We are pleased to announce that the dossier Women’s Political Rights, Gender, and Parliamentary Institutions in the Nineteenth Century in Latin America and Spain, edited by Laura Cucchi, Jorge Luengo, and Eduardo Posada-Carbó, has been published in Parliaments, Estates and Representation (Vol. 45, Issue 2, 2025).
Until recently, nineteenth-century Latin America had been largely understood as an era of caudillo-dominated politics, where local societies were mostly governed by strong individual rulers, almost in an institutional vacuum. Congresses have thus attracted very little scholarly attention among modern historians. Yet, constituent assemblies and legislatures were centres of significant democratic experiments and sites of representation in the new states that emerged in Spanish America and Brazil. In recent decades, an increasing number of studies have revisited the subject and provided new interpretations of the features and performance of congresses in the period. This dossier offers a contribution to a growing field by looking at a particular issue that has hitherto received even less attention: the relations between parliaments, representation and gender, before women achieved political rights.
During the nineteenth century, parliaments, like politics in general, were predominantly male-dominated spaces. But, as the scholarship on women studies has recently shown, women were not passive political agents, despite not having the rights to vote or to be elected. The articles in our dossier explore this subject further. In Spain, the queen took part in parliamentary life, presiding over state ceremonies. In Spanish America, women from a wide range of social backgrounds became directly involved in electoral politics in several ways, including registering to vote even if banned from doing so. Women also took part in the many rebellions and insurrections that shook the region following Independence from the Spanish Rule. A few of them translated and published key works that advocated women’s rights, which was the subject of parliamentary debates, while the topic also received attention in the press. Additionally, women in significant numbers petitioned to congress expressing their discontent, particularly in regard to legislation on education and marriage, or to demand solutions to specific problems that affected them.
You can read the articles here: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rper20/45/2
