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Sunday, September 19, 1999
Women Still Fighting for Economic Equity
By Anne Hillerman
Journal Staff Writer
Today's women in New Mexico enjoy more legal rights than any previous generation in history. They did not get those rights by accident.
A thousand years ago, New Mexico's women roamed the state with their mates and children in small bands, part of tribes of hunters and gatherers who lived short lives filled with hazards. Although they left only a few primitive tools and fire pits as records, it's safe to imagine that their central concern was their survival and that of their families. We'll never know if they discussed "women's rights."
Archaeologists believe New Mexico's ancestral Pueblo people lived in spiritually sophisticated, mostly matriarchal agricultural communities. The advent of the Spanish brought irreversible changes to the Pueblos. Christian, male-dominated Spanish society held a different view of the role and status of women.
The status of New Mexico women changed even more profoundly when the United States seized the territory. Around the time of statehood, New Mexico women worked hard for the right to vote and hold office, and they pushed for the state to adopt its own suffrage amendment. Later, New Mexico's Equal Rights Amendment set the tone for women's rights for the rest of the millennium.
"I think we fare better than women in many other states. In 1973, we passed the state Equal Rights Amendment, and as a result, all New Mexico's laws were revised to bring them into compliance," said Patricia Madrid, the state's attorney general and the first woman to hold that post.
Indian life
The status of Native American women at the start of the millennium can be re-created through archaeological evidence. Spanish observers -- men who had for the most part left their wives and children behind -- commented with surprise that in Apache villages women and children accompanied the men when the tribe moved in search of food.
In his book, "When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away," author Ramón A. Gutiérrez says that Pueblo society before the Spanish was strongly matriarchal. Women gained their status not from their husbands, but from their mothers. They built and owned the family home and could initiate divorce by placing their husband's belongings outside the home. The displaced husband returned to his parents' dwelling, owned by his mother.
"Indian men envisioned a cosmos in which masculinity and femininity were relatively balanced," Gutiérrez writes. "In a largely horticultural society, women ... had enormous control and power over seed production, child-rearing, household construction and the earth's fertility. Men admitted this. But they made a counterclaim that men's ability to communicate with the gods and to control life and death protected the precarious balance in the universe."
Spanish bring changes
The Spanish period brought profound transitions to Pueblo society, including a fundamental change in women's rights.
"Conquest by a patriarchal society meant that Pueblo women lost to men their exclusive rights to land, to child labor, to seeds and even to children," Gutiérrez writes.
Despite these losses, Indian women had the same legal status under Spanish law as men -- for better or worse. Spanish chronicles of the time report that in sentencing those they believed responsible for the revolt of 1680, women, like men, received 10 years in slavery.
For the women who accompanied the Spanish settlers, life on the frontier brought the right to be freer of gender and class restrictions more common in Mexico and Spain. When Diego de Vargas recruited settlers for the reconquest of New Mexico in 1692, among them were eight women who traveled alone or as heads of households. Reports indicate that two were cooks who earned wages for their work feeding the company.
As the colony matured, women, rich or poor, shared certain legal and social advantages that American women might have envied. They owned property and could initiate divorce. They could work at jobs for wages and keep the money they earned.
Janet Lecompte's essay "The Independent Women of Hispanic New Mexico, 1821-1846," published in the Western Historical Quarterly, says: "Hispanic women had many occupations beside caring for children and home: They worked as bakers, weavers, laundresses, midwives and a variety of other jobs outside the home." Court records of the period seem to show that standards of behavior were essentially the same for both sexes.
"In contrast (to women in the United States), a New Mexican woman retained her property, legal rights, wages and maiden name after marriage like her Spanish ancestors ... nor was she assumed to be subordinate to men, except by Americans." However, women lacked the right to hold political office and, for the most part, did not attend school.
When Mexico declared its independence from Spain, New Mexico began to welcome traders and, later, settlers, over the Old Santa Fe Trail. The influx had a profound long-term effect on New Mexico women and their legal standing.
During this period in the United States, a married woman had almost no rights. All her property -- even that which she acquired before marriage -- and any wages she might earn belonged to her husband. When New Mexico became a U.S. territory, women were expected to conform to the female stereotype of the day: pious, chaste, self-sacrificing and without sexual needs.
"The Spanish brought a whole system of law here, including their laws on property and marriage. New Mexican women fared better than those elsewhere (in terms of rights) because we are a community property state," Attorney General Madrid said. "The community property laws are fair to women; everything you accrue together and work for together is half yours. Just a handful of states have community property laws."
Suffrage
"If you look at this century, the greatest change for women was the right to vote, which led to the right to hold office," said Susan Thom Loubet, executive director of the New Mexico Women's Agenda.
Anglo and Hispanic women in New Mexico achieved suffrage in 1920, six years after women in all other Western states. Native American women, like their male counterparts, were not allowed to vote until 1948.
The work for suffrage coincided with the emergence of the Women's Club movement, in which several hundred New Mexico women organized and worked together on civic, cultural and educational projects. Although the majority of the women who worked for suffrage were Anglo, six key proponents were Hispanic, including Adlina Otero-Warren, niece of Solomon Luna, head of the state's Republican Party.
