review

Clara strips Arnulfo naked

a book review by Roberto N. Méndez

Clara

by Yolanda Marco

Editorial Universitario

Panama (2007)

Some will say that I go a little too far into sensationalism in the title of this review, but the truth really isn't very far from it. "Clara," the excellent biography of the tenacious Panamanian feminist  Clara Gonzáles (1898-1990), recently finished by the skillful historian Yolanda Marco, leaves naked the machismo of Arnulfo Arias, who, as some who are a little older than me will recall, always said that he "gave the vote to women." It's another of the many myths by which the history of Panama is distorted, and which it is now time to begin discarding without recourse to personal or partisan political egoisms.

Her past would be as difficult as Panama to cover with a veil, if we would want to do that. Of humble origins, Clara Gonzáles had to suffer serious emotional traumas, perhaps the gravest of them derived from her rape by a bestial neighbor when she was a girl, despite which she had the valor to make of herself a prestigious intellectual, jurist and Panamanian politician. During the 1920s, she stood out in the struggle for those elemental rights then denied to women, like the right to vote and practice the liberal professions --- Clara  Gonzáles being the first female Panamanian lawyer, she wasn't allowed to practice her profession for many years for the sole fact that she was a woman! But she also participated in many more general social and political efforts, among which where the tenant struggles of 1925 and 1932.

The difficult economic circumstances of the 30s propelled the rise of ultra-nationalist movements all around the world, one of which was the Accion Comunal, eventually headed by the physician Arnulfo Arias. Thanks to his personal charisma, governmental support, the use of violence and the existing discontent, Arias came to the presidency in 1940 and pushed for the repeal of the 1904 Constitution, which in an ambiguous way denied the citizenship of women.

But the "Arnulfista" Constitution of 1941 was even worse --- it eliminated the ambiguity and said that only "men" over the age of 21 years were considered citizens, leaving to the Assembly the "possibility" of giving citizenship to those women who men undefined "requisites." The National Feminist Party, one of whose leaders was Clara Gonzáles, in a manifesto called that provision "a mockery" of women. Arias's machismo was thus stripped naked and it wouldn't be until the Constitution of 1946 the women's right of suffrage would be definitively established in Panama!

In the years following the Second World War,  Clara Gonzáles headed the Juvenile Court, from which she retired in 1964 after 18 years of positive labor.

I conclude by noting that the biography has some lapses. It omits, for example, all mention of the participation that Clara Gonzáles had in events of crucial importance for the nation's fate, among them the struggle against the Filos-Hines Treaty in 1947 and the insurrectionary movement of January 1964. I am confident that these faults will be corrected in future editions.

Roberto N. Méndez is an economics professor at the University of Panama