Clara González and the Partido Nacional Feminista
Clara González (1898-1990) is a frequently cited figure in Panamanian women’s history. According to Wikipedia, González was the first Panamanian woman to earn a Bachelor of Law degree in 1922, with a thesis titled “La Mujer ante el Derecho Panameño” (Woman in Panamanian Law) [1]. The thesis title is itself a marker of the period’s reform ambitions. González was producing original legal scholarship on the status of women in Panamanian law at a time when women were excluded from the legal profession. The thesis became a foundational document for the women’s-rights movement that she then helped to organize.
Wikipedia’s entry on González records that in 1923-1924 she co-founded the Partido Nacional Feminista (PNF, the National Feminist Party) with Sara Sotillo, Elida Campodónico de Crespo, and Rosa Navas, and that the same period saw her establish the Escuela de Cultura Femenina (School of Feminine Culture) [1]. The PNF was Panama’s first explicitly feminist political party, and the Escuela de Cultura Femenina was one of the country’s first formal institutions for women’s civic education. The party was small but it set the agenda for the broader suffrage movement that would succeed in 1945.
González’s legal career continued through the 1920s. According to Wikipedia, González was the first Panamanian woman to practice law in 1925 (after amendments by Belisario Porras’s administration), Panama’s representative to the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW) in 1928 where she headed research from 1928-1930, and received a doctorate in law from New York University in 1929 [1]. The combination of legal practice, IACW service, and the NYU doctorate made González a highly credentialed Panamanian woman of her generation and gave her an institutional platform that the broader movement could use.
The 1945 suffrage victory and the Unión Nacional de Mujeres
The 1945 women’s suffrage victory came after a 25-year campaign that González and her successors had sustained. According to Wikipedia, González founded the Unión Nacional de Mujeres (National Women’s Party) in 1944 after Panamanian women won voting rights in 1945 [1]. The 1944 establishment of the Unión Nacional de Mujeres is a marker of the campaign’s transition from the PNF-era’s smaller activist groups to a broader coalition that included professional women, labor organizers, and political party women.
The 1945 suffrage victory did not immediately produce major electoral victories for women. The Unión Nacional de Mujeres continued to organize through the 1950s and 1960s, and a small number of women were elected to Panama’s National Assembly during that period, but no woman held a major executive position in Panama until the 1999 election.
González’s later career and the institutional legacy
González’s later career produced an enduring institutional legacy in Panamanian women’s history. According to Wikipedia, González was the first Panamanian woman to serve as a juvenile court judge in 1951, a position she held until her retirement in 1964 [1]. The juvenile court position was a significant institutional foothold. The juvenile court system was an emerging area of legal practice in the 1950s, and González’s tenure established the framework for women’s professional participation in the Panamanian judiciary.
The institutional legacy of the women’s-rights movement is also visible in several other areas. The Panamanian suffrage victory preceded the U.S. suffrage victory by five years and made Panama an early Latin American leader on women’s voting rights. The IACW connection continued through the 1950s; Panama’s IACW representatives worked with regional counterparts to develop a Latin American women’s-rights agenda. The Escuela de Cultura Femenina continued as an institution through the 1950s and was a precursor to several later women’s-studies programs in Panamanian universities.
The 1999 election of Mireya Moscoso
The 1999 election of Mireya Elisa Moscoso as Panama’s first woman president was a visible milestone in Panamanian women’s political history. According to the Feminist Majority Foundation citing the New York Times of May 4, 1999, Mireya Elisa Moscoso, the widow of three-time president Arnulfo Arias, was elected Panama’s first woman president on May 2, 1999, having previously run in 1994 and finished second [2]. The election came at a transitional moment (the canal was being transferred later that same year), and Moscoso’s victory carried the symbolic weight of a new era.
Moscoso’s stated priorities were substantially focused on economic and social policy. According to the Feminist Majority Foundation, her stated priorities were ending poverty and joblessness, fighting government corruption and nepotism, and ensuring the Panama Canal remained well cared for after US control transferred later that year [2]. In her victory speech Moscoso declared that she would not forget her roots or her commitment to fight unemployment, poverty, and its consequences, and that she wanted for Panama what she wanted for her son Ricardo: the right to grow up in a democratic country with guaranteed freedoms, judicial stability, and social justice. Her vice presidential candidate Kaiser Bazán added that the triumph of Señora Mireya was a triumph for the Panamanian woman [2].
González’s biography in detail
Wikipedia’s entry on González provides the biographical depth that the timeline-only summary above omits. González was born Clara González Carrillo on 11 September 1898 to David González, a Spanish immigrant, and Basilia Carrillo Sánchez, a woman of indigenous descent, in Remedios, Chiriquí Province. During her early childhood her family lived in Costa Rica in exile between 1900 and 1904 [1]. After returning to Panama, González earned a teaching degree from the Escuela Normal de Institutoras before enrolling in the Escuela Nacional de Derecho (National School of Law), where she also taught at the Escuela Manuel José Hurtado. In 1927 she won a scholarship to New York University, where she earned her doctorate in law in 1929 [1].