In 1910, the president of the state's federation of women's clubs petitioned the delegates drafting a New Mexico Constitution -- all males -- to support limited suffrage. The clubs asked for women's right to vote in school district elections, to run for school board and to be elected as county school superintendents and school directors, the latter two offices now long gone.
The delegates compromised. Article VII of the Constitution of 1910 gave women the right to vote and run in school elections, but restricted these rights if enough men objected.
The constitution left New Mexicans who believed in women's right to vote more determined than ever. Now, they focused on federal legislation.
Wealthy Anglo women, mostly married to Republicans -- the dominant party in the state at the time -- led the fight. Emma Morgan Fall, the wife of U.S. Sen. Albert Fall, served on a suffrage committee. Sen. Fall, while sympathetic, was not an active supporter of women's right to vote.
New Mexico's other senator, Tom Catron, "not only opposed women's suffrage, he did it with ill humor," historian Jensen writes in "Disfranchisement is a Disgrace," an essay in "Women and Politics in New Mexico, 1900-1940." Catron even introduced an anti-suffrage statement in the Senate.
The 19th Amendment passed in the U.S. House in January 1918. In the Senate, Democrat Andrieus Aristiens Jones, whom voters elected to replace Catron, worked actively for women's right to vote, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage. The Senate voted favorably in June 1919. In 1920, New Mexico ratified the amendment, although the vote was far from unanimous.
Continuing struggle
Although New Mexico had to wait 26 years from suffrage for its first female U.S. representative in Congress -- Georgia Lusk in 1946 -- Hispanic and Anglo women were elected to state offices. Women claimed the office of secretary of state in 1923 with the election of Soledad C. Chacon and never lost it. And they held the office of state school superintendent for most of the years before 1940.
By the end of World War II, historian Jensen says in "Disfranchisement is a Disgrace," there was growing consciousness in New Mexico of the need for stronger legal rights for women. The campaign for revising property and inheritance laws received its impetus from southern New Mexico and, like suffrage, was initially promoted through women's clubs.
"What the women had to face was ... well-entrenched discrimination," Jensen writes. This was despite the presence in the Legislature of women such as Ernestine Duran Griegos, Cala Wolf and Concha Ortiz y Pino, who held important positions during the 1930s and '40s.
In 1953, the Legislature set up an interim committee and commissioned a report on women's rights, which clearly set forth the inequities in the law and discussed solutions. But the Legislature let the matter rest.
In 1959, the Legislature approved a bill that gave women control over community property of husbands who died without a will. The law already provided that on the death of the wife, the husband automatically inherited her estate without tax or probate fees. But before the change, on the death of a husband who died without a will, the widow had to have the estate probated, pay estate tax and frequently had to go to court to be appointed guardian of her own underage children.
In 1972, the Legislature asked voters to amend the state constitution to say: "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law; nor shall any person be denied equal protections of the laws. Equality of rights under law shall not be denied on account of the sex of any person. The effective date of this amendment shall be July 1, 1973."
New Mexico approved the Equal Rights Amendment by 71 percent. The measure passed in 28 of the state's 32 counties.
The state amendment led to the revision of 60 state laws. The change removed or modified language that could have been discriminatory, equalized the power of husbands and wives over community property and changed labor laws to offer men and women equal rights and protection.
The future
"Our rights may be the same as those of women in other states, but our status certainly is not equal," said Rebecca Jo Dakota, director of the Commission on the Status of Women.
The problems facing New Mexico women have to do not with legal rights but with economic equity, Dakota and others believe.
As part of its own planning for the future, the commission sponsored town hall meetings for women in the summer and fall of 1998. Participants throughout the state identified education, employment at a living wage and violence against women as main concerns.
According to figures provided by the commission, in spring 1999 New Mexico had about 30,700 displaced homemakers, 44 percent of whom lived in poverty. The state had roughly 93,700 single mothers, 44 percent living in poverty.
Poverty, Dakota said, is the cause of two other major problems facing women: lack of health care and poor education.
On the positive side of the economic picture, New Mexico inspires entrepreneurs: The state has ranked seventh in the nation for women-owned businesses.
"Women are an economic resource that needs to be paid attention to," New Mexico Women's Agenda's Loubet said. "At some point, we'll see economic development in terms of developing what we have here. That will mean women's businesses."
Madrid says women need to make more inroads as heads of major businesses and in influential positions in science and politics. New Mexico has never had a woman governor or a woman as a U.S. senator.
"I often call the AG's office a 'boy job,' '' she said. "I deal with 'boy issues' -- utility companies, prosecutions, injunctions, the death penalty. ... People don't seem to notice that I'm a woman when they talk about a $37 million utility rate decrease. ... It's important that (women in high offices) become commonplace."
Madrid said that when she was elected district judge in 1978 -- the first woman elected to that position in New Mexico -- she faced a male-dominated state bar and a judicial system that was less than welcoming. Today, she said, the state has many fine female judges, and their gender does not seem to be an issue.
"In the business world, the heads of banks and HMOs -- the jobs that pay a lot -- are still held by the old boys," she said. "In the future, I see women more involved and more welcomed in the halls of power."
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