would have been the first elected MP, she did not get her rights. The first female member of parliament in Ecuador was Nela Martínez , who in 1945 succeeded the Communist Party of Ecuador in what was then called the National Assembly. In 1956, Hidalgo was awarded the National Order of Merit.

In 2005 the Ecuadorian director César Carmigniani filmed her life under the title "Matilde, la dama del siglo".

literature

• Jenny Estrada: Matilde Hidalgo de Procel, una mujer total . 6th edition. Grupo Santillana, Quito 2004.

Web links

• Short biography at edufuturo.com (span.)
• Short biography (span.)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Jenny Londoño, Mujeres y Participación Política. Breve Reseña de la Historia de Lucha por la Participación Política de las Mujeres , Confines en Azul, August 28, 2007 (Spanish).
2. ↑ Una mujer que rompió esquemas ( Memento of the original dated December 29, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Diario HOY , January 29, 2005 (Spanish)