Her 1928 appointment to the Inter-American Commission of Women came through chair Doris Stevens, who assigned González to work on legal issues in the Pan-American Union office in Washington, D.C., and from 1928 to 1930 she headed IACW research, overseeing nation-by-nation reports on women’s rights. Wikipedia’s entry records that González eventually grew resentful of Stevens’s unilateral leadership and dismissive approach to Latin American issues, including Stevens’s denial of IACW funding for activists to attend conferences based on González’s own research [1]. Upon returning to Panama in 1930, González taught economics, political science, and sociology at the National Institute until 1937, and later taught criminology, family law, and juvenile justice at the University of Panama.
During the 1930s, González advocated for women’s social and economic rights through the PNF under the cover of Popular Front politics, and her support for socialism led officials to accuse her of being a communist, blocking a government posting. Although she was not a Communist Party member, she collaborated with communist activists during a 1938 trip to Mexico, where she joined the Frente Único Pro-Derechos de la Mujer (FUPDM, the Sole Front for Women’s Rights) [1]. In 1943, González married Charles A. Behringer, an American civil engineer working in the Canal Zone.
After Panamanian women won the right to vote in 1945, González entered electoral politics more directly. She founded the Unión Nacional de Mujeres in December 1944, ran for the Constitutional Assembly in 1945 with Liberal Renewal Party support, and later ran for vice-president, but failed to win office in both campaigns. She also worked on child welfare issues with UNESCO and served as an official in the International Federation of Women Lawyers (Federación Internacional de Abogadas). She was named Panama’s first female juvenile court judge in 1951, a position she held until 1964, when she retired at her husband’s request and settled in West Covina, California. She was questioned by U.S. federal officials over alleged communist links, which she denied by asserting her liberal beliefs, and after her husband’s death in 1966 she returned to Panama. Clara González died from complications of hip surgery on 10 February 1990 [1].
Her legacy is institutionalized in several ways. The School of Public Prosecutors in Panama is named in her honor, and the National Union of Lawyers awards an annual Premio Clara González de Behringer to the legal professional excelling in the fight for women’s or human rights [1].
Moscoso’s biography and the post-1999 trajectory
Wikipedia’s entry on Moscoso adds biographical context for the 1999 election. Mireya Elisa Moscoso Rodríguez was born on 1 July 1946 in Pedasí, the youngest of six children in a poor family. Her schoolteacher father died when she was ten, after which she worked as a secretary. She joined Arnulfo Arias’s 1968 presidential campaign, followed him into exile in Miami after his overthrow, and married him in 1969 (she was 23, he was 67). She studied interior design at Miami-Dade Community College. After Arias’s 1988 death, she inherited his coffee business. She married Richard Gruber in 1991 (divorced 1997), and they adopted a son, Ricardo [3]. In 1994, she lost to Ernesto Pérez Balladares (33 percent to 29 percent). In 1999, running on a populist platform with the slogan “Vox populi, vox Dei,” she defeated Martín Torrijos 45 percent to 37 percent, becoming Panama’s first female president. The Presidential term was 1 September 1999 to 1 September 2004 [3].
Moscoso’s presidency oversaw the Panama Canal handover from the United States on 31 December 1999, the cleanup of Canal Zone environmental contamination (including depleted uranium), the passage of anti-money-laundering legislation that removed Panama from international tax-haven lists, the appointment of Ricardo Martinelli to head the Panama Canal Authority, the granting of temporary asylum to Vladimiro Montesinos in 2000, and the establishment of a truth commission investigating disappearances during the Noriega era. Her approval rating fell to 23 percent by 2001 amid nepotism accusations and corruption scandals including a US$146,000 watch-gifting controversy. She pardoned four men convicted of plotting to assassinate Fidel Castro, plus 87 journalists and others (180 total pardons); the pardons were later overturned as unconstitutional in 2008. After leaving office, Moscoso joined the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Council of Women World Leaders, a network intended to promote good governance and enhance the experience of democracy globally by increasing the number, effectiveness, and visibility of women who lead at the highest levels in their countries. She received foreign honors from the Royal House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies (Knight Grand Cross, Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George), Monaco (Knight Grand Cross, Order of Saint-Charles), and Taiwan (Grand Cordon, Order of Brilliant Jade) [3].
For a reader interested in the broader history, the most useful starting points are Wikipedia’s entry on Clara González (which provides a thorough single-figure chronology) and the Feminist Majority Foundation’s coverage of the 1999 election (which provides the contemporary primary-source reporting). The Inter-American Commission of Women’s archive in Washington, D.C. holds the IACW’s institutional records and is the most useful single primary-source archive for the regional context.
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