Women’s political rights: an incipient affirmative action in Costa Rica

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the political and journalistic discussion that aroused a motion presented in the Legislative Assembly in 1954. At that moment, it was proposed to provide by law, a possible place of five, for a woman on the board of an autonomous institution. Although the Constitution protected the right of women to hold public office, stereotyped arguments prevented that proposal from materializing. The critical analysis of discourse was used as the main methodological tool. The newspapers, Diario de Costa Rica and La República, constitute the primary source of the present study, with its election it was sought to obtain a balanced perspective of the events because the political polarization that characterized that period was transferred to the press. The corpus is made up of news, chronicles and interviews with women and men deputies. The minutes of the sessions of the Legislative Assembly that collect the discussion were also analyzed. In the course of the research, it was found the presence, in the collective thought, the belief that the approval of women citizenship in the Political Constitution (1949) would guarantee women’s access, immediately and without restrictions, to positions of high responsibility. This argument hindered for decades, women’s effective access to political decision-making positions. The article qualifies as “an incipient affirmative action” the motion presented by the deputy Mario Echandi Jiménez, as it constitutes a precedent of what would be known at the end of the 20th century as positive discrimination actions.