Colombian Women Zoom Ahead in Politics

When I arrived in Colombia in July of 1994, I was surprised to see women in jobs usually held by men in almost every labor field, and especially amazed to see so many women in important leadership positions in finance and economics. Although more and more American women ha entered those fields, none had risen as high as Maria Mercedes Cuellar, who was then co-director of Colombia's central bank. Also, gender relations were far more peaceful and cordial than in the United States. Female leaders took pride in femininity, in being wives and mothers and in a leadership style they said aided their progress without alienating men. In fact, one successful man told me he admired the achievements of his countrywomen and had mentored several of them. "But," he was quick to add, "It is still muy macho in Colombia's small towns and rural areas." In Latin America, conservative Colombia was next to last-place Paraguay in granting voting rights to women. But Colombian women made up for their late start by taking only 41 years of peaceful power sharing to field two highly qualified female candidates in their 1998 presidential election. Colombian women's remarkable achievement in such a short time led me to question why women in the United States took more time, encountered more bumps, attained a more contentious male-female power relationship and launched only one candidate in our 2008 presidential primaries. Diverging Paths Sharing Power In the 1940s, even though U.S. women successfully assumed jobs normally held by men during World War II, they happily returned to their domestic roles at the end of the war. Most American women stayed at home while husbands went to work throughout the '40s and '50s, in lives lauded in popular weekly television shows such as, "Father Knows Best" and "Leave it to Beaver." During that same period in the 1950s, Colombian Liberal political activist Esmeralda Arboleda spent several months of self-imposed political exile in the United States in fear of the authoritarian Colombian government that she and Conservative Minister of Education Josefina Valencia de Hubach had criticized. By organizing a Union of Colombian Women, those two political activists welcomed all Colombian women, regardless of their political or religious beliefs, or their educational, social or economic status, to demand that the government end 22 practices that denied women their citizen's rights in a democratic society. During her exile, Arboleda studied the history of the U.S. League of Women Voters and concluded that Colombian women could not follow the U.S. feminist model. Her greatest departure from that model was her life-long conviction that women must actively participate in legislatures to eliminate the laws that legislators enact to discriminate against women.